The thing that hurts them the most is the respectful, thorough, intellectually rigorous destruction of their ideas in the most public possible way. Cancelation is the opposite of that. The left cancels because their ideas are terrible and can't withstand scrutiny. The right can get its best revenge all while strengthening the norms of free speech. I don't want the intersectional nonbinary freak canceled, I want him defrocked in the town square. Defend your ideology and let everyone see exactly what kind of a person Woke protects. Once all of your magic incantations (racist! sexist! homophobe!) stop working you'll be revealed for the pathetic envious mendacious mentally-ill loser that you are.
Well if nothing else we know how to spell 'fellatio', presumably because we're not too beta to get our women to perform it on us. But I challenge you to an idea face-off. If I can present a right-coded idea that you can't defeat then I win. Deal or are you a sniveling coward?
Jesus man, chill out. I hate progressives too but there are better ways to win.
Do you remember the end of The Princess Bride when Wesley said of the defeated Prince, "no matter what happens I want him to live a long life alone with his cowardice"? That's the way to win. It's worse for them, better for you, and better for the culture.
We can't plow salt into their fields because they're our fields too. We eat from the same bounty. I'd advise you to reflect on that. Think not of Carthage but of Lincoln and reconstruction. He sought not to punish but to mend.
After we create a norm against cancel culture, I want a norm against people sarcastically describing "this thing I heard from my enemies one time" as "the received wisdom that nobody dare question."
California DID raise lots of money for the homeless... but they failed to build any housing because the problem was regulations rather than a lack of funding.
The problem is that vagrants strip down anything they have access to in order to convert it to cash for drugs. The average vagrant is either so mentally ill they're basically rabid or, more often, a rotten person comfortable dumping massive costs onto the people around them as long as they can get high.
3 is just "You're a bad person because you recognize reality." Did you have a point, or are you just reacting against someone reminding you that your fantasy land is just a fantasy?
Yes, you can build something indestructible. It's called a prison, and the reason it's indestructible is that the inmates are watched all the time by guards, who stop them when they try to remove the pipes.
Nothing is indestructible without human intervention, and it doesn't take all that long for motivated humans to do incredible amounts of damage.
Even if the pipes don't get removed, someone can still kick holes in the walls. And then a reporter calls and says "How are they treating you?" And takes pictures of the holes and then writes an article about how badly this public housing is maintained.
Take away all the guards and see if the prisoners can kick holes in the walls before they starve.
Prison walls are built to be much harder to destroy than housing.
My point was that if you don't have other humans to stop them, humans can destroy pretty much anything with sufficient time and motivation. It doesn't even take much in the way of tools.
They have sufficient time, since they don't have anything else to do. They have sufficient motivation because they can sell some of the stuff extracted from the walls, and a lot of humans get a kick out of destroying things.
>"I do not really support raising taxes to buy homes for unhoused persons
>but I will savage everyone who calls them homeless."
My impression is that the Venn diagram between these two has a lot of overlap, unless you're not counting it as support for raising taxes if it's directed at "the rich" or "corporations" or "billionaires" etc etc.
Amen. It’s gotten to the point where I think if you strongly identify as democrat or republican, chances are you’ve been had. The two most useless categorical descriptors of human beings these days are in no particular order “left” and “right.”
Do you consider it impossible for some of your enemies to be "your fellow countrymen"? If not, what would people who happen to be "your fellow countrymen" have to do before you'd consider them enemies?
Okay, but that is not the way most people use the word "enemies."
> But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you … Do to others as you would have them do to you.
Hmm, I wonder what happened to the guy who preached this. If he ends up dying painfully, maybe treat it as a cautionary tale and NOT do what he says?
I don't think it's true that the only solution is war. You probably need SOME displays of force to establish a credible deterrent, but mutually-beneficial truces are possible.
Do you consider it beneficial to declare enemies of people you disagree with? Friends, family, fellow citizens? When you designate one of these people as an enemy, what are you hoping to accomplish that couldn’t have been accomplished otherwise?
You characterizing it as a mere "disagreement" is the kind of thing I hope getting people to see this in terms of friend vs. enemy would stop. Ben Mordecai's post (in the screenshot in Section 4) lists a few of the things the other side has done to his. I would characterize those as the actions of an enemy to be fought back against, not those a friend with whom you have disagreements to be reasoned with, and to the extent that my pointing that out makes people more likely to fight back instead of bending over, I DO consider it beneficial.
I’m not that eager to join people on the left and right waving their fists in the air and threatening to fight their neighbors, coworkers, teachers, caregivers, service people, etc. And I’m not even sure who your “other side” is.
I agree, I squinted at that chart a good bit to make sure I was understanding Scott correctly. Pretty sure his claim is "you won't find many instances where >50% of Democrats take the Cancel position and simultaneously >50% of Republicans take the no-Cancel position."
This is true. 38% pro-Cancel is less than 50%. (On Q 24, the Ds do narrowly break 50%, and one Q 23 they do so significantly -- so how rare is rare?) But in any event, there are still significant differences in the percentages between D and R responses, pretty consistently in the direction of Ds being more pro-Cancellation. So while Scott's narrow claim is true depending on how we define "hard," the stronger claim "Ds and Rs have basically the same balance of views when it comes to cancellation" is not true.
Collective punishment makes the most sense when you can't identify the culprit responsible for the act being punished, but the collective they belong to can. When people are being cancelled for social media posts, they CAN be individually identified. People are just too lazy to bother to check whether the individual who endorsed Trump's assassination also endorsed cancelling anyone.
Let's not pretend this is about justice. You get to hurt someone small, really f--k up their life. Maybe ruin them. Smear shit in the face of some member of the hated outgroup.
I've been pseudonymous on the 'net for twenty five years, and it still seems crazy to me that at the middle of noughties everybody collectively seemed to decide to renounce pseudonymity. Of course, what actually happened is that normies took over, and have been getting what they deserve since.
Richard Hanania has been deriding pseudonymous people recently, talking about how he was worse when he wrote as "Richard Hoste". But not every pseudonym was nearly that bad. For example... Scott Alexander.
Yeah. Sometimes people need social reinforcement from parts of society to hold to decent standards of behavior. Or maybe it's the crowd Hoste found himself running with - if he'd fallen into Scott's circle, maybe he'd have found that he could be decent and principled even using a pseudonym?
I think social feedback matters a lot, but also, people choose the environment in which they live. If I hang around in an online community that rewards nastiness, it will pull me in a nasty direction...but also, if I'm inclined in a nasty direction, that online community will be more appealing to me.
I was going to say something about places that reinforce our worst impulses vs our best, but I suppose that would require first having a solid grasp on which is which.
This just confirms my sense of what Hanania is. If the only reason one is being civil is fear of negative consequences, one is... not exactly a model citizen now, no? "If mom weren't watching I'd poop on you" is bad even for a kindergartner.
Everyone responds to consequences. You say "even for a kindergartner" because we teach children (one might say "civilize them") by exposing them to differential rewards/punishments over time.
Yeah. I also find myself in the position of generally disliking cancel culture, and not really wanting to cancel others, but at the same time not caring to defend those who had been cancelling others from getting cancelled themselves.
"I’m OK with Tenacious D having to cancel their tour."
That was shooting yourself in the foot, right enough. I don't know about cancelling the tour, it was a stupid joke by a guy who thinks he's a comedian and is a lefty. Should have been left up to the audiences if they wanted to go see them after that. But an old fat white guy like Kyle Gass trying to be edgelord was just silly and in bad taste and poor timing. Cancel worthy? No idea. But Jack Black was smart enough to go "oh sugarlumps" about the possible immediate effect on his career and he pulled the tour.
After a decent interval they'll probably be back on the road.
"A doctor at a hospital I used to work at was fired for posting on an anonymous internet message board “some women deserve to be raped;” I’m fine with that decision too."
I agree. Posting "some people make really bad and stupid decisions and get themselves into situations where they're then surprised bad consequences happen" may get you in trouble, but it's true (if blunt). "Bitch was asking for it" is not.
“Thinks he’s a comedian” “trying to be edgelord” - are you at all familiar with Tenacious D? I ask that sincerely, because their entire schtick is being an edgy comedic band.
Comedians should be allowed to bomb occasionally. The correct response is heckling, not being fired by their agency.
When it comes to cancel culture, you can say that both sides have tendencies to do it, but I find it a little weird to focus on "left bubbles" when it comes to wishing death on political opponents when January 6 showed the same willingness on the right ("hang Mike Pence").
Trying to kill people is already a crime, and we do actually put people into prison for it. Saying you wish someone would die, or you wish someone would murder X, or you're sorry X didn't get murdered, all that is indeed very nasty, but it's very different from actually trying to do it.
In Pelosi's case, there wasn't just a plot, there was a serious physical attack on her husband. Presumably, the only reason she wasn't attacked is that she wasn't home.
There aren't many radical rightwingers in SF - like the attack on Gabby Giffords, the Paul Pelosi attack appears to have been the work of a genuinely disturbed person without much coherent contact with any reality, let alone politics.
The Whitmer plot was organized and operated by an FBI "informant". He wasn't just the prime mover, he's the only reason the "ringleader" ended up in charge of a group. It was an FBI false flag.
And the assault on Paul Pelosi appears to have been a crazy bum doing crazy bum things accidently to a fame-adjacent person.
I think the Whitmer plot followed the pattern of a bunch of post-9/11 FBI arrests:
a. FBI agents/informants recruit some hapless losers who are vaguely inclined toward terrorism.
b. The FBI agents/informants hatch the plot, organize everything, supply the weapons and bombs (ideally bombs that won't blow up), etc., and the hapless losers follow along and feel important and dangerous and powerful.
c. The FBI then sweeps in and arrests the hapless losers and announces that they have saved America from another dastardly plot.
Now, the hapless losers in these cases aren't people I particularly mind seeing in prison--they did go along with a terrorist plot or a kidnapping scheme or whatever, and presumably could have been recruited by a real terrorist instead of a pretend one. But I doubt that many actual successful attacks have been prevented this way.
I think the guy who wanted to kill Nancy Pelosi was a standard nutcase, not really politically motivated in the normal sense. Though this might be more of an example for the "bring back the bughouse" thread.
Trump's would-be assassin killed a dude standing behind him, which seems worse than Pelosi's would-be assassin, who tried to murder her husband but failed.
I think the leftist response/rationalization for this would be something along the lines of: "yes, its wrong to wish for violence on a political opponent, but Trump has the potential to irreversibly damage our democracy and has demonstrated willingness to do so in the past with Jan 6 and the false elector scheme, therefore the line here is blurry and it is not clear exactly how morally unjustified this is." (Similar to how expressing support for assassinating Hitler seems morally justified).
I suspect the cultural conflict has more to do with evidential weight than any kind of fundamental moral incongruity, as is the case with many disagreements between the left and right.
Most people on the left I know would contest this categorization; they'd probably say that the right is much more pro-violence (eg Jan 6) than the left, not just "damage democracy" in the abstract.
They'd also point to clips of Trump and supporters making fun of Paul Pelosi's attack, which afaik no high-ranking Democrats have done about the Trump assassination (and hence why a lowly nobody from Home Depot was the one cancelled).
I'm surprised that Scott didn't address this. Expressing regret that Trump wasn't murdered in front of a crowd of his supporters is unambiguously worse than, to pick something, Carol Hooven saying that sex is binary. The main reason we want a culture of free speech is that we don't have to settle differences of belief through violence. If some people are now saying that it's too bad that their political disputes weren't solved by violence, what claim do they have to free speech?
I'm prepared to defend someone's *right* to free speech. I'm not necessarily prepared to defend someone from the loss of a job for saying something odious.
I've proposed a razor: if you abominate the liberal order, you forfeit the protections of the liberal order. Jubilating in violence against your enemies is an abomination of the liberal order.
That just moves us back one level. Is intentionally misgendering someone or stating that homosexuality is an abomination before God abominating the liberal order? How about calling someone a race-traitor for marrying outside their race? Or saying that white people are the cancer of history?
The argument made by many cancellers and many supporters of hate-speech laws is that these statement undermine the liberal order and deserve punishment.
I have heard them claim that they deserve punishment but never that they undermine the liberal order. They don't care a whit about the liberal order.
I'm talking about the liberal order in which we solve our differences through dialogue and answer wrong speech with right speech. People who want to solve differences through violence and answer wrong speech with threats and censorship, as far as I'm concerned, can be canceled or counter-canceled without qualms.
> Expressing regret that Trump wasn't murdered in front of a crowd of his supporters is unambiguously worse than, to pick something, Carol Hooven saying that sex is binary.
This is just billion-dust-specks vs. eternity-of-torture-for-one-guy, isn't it?
Trump has the potential to do much more than analogous dust specks, so it's more like certain torture for one individual vs possible torture for many individuals.
Reading Carol Hooven's account, it doesn't seem straightforwardly about cancellation perpetrated the left, or simply about the 'sex is binary' statements. My summary:
Hooven deliberately entered into a contentious public debate by going on Fox and Friends saying we need to use biological terms male and female in medicine, and got some criticism by a trans graduate student in her department on twitter and she responded on twitter (so far, so good; this seems within the bounds of regular discussion/debate).
Subsequently the right media (and mob) started attacking the graduate student, and the left started attacking her for having unleashed all the inevitable harrassment on the student. (This is where it all went off the rails, it honestly seems like if she'd had a private conversation with the graduate student they could have dealt with it amicably)
Weeks later, a DEI committee chose to include a comment from yet another student complaining about Hooven in some email (not clear who the email was sent to, seems like probably sent to faculty in a particular department?). She claims additional quotes from her were added out of context to smear her character.
Hooven felt like this was uncalled for and expected a defence or retraction or something from the university. She felt the response was insufficiently apologetic to her, and therefore felt unsupported by her employer. She developed mental health issues and went part time before ultimately quitting her job.
It's a sad story and an indictment on media and online culture, but in the end, it really doesn't seem to be about the free speech to say sex is binary. It wouldn't have occured without both the right and the left outrage machines, and Hooven naively not understanding going on media like Fox and Friends your words are obviously going to be taken out of context and court controversy. Subsequently she didn't understand the perils of fame and the harm you can inadvertantly cause on others.
Hooven's story is an unambiguous case of cancellation visited upon her for saying that sex is binary. After her Fox appearance, the Director of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force at Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology condemned the remarks as transphobic and harmful. This wasn't the product of a bipartisan outrage machine, it was the product of hateful progressives coming together to punish a colleague for giving credibility to their enemies by saying something that's true.
You say it's unambiguous and then state facts taking all the ambiguity out.
The graduate student (one person) directing some DEI taskforce felt the need to tweet that her "remarks" were "transphobic and harmful". That in itself doesn't seem to rise to the level of cancellation (though as events unfolded, it was an unwise thing to tweet). I think people should be able to call remarks transphobic if that's their opinion.
This is immediately jumped on by the right wing media (the same day), in which Hooven says her position was misrepresented in click-bait headlines. I think it's safe to assume the graduate student received a tonne of abuse after that. I mean, just look at the replies to her tweet: https://twitter.com/LauraSimoneLew/status/1421128429068554250).
Do you think it's irrelevant that she became the cause célèbre for the transphobic right wing? It seems to me if the tweet had been ignored this whole thing would have blown over.
Hooven faced no formal consequences and indeed receives a letter stating “It was not the intent of our DIB Committee to cause damage to Dr. Hooven’s reputation, but to raise important issues about best practices in science communication and respect for the serious impact our scientific opinions may have on others. We apologize.”
The DIB Committee apologized because they baldly tried to destroy Hooven's reputation, and for doing so, their noses were rubbed in their excrement. Postcards From Barsoom is correct.
> It seems to me if the tweet had been ignored this whole thing would have blown over.
It seems to me that if the cancelers had ignored Hooven's Fox appearance this whole thing would have blown over. They didn't want it to blow over. They wanted to destroy Hooven.
So let me get this right, for people baldly attempting to destroy Hooven's reputation "their noses were rubbed in their excrement" and they were forced to apologise. And this is evidence of her being cancelled?
I don't think it's plausible for the person tweeting to expect a media firestorm to result. All the subsequent events were more to do with people unfairly blaming Hooven for that firestorm. It rapidly became more about the meta story than about the actual things Hooven said. Going on about "hateful progressives" who "wanted to destroy Hooven" just makes me think you're predisposed to seeing the worst in her critics and ignores the nuanced reactions many people had. I'm sure there were individuals who wanted her fired, but high-profile controversy inevitably attracts extreme voices.
Faithful amplification of a person's actual statement is not "character assassination." Taking a screenshot of someone wishing death on a prominent political figure is significantly different from, say, taking a picture of a guy resting his hand out the window of his truck and then claiming that his fingers are forming a White Power symbol, therefore he's racist.
The trick is determining whether the “wishing of death” is sincere or just a case of poor taste in edgy humor. Which is basically impossible on Twitter. Which is why we shouldn’t mob randos.
Or just a dumb thing someone said in a moment of idiocy. If you dislike cancellations based on someone using a racial slur in a moment of drunken idiocy, or based on someone telling a racist joke in a setting they thought was private, then I think you should also dislike this kind of cancellation.
I mean, you shouldn't scream racial slurs at people, or wish people dead, or say all kinds of other ugly things that people sometimes say. But saying those things doesn't seem like it is a good reason to fire you from a job as a cashier.
If I discovered my dentist, plumber, tax preparer, doctor, etc., had done one of those things, I wouldn't refuse to do business with them. I want my cavities filled, my leaks repaired, my taxes done properly, my illnesses treated, and so on; I don't need the people doing those things to have never said something ill-considered and nasty.
A tangent: I suspect there is a lot of preference falsification when people treat it as a taboo to wish that a politician were assassinated, and pretend it's totally unreasonable, while probably many people actually occasionally have such thoughts themselves.
The death of one man, in a country of many millions, as a wrong in itself, is easily outweighed by even minor political effects, and one may consider the direct effects of an especially bad politician on the other side dying to be good.
There is of course the argument that it would normalize political violence, perhaps even lead to a civil war, that it deters smart people from going into politics by making it a risky job, or that it forces politicians to use even more expensive security precautions. These are good reasons to not want assassinations, but not not slam dunk obvious ones that only a totally unhinged person may disagree with: after all, four US presidents have been assassinated, and little of these concerns materialized. Arguably we *should* treat it as taboo to openly wish for an assassination in order to discourage attempts (though it's questionable that the sort of people who would commit one would be influenced), but that's an argument that we should pretend that only totally unhinged people wish for one, not an argument that actually only totally unhinged people wish for one.
This taboo seems to be respected by some to a weirdly extreme extent. Senator Lindsey Graham got a lot of flak from both parties when he wished Putin to be assassinated. If it's right to send weapons to poor Ukrainian conscripts to shoot tens of thousands of poor Russian conscripts (as I do, as does some three fourths of the US Congress), why would it be wrong to wish the very guy who started the whole war were shot? The US *organizing* his assassination would be dangerous, but *wishing* that some Russian shot him, as Graham did, isn't. I wonder if this is some implicit pact between politicians: do not wish for the death of even a leader of a proxy war enemy, lest you be assassinated yourself. In which case it's kind of cowardly: send soldiers to shoot each other, but not be willing to take a small risk themselves.
Yeah. There's a big difference between wishing your political enemies would drop dead and wishing them assassinated (because assassinations are destabilizing in a lot of ways, and having them become commonplace would do all kinds of harm to our political system and country), but I think this is the sort of thing that comes only with thinking about it a bit, not with popping off with the first thing that comes to mind on Twitter.
Sure, but it's not at all obvious that an assassination would've make the world better, if anything the most recent attempted coup is some evidence against (former head of Wagner didn't exactly sound like a pleasant guy).
Many Thanks! True. If his coup had succeeded, that might indeed have been worse. Even for any replacement to Putin there is always a question about the devil you know vs the devil you don't know...
I always find posts like this a bit puzzling. Why are we debating whether the right should try to match the left's willingness to cancel? They already exceed it.
The right has always been more aggressive about that stuff, not less. Quasi-religious orthodoxy is no match for actual religious orthodoxy, and the fiercest restrictions I've seen on free speech in America are aimed at left-wing critics of Israel.
Or at least, that's how it seems from where I'm sitting. If I'm wrong, you can try and prove me wrong. But it'll take more than vibes and anecdotes.
"At no point do I ever recall any left-wing institution adopting a policy against hiring people for any kind of right-wing belief."
And this is the point at which I think we differ. I work for a public, for-profit company - not a place I'd describe as left-wing; and if I had a Pride flag on my desk, and a picture of Harvey Milk, absolutely no one would object. I'd be incredibly reluctant to have a Confederate flag and a portrait of General Lee on my desk, even though historically those are much more honored causes.
You don't even need to be that inflammatory. "An Appeal To Heaven" or "Don't Tread On Me" is probably enough for people to start giving you the side-eye.
> I'd be incredibly reluctant to have a Confederate flag and a portrait of General Lee on my desk, even though historically those are much more honored causes.
I feel like the problem with this analogy is that we can read the Confederacy's constitutional documents today and see that the 'Lost Cause' narrative falls apart quickly. So while I'm pro-free speech and all that, if I see you have a Confederate flag on your desk, what inference am supposed to make?
1. You are ignorant of the historical documents and haven't done the research, but just grew up in a place where that wasn't questioned. You truly just see it as a flag that says nothing more than "I'm from the South / I like the Rural Aesthetic".
2. You aren't ignorant of the historical documents, you disagree with them, but feel like the historical context doesn't matter anymore and its just a cool flag from your hometown.
3. You aren't ignorant of the historical documents but you agree with them.
Those are honestly the only 3 options I can think of. If I'm missing some 4th option, I'm curious what it would be, but it should be illustrative that I couldn't think of one. And while I think #3 is the least likely, I'd have to go based off the rest of your vibe to really guess which of the 3 it is. And none of them are particularly charitable.
Now if it was, y'know, 1980 or whatever, I'd likely myself not know about the history in enough context, but the Internet uh, exists now?
I wouldn't cancel you for it, but I'd just have a lower opinion of you and if I were your boss I wouldn't trust you to not accidentally cause a PR/HR scandal.
Correct, I didn't know that and had never heard of the guy. Which is why my comment was only about how I'd see the Confederate Flag vs Pride Flag. Can you link me a source about your claim? I couldn't find anything on Wikipedia and even ChatGPT4 doesn't seem to know anything about that? https://chatgpt.com/share/217de218-d414-4993-be60-c454b0c11b09
Obviously no? It's that he was the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. Or possibly "He's that guy who had that Oscar-award winning movie about him" (which was centered around the former thing). If you genuinely believe otherwise, you live in a weird bubble.
You should go back in time and watch a bunch of "Dukes of Hazzard" episodes. The Confederate iconography there is clearly being used as a symbol of #Resistance against a corrupt and overbearing government.
You don't get to pick and choose what symbols mean to other people. Or, well, you can try, and that's where we get Culture War. *shrug*
> You should go back in time and watch a bunch of "Dukes of Hazzard" episodes. The Confederate iconography there is clearly being used as a symbol of #Resistance against a corrupt and overbearing government.
Yeah, this is what I meant by "the rest of your vibe". If you're some dude old enough to have been watching Dukes of Hazzard on TV, that's definitely going to weight me towards #1. Since I know that the Dukes of Hazzard choice of iconography was itself downstream of the 'Lost Cause' narrative perpetuated after the Civil War as a result of the failure of reconstruction.
> You don't get to pick and choose what symbols mean to other people. Or, well, you can try, and that's where we get Culture War. *shrug*
This is why it is important to become cognizant of the fact that these symbols do in fact mean different things to different people and treat them as such, instead of just thinking that your interpretation is the obviously correct one, and then taking it as a personal attack when you learn that someone else has a very different view of what that symbol means, for pretty well justified reasons.
"if I were your boss I wouldn't trust you to not accidentally cause a PR/HR scandal."
That's exactly the point. If right-wing beliefs were as acceptable as left-wing beliefs, "this guy thinks the Confederacy was pretty awesome, and General Lee was the epitome of gentlemanliness" would be just as acceptable, and just as implausible as a source of an HR crisis, as "this guy thinks there's nothing wrong with homosexuality, and that guy from the Village People is pretty cool."
>"The Confederates pretty unambiguously betrayed the United States..."
From the Union's POV; from the Confederacy's POV the other States were reneging on the deal thatt was made to get the South into the Union in the first place.
Many universities require applicants to academic jobs to make diversity statements. And that's just the explicit political litmus tests, most examples of cancel culture are rather firings without a formal rule.
I work in academia and I am gobsmacked to hear someone say that colleges bend over backwards to hire conservatives. What right-wing influencers are you thinking of? These were people hired recently?
You could certainly argue that that _particular_ meme could be considered election interference, but it's a pretty common joke that others in other elections have made without being prosecuted.
The prosecution proved its case by introducing electronic communications between the conspirators discussing how to most effectively interfere with the election.
I don’t think the memes can be described as jokes, even if the content is similar to actual jokes, because jokes are intended to be funny. The discussions between the conspirators makes clear that the memes were intended to interfere with the election; being funny was not a goal.
As someone in the so-called "Bible Belt", no one cares one bit about an atheist bumper sticker. The Bible Belt has more angry disaffected ex-Christians who hate their parents than other places, and as a consequence has a great deal of performative atheism which draws no attention outside of an occasional eye roll.
You'd have to start by staking out what you mean by the left and the right. If you're talking about the world as a whole, I don't think the claim's defensible; as far as I know, nobody cancelled by the left gets the Salman Rushdie treatment.
Perhaps if you limit this to the West, and focus specifically on the social pressure style of cancellation rather than the kind with real teeth, you could convince me. But even then I'd want to see numbers.
What numbers could one show? What numbers would you show to demonstrate that right-wing religious cancellation is a problem (which I do believe)?
I did mean the West. You're right that no one cancelled by the Left in the West gets the Salman Rushdie treatment, but then they aren't treated like Solzhenitsyn either.
As for teeth, I think losing one's job, for instance, has teeth. It's certainly a powerful disincentive for a lot of people. Was anyone during McCarthyism on the receiving end of teeth? I would say so, but I don't think any of them were Rushdied.
Philippe brought up Rushdie, not me, but would you disagree that Islamist-governed countries like Iran still have a left-right spectrum and that the further to the right one is on that spectrum, the more one would be expected to support repressive acts like attacking Rushdie?
At the same time, I do think it's fruitless to try to work out a consistent view of "left" and "right" in a global context, especially for the purposes of keeping score on who's doing more canceling.
<i>Philippe brought up Rushdie, not me, but would you disagree that Islamist-governed countries like Iran still have a left-right spectrum and that the further to the right one is on that spectrum, the more one would be expected to support repressive acts like attacking Rushdie?</i>
TBH I'm not sure the terms "left" and "right" really make sense in the context of somewhere like Iran. In the west, meanwhile, Islamism is more associated with the extreme left than the extreme right -- the average "From the River to the Sea" chanter is not a member of a right-wing party, for example.
There may be something to what you say, which could also help explain why cancellation in academia (where supply of workers greatly exceeds demand) is so feared. Regardless, I think almost no one is indifferent to being fired even during good economic times—apart from material problems (not just the money but the stress of finding a new job, etc.), being judged to be a bad person and made to leave a workplace for that reason seems like it would feel humiliating and perhaps unjust to most people.
Also, I'm not sure how it was in the 1950s, but now pretty much every job (at least that I've come across) requires a reference from your last employer, which might be a difficult hurdle to jump if you were fired for having extremist opinions.
Someone would have to do a real study, I think. Maybe someone has?
The survey questions Scott quoted are a decent start. I'd want to see specific examples, though. Because the rhetoric of free speech has become associated with the right, but the practice is quite another story.
"If a schoolteacher were to post STATEMENT X to Facebook, should they be fired", that kind of thing.
You could also count up anti-speech laws and criminal convictions made under them.
Even without a study, you seem pretty confident that the right wing has consistently been worse than the left when it comes to cancellation. Maybe you are also relying on vibes and anecdotes? I think that's unavoidable when it comes to cultural phenomena like this. Similarly, your suggestion of counting anti-speech laws I think is pretty limited because a lot of cancellation is done via social and professional pressures (hence cancel *culture*). To my knowledge the people blacklisted under McCarthy weren't convicted of any crimes, but that didn't protect their jobs.
I mostly look at laws and extra-legal state actions. Because that's where the real power, and the real violence, is.
Beyond that, I hope I haven't given the impression that I hate anecdotes and vibes. They're a big part of everyone's thinking, mine included. I just wanted to make clear upfront that I can't be swayed by them, because I have my own vibes and my own anecdotes.
You've probably noticed that within the West, I haven't tried to convince you that the right is actually cancel-ier. I believe it is, but I'm fully aware that I don't have strong enough evidence on hand. My vibes and anecdotes won't convince you, right?
There are studies. Metrics on professor sanctions are tracked.
Typically 'the right' have organized groups external to the university, that attack liberal professors. More like roving hit squads.
Not just universities. Anybody that has followed state politics has seen this happen, 'the right' is very heavily funded and go after smaller targets that don't get the large media attention, so 'anecdotally' it appears 'the left' cancel more because they are bigger headlines, while 'the right' win many more smaller battles.
"Sanction attempts initiated by on-campus groups typically come from the political left of the scholar, including 75% of the attempts from undergraduates and 82% from other scholars.
On the other hand, sanction attempts from off-campus groups typically come from the political right of the scholar, including 78% of the attempts from the general public and 86% from government officials."
>Someone would have to do a real study, I think. Maybe someone has?
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who want to control the output of the function "look for studies on which side of politics is worse". Many of them care enough and have the resources to do bogus studies. Many of them care enough and have the resources to control which such studies get published. And many of them care enough and have the resources to control which such studies are popularised.
Hence, I'm afraid you mostly have to do this yourself or rely on already-trusted people to do it for you.
> The survey questions Scott quoted are a decent start. I'd want to see specific examples, though.
Honestly, I think you'd see a huge swing in numbers if you simply replaced "hateful" with a different descriptor. The culture war has taught the right to believe that "hateful" is just a word the left uses as a synonym/dog-whistle for "not woke enough" (or to be more blunt, many people *on both sides* think it means "pro-white"). They're responding to its use in kind in the poll with that in mind.
I would like to see, for example, how republicans would feel about opinions that "damage the fabric of society".
You seem to put religious people in the 'Right' by default?
Have you looked at what eg the Pope is saying about the economy?
Globally, left and right barely have any meaning. They are just locally useful tribal identifiers. Any relation to actual positions or policies is purely coincidental.
The Pope appears to have made the Catholic Church hierarchy into the Anglican Church.
Which was for a long time the church to belong to in order to appear part of the secular hierarchy, but generally inspired the opposite of fervent belief. You show up on Sunday, stick money in the collection plate, and ignore them the rest of the time.
The *fervent* Catholic believers these days? Many of them reluctantly acknowledge the Pope's authority, but do a lot of "interpretation". Others just call him apostate.
Some links to more nuanced ways to measure and express our various political/social/ideological viewpoints, then trying to pin them solely on a crude, single "left/right" axis ...
I mean, if you're going to count Iran as being on "the Right" then I think you've got to count all Soviet/Chinese state oppression as being on "the Left". Then we get to have an argument about whether the Holocaust was right wing cancellation. I don't think any of that stuff can be credibly linked to the contemporary American mainstream right or left.
In terms of what actually happens, I suppose the example I'd go with was Gina Carano, who was fired from an apolitical acting job basically for being a Republican. It amazed me, a Democrat, at the time. Republicans are like half the US population and except for a few subcultures like country music, they are either absent or have to hide their identity in cultural institutions. No wonder these people are vengeful.
Reading the Wiki, it doesn't look like you're correct about this, at least when it comes to why she was fired for The Mandalorian. It seems like she was fired for social media posts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Carano#Political_views
Yeah, and the post she was fired for was pretty mild. She compared the hatred being stirred up against the unvaxxed to the hatred the Nazis stirred up against Jews. It was a dumb analogy, but if everyone who ever made a dumb Hitler analogy was fired from their jobs, crops would rot in the fields. She was pretty clearly fired for being MAGA.
You have to admit, though, that religion is incredibly censorious in our culture. It's much easier for an "anti-woke" person to achieve political office in the US than an atheist. Growing up in an evangelical family, there were tons of "un-Christian" artists and intellectuals who we were supposed to boycott- Seinfeld was pure evil, metal bands were all satanists, and Carl Sagan was an insidious atheist propagandist. Even now as an adult, admitting to my family that I'm an atheist or that I have a moderate liberal view of culture is unthinkable- not even because I worry about their reaction, but because I worry about the reaction their social circle would have toward them.
As a culture, we seem to take religious mobs in stride. When a gigantic group of religious people condemn and boycott something innocuous, rather than reacting with the fear and outrage that accompanies progressives doing that sort of thing, we often just laugh it off. But those groups do still exist, and still have an enormous amount of cultural and political power.
If you live in a very religious community, tons of things- usually enforced by social pressure, but people certainly do lose jobs or face similar consequences for being "un-Christian" all the time. Comments in support of abortion, for example, are very much a cancel-able offense in a lot of American South.
Even in broader American society, there can be a pretty big chilling effect- when was the last time you saw a politician who could admit to agnosticism, let alone atheism?
I don't know what your threshold is for "major," but the South does have cities with significant populations, even if they're not global superstar economies. My local metro area of ~1.5 million is still subject to state law that recently mandated the display of the ten commandments in public schools and made being visibly LGBT explicitly cancellable in schools and libraries. Broad swaths of the country have to live with censorious Evangelical cultural power, mostly in areas that don't offer the education and economic opportunities necessary to afford to move to a more tolerant place.
I don't recall any specifics aside from an accusation of Sagan being atheistic- which in those circles in the '90s, might as well have been an accusation of pedophilia or neo-Nazism. I haven't actually seen Contact, but it doesn't surprise me that a middle-ground theist position would be interpreted as atheism- imagine the left's reaction if an intellectual tried to argue for a middle ground between racism and anti-racism.
I think it depends on what one means by "our culture." I grew up in a left-wing town and have attended and worked at left-wing institutions my whole life (and I still consider myself on the left). *I* never felt like anyone I knew was being prevented from watching Seinfeld, but there were a few years there (the period I identified) where I did feel a certain amount of pressure towards ideological conformity. So a lot depends on what circles one moves in.
As far as the *mass* culture, though—what one encounters in mass-market movies and TV, or in a college classroom other than at an explicitly religious college—I think religious pressure is still very weak and has been for decades. I have kids and all kinds of kids' entertainment (Inside Out 2 is a recent example) has characters who wear hijabs, who are queer-coded, etc. But I don't think I've ever seen a character in any of these works wearing a cross necklace. (All of that is orthogonal to cancel culture; I'm just talking about who is wielding power in mass culture these days.)
HIs comment indicates that he does not dare to speak openly about his atheism even today. That should suffice to demonstrate the ongoing power of the religious right.
Eh, the Left has backed off hard atheism as well, since pretty much everybody in the coalition except coastal elites takes that stuff reasonably seriously.
"Culture" seems to imply something broader than his family and immediate friend circle. Otherwise it's just an anecdote - meaningful to him for sure, but not really saying much about the broader picture.
No, that goes to show that they value what their family thinks of them.
There is a significant distinction between "my family would disapprove of my choices/beliefs" and "if this was public information, there are decent chances someone could convince their boss to get them fired".
The evangelical subculture still has enormous influence in the American South, especially (though not exclusively) in rural areas. That might all be a bit invisible to people living in larger liberal cities, but it's still tens of millions of people.
I grew up I a small Mississippi town full of Evangelicals. I felt out of place and eventually left. But I can't remember ever feeling like I need to stay quiet and let people assume I was evangelical because I was scared of social censure. I don't think there's a job in my home town I couldn't get because I'm not Evangelical besides pastor (mayyyyybe mayor?) No in my town was ever fired from a job or pressured into resigning because of ideological sins against Evangelicalism.
Would you have had difficulty getting a job if you were perceived as anti-Evangelical in an active sort of way? That's really what we're talking about here--cancel culture is generally aimed not at those perceived as not being in the ingroup, but rather at those perceived as being against the ingroup.
This is all true and I agree with it. But there's an important asymmetry, one that goes both ways: conservative/religious tyranny is almost always concentrated in particular families, or maybe small communities. It affects only a handful of people, even indirectly, but it affects them extremely strongly. While woke/progressive tyranny is far broader but also weaker.
You can make arguments for either being worse than the other. You suffer horribly as a child (if you're unlucky) but if you later escape and leave your family you're completely free of that control entirely, and most people are never affected by it at all. Or most people are to a small extent affected (chilling effects), some a fair bit more (but still nothing like a religious familiy) but across whole industries, pillars of society and even on the internet itself you can never fully escape it.
Personally, I think the first is much scarier (without a doubt) but the second is much more disgusting and outrageous (because of just how many people and institutions are complicit in it).
>But there's an important asymmetry, one that goes both ways: conservative/religious tyranny is almost always concentrated in particular families, or maybe small communities. It affects only a handful of people, even indirectly, but it affects them extremely strongly.
Partially I agree with you, but one exception with a broader reach is abortion laws, and, prior to SCOTUS rulings, laws on gay sex and marriage and on contraceptives. Those are generally statewide, rather than only affecting residents of small communities.
That might be specific to where you grew up and whom your parents were. As someone who grew up in the extremely secular Northeast, for as long as I can remember, overtly religious people were viewed with suspicion - especially if they were not the more acceptable "ethnic religious" types like Irish Catholic, Greek Orthodox, or Reform Judaism (where it was more about maintaining ties and traditions with your fellow co-ethnics than about the religion itself). Someone who was, for example, an Evangelical Christian and was open about it was viewed as either a potentially dangerous religious fanatic or else a grifter like Jim and Tammy Bakker. And this was back in the 1980s...it's even more pronounced today. Granted, I grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb; so the general vibe was that strong religious fervor was something reserved for overweight people living in trailer parks, or maybe for uneducated immigrants from impoverished countries.
I did live in the Bible Belt for a few years as an young adult; and noticed that while a majority would describe themselves as "Christian," in most cases the Christianity seemed to be a mile wide and an inch deep. However, it was certainly more socially acceptable to be overtly religious than it was in the Northeast. I don't recall anyone being cancelled or ostracized for atheism; but I also don't recall anyone being really overt about it, either - I would imagine many folks were in a similar situation to you, where they tended to be quiet about being an atheist so as not to upset their more-religious families.
That being said, a friend of mine swears he was fired from not one but two jobs for being an atheist. It seemed odd to me that both Guitar Center and Reptile World would be hotbeds of religious fervor, but according to him they were (this was in eastern Maryland, in the 1990s/early 2000s).
I think the most cancelly thing is being anti first amendment. Because when the government cancels you, you don't just get mean tweets, you go to jail.
So a loose list of anti first amendment stuff from the right: Donald Trump talks about wanting to open up libel laws, or Desantis wants to compel speech https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_WOKE_Act, Desantis going after corporations because he thought they were too woke; Florida, Montana, Tennessee and Texas all have drag show bans. This stuff is worse than obnoxious people on Twitter.
But people who get fired and blacklisted don't just get mean tweets either—their careers are ruined, their livelihoods are threatened. I'm against opening up libel laws, but I don't see how *taking a position* about libel laws (a position which he doesn't have the power to put into effect) could be worse, cancel-wise, than making someone unemployable.
Yes, I agree that your livelihood being threatened is bad. That's why I take government imprisonment very seriously! You're not very employable in prison.
Seems like a non-sequitur. Are you under the impression libel is a criminal offense, or that Trump suggested imprisonment ought to result in imprisonment?
I don't think either of these is true, off the top of my head. Trump said something about "I'm gonna open up libel laws so you can win lots of money by suing" or words to that effect, IIRC.
Even if you can't literally go to prison (though it looks like Florida's drag show ban does make it a misdemeanor criminal offense), I would argue that taking people's money with state force (via lawsuits or fines) is more dangerous and more effectively censorious than threatening someone's revenue with social pressure. You can at least theoretically resist social pressure, but resisting the police is much harder.
The other thing is that a sufficient number of mean tweets adds up to a denial of service attack, and also, a great many people are emotionally affected by a big barrage. Maybe they shouldn't be. If they were emotionally tougher, they wouldn't care, but the truth is that a high proportion of people aren't that emotionally tough.
I'm not even sure that it would be good if people in general were so emotionally tough they couldn't be affected-- being unshamable removes a social control which can be valuable.
Most groups have their anti-first-amendment contingent. For some, it's what constitutes harassment. Employers, acting under the threat of lawsuits, become proxies who censor workplace speech so that governments don't have to.
The bumper stickers on cars in the parking lot have been submitted as evidence in trials.
And perhaps an expanded understanding of harassment accomplishes good ends. I'm not trying to address that, one way or another. It's still a curtailment of speech.
"I think the most cancelly thing is being anti first amendment."
This is a strange argument to use against the right, since the First Amendment is the *only thing* stopping people being arrested for misgendering or sent to jail for having religious objections to homosexuality. Going by the fact that (as far as I can tell) *every westerm country other than the US* has either had those things happen or serious attempts to make them happen.
Except for that time they made it a misdemeanor for long term care staff to intentionally misgender elderly patients. I doubt they stopped with that due to lack of ambition.
Is the "Stop WOKE Act" compelling speech? What speech is it compelling? It doesn't seem to even *prohibit* speech — only prevents employers from requiring employees to receive instruction that endorses the listed concepts.
"Obnoxious people on Twitter [sic]" is a strange thing to bring up, since no one is talking about standards of online politeness or anything. Unless—hold on, is it your contention that no one has been fired for being publicly "un-Woke", nor (e.g., since compelled speech has been mentioned) been made to sign/profess/endorse DEI statements lest they be fired, in the U.S.?
> This stuff is worse than obnoxious people on Twitter.
No it's not. The "obnoxious people" against freedom of expression are by far the more powerful side, and diminishing their power (or more likely, trying in vain to) is a good and noble thing.
Teachers working at publicly funded educational institutions are not 'speaking their mind' as free citizens when they attempt to invert alleged oppression hierarchies within society. The idea this should get a free pass is to suggest that voters and parents should have no influence over the contents of their childrens' curriculum, which is ludicrous.
In any case, this goes beyond constitutional principles. Stare at South Africa for more than fifteen seconds and tell me the woke coalition isn't an existential threat to civilisation at a basic physical level. Most people in the DR sphere are aware that home depot employees shouldn't really be high priority targets, but entertainers like Jack Black or Destiny and *especially* the parasites infesting the halls of academe and running the 4th estate *need* to be dislodged to avoid another holodomor at the hands of the charming people who think anti-vaxxers should be in internment camps. The point of cancellation is not to "teach them a lesson", but to remove malicious actors from power and staff the vacant positions with people who are, at minimum, less insane.
I think the evidence for the general efficacy of education is extremely weak when appropriate controls are introduced and I know Scott has written about this at some length...
...so I'm actually broadly sympathetic to the 'end kid jail' argument. I'm just saying that free speech arguments don't really apply to the programs of publicly funded institutions.
Now that you mention it... I plan to homeschool my kids and give them a rigorous education, but for the parents who just need somewhere for their kids to go to keep them out of trouble... Who aren't really learning anything anyway... They might actually be just as well off playing video games all day.
Yes, end truancy laws, and... How about a free PlayStation and Meta Quest for households below the poverty line? Maybe Tim Minchin was on to something :D
One of the ironic parts is that basically *the original* case of cancel culture, long before Justine Sacco, was Stacy Snyder, a teacher who was cancelled due to a MySpace photo captioned "drunken pirate".
The intensity is cancel culture is a function of motive and opportunity. In the 2015-2021 period the right wing had not the cultural power to cancellations happen.
I think we need actual statistics here. Even at the height of woke cancel culture, it seemed that actual cancellations of academics were more likely to be Ward Churchill or Steven Salaita than someone who said something right wing.
As far as anecdotes, here are the prominent examples I can think of off the top of my head of people being disciplined, fired, or had jobs or opportunities withheld because they were taken to be saying or doing something right-wing or offensive to progressives:
I do hope that FIRE keeps this database going forward. I had some concerns about the database because the early years were less well documented, so I was a bit skeptical about the magnitude of the supposed increase since 2000. But it'll be good to have a longer-running record to see how much these features change.
>Diversity statements are a new flashpoint on campus, just as the Supreme Court has driven a stake through race-conscious admissions. Nearly half the large universities in America require that job applicants write such statements, part of the rapid growth in D.E.I. programs. Many University of California departments now require that faculty members seeking promotions and tenure also write such statements.
To put it other words: even if I agree with most of your individual points, I can't agree with the post as a whole because it seems built upon a worldview that just isn't true. A worldview where leftwing cancellation is far more powerful than it is.
Take Richard Hanania. You favourably cite him here, as if he was an actual thinker and not a professional rationalizer. And you're in good company! Stanford brought him over to teach a seminar!
This is the "white nationalism is our only hope, black people are incapable of self-government, and we need to forcibly sterilize a quarter of the population based on IQ test results" guy. The ideologically pro-bullying guy. He's as offensive to the left - and to decent people in general - as a talking head can be. And he's doing fine. That should, I think, make you question your premises a bit.
Pardon me if I'm misreading you but it sounds like you're saying that Hanania *should* in fact be canceled—that he shouldn't be brought to teach at Stanford, that one should show one is a decent person by not citing him under any circumstances. And so your point is that, as long as he's *not* canceled, cancel culture from the left is weak and not strong. Do I have that right?
If so I disagree with it, but I also think you might have missed the point Scott made that cancellations by a side are most potent against those who share that side. If we're talking about academics, I'd point to Yoel Inbar as someone who seems to have had a job offer spiked over statements he made skeptical of DEI which caused grad students to circulate a petition demanding he not be hired. Inbar isn't a rightist like Hanania, he's a liberal academic, which is precisely what made him vulnerable to other liberal academics. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/us/ucla-dei-statement.html
I actually agree strongly with Scott's point there, sorry if that wasn't clear.
And the left absolutely does hold its people to a much higher standard than the right does. If that's what you mean when you say the left is (was?) more cancel-y, then we may not actually disagree.
But this post is about right-wingers retaliating for their own ostensible mistreatment. Taking revenge for their allegedly brutal oppression. Somebody else responded to my comment saying "their houses and plants burned down, and their lives destroyed". Which seems like a wildly inaccurate frame to me. I bring up Hanania as an example of how conservatives aren't actually being destroyed by cancellation.
...are you familiar with the story of the TikTok Couch Guy, by the way? I think it's an interesting one because someone was cancelled for no sane reason at all, completely apolitically. And I think keeping it in mind provides a bit of a corrective to the worldview where your all-powerful political enemies are using cancellation to crush those who defy them.
> I bring up Hanania as an example of how conservatives aren't actually being destroyed by cancellation
I mean, this is the trouble with arguments about "cancellation". It's impossible to come up with examples of people who have been truly "cancelled" because anyone who got truly cancelled is someone you can no longer bring to mind.
Bill Cosby got actually imprisoned for actual crimes, doesn't seem like "cancel culture" to me.
I had to refresh my memory on the Michael Richards situation. I'm not sure that going on a lengthy racist tirade in a stand-up show and having your career suffer somewhat afterwards is really a central example either.
I'm not familiar with that, but I don't see how a guy being canceled for apolitical reasons could possibly act as evidence against the idea that people do get canceled for political reasons.
As for the left holding its people to a higher standard, I'm in favor of high standards of *behavior,* not conformity. I mentioned Yoel Inbar; there's also Dorian Abbott as an example of someone who was disinvited from a talk for heterodoxy. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/us/dorian-abbot-mit.html That's not about high standards, it's about purity tests.
Completely random bullshit lightning strike cancellations help put political cancellations in perspective. If you're not aware of the internet's capacity for this kind of nonsense, cancellations feel far more planned than they actually are.
Once you've seen a similar process play out in service of absolutely no agenda, you stop looking for the unseen hand of the conspirator. Which is good, because as a scroll through this comment section shows, there are many people who feel as though cancellation is a well-orchestrated policy campaign. Which it isn't, in any direction.
Anyway, I'm not sure how much we actually disagree here. I talked about how we'd have to define the left and the right and the region and so on, but I probably didn't go far enough: we'd also have to be clearer about what exactly it means to be more inclined towards cancellation. And what cancellation actually is.
I regret the way I wrote the comment that started this chain. "More aggressive about this stuff"? Did I really expect everyone reading this to know what I meant by "this stuff"?
Kinda did, because I wrote that comment in three minutes and one draft. Rather silly in retrospect. Still, I hope this conversation has given some insight into my perspective, and why even someone who agrees with Scott on most of the object-level points might find this post disagreeable.
(One thing I appreciate about our host is his ability to actually make himself understood. Most people discussing this stuff have to spend half their time clarifying.)
I definitely don't think there is a conspiracy or organized agenda, BUT I think the fact that the internet makes cancellation so easy and tempting makes political cancellation a very powerful force, politics being something that makes us feel justified in much of what we do. At any rate, yes, thanks for the discussion!
Tom -- to your point regarding being in favor of high standards of behavior, not conformity, do you still stand behind your statement in an earlier Slow Boring comment that "I think honesty about despicable positions is not good! Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue." ? It seems like you're broadly sympathetic to the point that cancel culture is not good, but this particular normative position is kind of a core cancel-culture rationale / goal expression, in which the point (and the problem) is to dominate the information-space by making only one brand of opinion within-the pale.
For the record, normally I think this kind of old-comment dredging / referencing is dumb and, ironically, potentially inhibitory of free exchange in exactly the way that I'm saying is bad here, but in this case this particular comment of yours actually made more of a lasting impression on me than like 99% of SB comments, because I honestly felt viscerally repelled by it as seeming to endorse some of the worst impulses of cancel culture, viz., the incapacity to obtain--or even express--accurate information or even have clearly delineated opposing sides and values because everyone's terrified of expressing politically disfavored preferences; "despicable positions" obviously being a political judgment. This particular expression of sentiment by you has honestly been living rent-free in my head since February, and I promise I am genuinely just looking for closure as to your actual answer / position, not trying to play some stupid form of gotcha.
Well, I don't know how interesting my views will be to others here, but I'm flattered you remembered, even if not for the reasons I might like! I'll do my best to answer:
—I don't think my belief that some positions are despicable compels me towards cancel culture. Cancel culture, as I understand the term, means trying to make someone suffer personal or professional consequences for their views. I'm not in favor of that at all. If anyone is terrified of expressing their views around me, then I'm flattered again, but the fear is totally misplaced because I'm not going to do anything to them over it.
—I have no desire to dominate an information-space. If I am in a space where opinions I find despicable are commonly expressed and no one bats an eye, I may make myself scarce, but that's different from wanting to dominate anything.
—My standards for finding a position "despicable" are quite exacting. I don't think it's accurate to say I only want "one brand" of opinion represented. (I want to say that the comment in question was about how schools named after George Washington Carver have worthless students in them or something like that but I could be totally wrong.)
—I think almost everyone could identify some views they find despicable. Do you not have anything like that? I think "hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue" has proven its worth in the Trump era, where the failure to pay lip service to values like shared humanity, generosity, etc. hasn't felt like refreshing honesty to me, but like the End Times for civil society.
Telling someone that you don't want them to speak at your event (because you are concerned they may embarrass your organization) is not cancelation. This is true even if it is done by many organizations. I would argue that this is just capitalism.
I googled it, and determined it was a TikTok video in 2021 about a teenage girlfriend surprising her teenage boyfriend with a visit, and people commenting about all the "red flags" in the video indicating he was probably cheating on her or something. Comments like they had never seen someone so unhappy to see their girlfriend, did he slip something unknown to someone else, where did that cell phone come from, etc.
The couple is apparently still together, so no lasting harm was done to their relationship, but they did gain inadvertent (in)fame.
That some of us get big enough to avoid cancellation is not an argument against the existence of cancel culture. Yes, Aristocrat Officers receive greater consideration than conscripts and even greater consideration than random civilians who get their houses and plants burned down, and their lives destroyed.
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You guys destroyed random civilians, who had never contributed more than 100 bucks to your enemy. Do you not see how awful that is?
Who are “you guys” here? I don’t believe there has ever been a period where this sort of thing happened only to people on one half of the political spectrum, or even a 75-25 split.
Also, there are no monolithic groups here. Liberals like Nicholas Christakis have been arguing against cancellation consistently for years, alongside conservatives like Robert George and moderates like Conor Friedersdorf.
Scott seems to be condemning cancel culture in general, and also pointing out that two wrongs don't make a right. As it happens I agree with the general thesis that it's wrong to cancel people over expressed opinions (punishment doesn't fit the crime), that just because the shoe's on the other foot now doesn't mean people with leftist opinions should be canceled, and that the idea of demonstrating how wrong it is will cause the left to feel remorse and stop them from canceling people won't work.
I'm very confused here. Is 'the left' no longer in power? Pre-emptively or something? And so 'the right' has hands on all the levers? I suppose I'm just a bit pea-brained, but I just can't keep up.
I don't think "the left" is an actual entity here, but rather the grass-roots people who identify with left-leaning goals. In this case, they exercise power en-masse by publicly, often with social media, causing offending businesses and/or people hardship by announcing they are all offended and refusing to deal with that company/person. Similarly, "the right" now has a target to cancel, and as a whole decided to do it.
"The Left" is still in control of the presidency and Senate. The government itself doesn't cancel anyone. If they do, it is done by arresting and/or suing them.
I think the one thing you and I are in agreement on, Philippe, is that Hanania annoys the socks off us both. I don't consider him to be an intellectual, but oh well, what do I know, I'm just a peasant clod.
> This is the "white nationalism is our only hope, black people are incapable of self-government, and we need to forcibly sterilize a quarter of the population based on IQ test results" guy.
While he is still a race realist, as far as I can tell, Hanania has since entirely repudiated white identitarianism, and is now some sort of open borders, elite human capital maximalist.
If he means "Yay, brain drain, H1B visas" then I agree with him (with some reservations during a tech industry downturn). That would match up with "elite human capital", but isn't the usual interpretations for "open borders".
Like others have said, Hanania has repudiated white nationalism. He is in fact now a big fan of immigration, and routinely mocks white nationalists for being dumb fucks.
Of course right-wing opinion bloggers/journalists don't get cancelled for being right-wing, just as left-wing opinion bloggers/journalists don't get cancelled for being left-wing. Journalism, especially opinion journalism, is inherently political; people care about the views of the writers they read, so if left-wing media get rid of right-wing writers, there is enough demand to support explicitly right-wing media that hires them (or in a blogger's case, they support him directly).
The important sphere of cancel culture is not-inherently-political institutions. The overwhelming majority of these have become left-wing in practice in terms of what speech they allow or disallow, and what messages they put out, at least when it comes to cultural (as opposed to economic) issues and among those that take a stance at all; and in some sectors the overwhelming majority do take a stance. But it only directly affects the small minority of employees who especially prominently express their opinions, so there's insufficient demand to sustain right-wing alternative institutions. The indirect effect is that less politically engaged people, who don't explicitly seek out right-wing or left-wing media or institutions, are disproportionately exposed to a marketplace of ideas that's artificially tilted in favor of the left.
You are presenting things Hanania wrote anonymously under a pseudonym in the past and completely disavowed as soon as they were brought to light as if they are things he manages to be successful while espousing. I am pretty sure he would be completely cancelled if he started saying these things today!
You are also inaccurately minimizing the professional repercussions he experienced in spite of those things. While it's true Stanford didn't rescind the invitation to talk about his book that was extended before they were revealed, he lost his affiliation with UT-Austin.
I'm not hugely familiar with Hanania, but it strikes me that if he writes something objectionable under a pseudonym (black people are inferior to whites), but in public presents a more acceptable version of a similar intellectual argument (let's get rid of civil rights law), it's reasonable to suspect that his 'private' statement might be indicative of his true beliefs. I think that's the (theoretically) cancellable offense here. If Hanania had been publicly espousing these things all along, he probably wouldn't be in a position to be 'cancelled' at all, he'd never have become famous or notable in the first place.
To draw a parallel hypothetical, let's say a pro-Palestine author/activist was revealed to have written something celebrating 9/11 or the holocaust under a pseudonym in the past. It seems fair to suspect their views even if they disavow those statements today. Whether they should be cancelled or not, the 'offense' is that they are secretly motivated by anti-semitism and Islamic fundamentalism, not that they openly espouse it.
Richard Hanania disavowed his right wing views and is now basically a center-right guy (who is more socially liberal than most democrats) who spends most of his time mocking conservatives. Is he really good example of conservative impunity to cancellation? It would be an own goal for progressives to cancel him. And isn’t this anecdote training pretty pointless? One could point out that Angela Davis is still a celebrated - and employed - public figure on the left, or any of the myriad of openly racist progressives or writers who still have jobs at think tanks or universities or newspapers, and it would prove just as little.
Do you honestly believe that a conservative could talk as freely and derogatorily about black peoples or women as is common for many people on the left to talk about white people or men, and not have a higher chance of being fired or sanctioned? I know the reply is ‘but it’s different, our motives are better, something something power differentials,’ but conservatives disagree with that model, and this isn’t a dispute that can be resolved empirically.
I suppose the conclusion is, your conception of how merciful your side is depends on your side’s conception of what is sinful and the magnitude of the sin. Two ideologies with differing ideas about what is wrong and how wrong it is will probably never agree on which side is more punitive even if they are privy to all the same information.
The only genuine taboo in America is criticizing Israel. Seems to me a lot of the faux outrage about „cancel culture” is to distract people from this fact.
Due to the First Amendment, in these sorts of protests law enforcement is legally only allowed to punish violence or other violations of the law (and incitement to imminent lawless action, and true threats of violence, and technically fighting words but that doctrine is basically dead.)
It's because you're seen as associating with the bloodthirsty palestinian groups? (Tbh I assume, perhaps unfairly, that you are a bloodthirsty monster based on your question.)
Few people have a genuine opinion on Israel unless they're Jewish, crazy, monsters, antisemitic, or reacting to the crazies and monsters.
"Few people have a genuine opinion on Israel unless they're Jewish, crazy, monsters, antisemitic, or reacting to the crazies and monsters." why do you think so?
This seems accurate to me, also. Israel gets far more attention in the West than other parts of the world outside the US and Europe, proportionately, so that tends to influence who responds.
The Palestinian Authority has consistently refused a 'Two State Solution," demanding as an unmet requirement the opportunity for all Palestinians to become Israeli citizens and live in Israel. Given the history of violence in the region, this is rather like demanding a complete surrender followed by an invasion. The Right of Return as defined by Geneva 4 attaches to citizenship more than land, and Israel would be able to choose between which of the two (citizenship or land) should be used to repatriate refugees, if needed. And denizens of the West Bank were former citizens of Jordan before Jordan (somewhat understandably) washed its hands of the situation. If West Bank Palestinians had a "Right of Return" at all, it would be to Jordan and not to Israel which they were never citizens of.
And Gazans were, similarly, never Israeli at all. Though many wouldn't have a prior citizenship to revert to unless we went back to the Ottoman Empire and decided they were Turks. Egypt's control was an occupation. Gazans were not granted Egyptian citizenship just like they were never granted Israeli citizenship.
In short: the reasonable solutions to where Palestinians should live are severely hampered by Palestinian rejection of a 'two state solution' due to their idiosyncratic demand for a Right of Return to Israel despite never being Israeli citizens. If critics of Israel ignore that problem, one is forced to ask 'why?'
That may be a problematic level of detail and too controversial for Scott. If so, he's welcome to remove the post. But I think that's what it boils down to: while specific criticisms of Israel are possible (since everyone has a list of bad deeds somewhere), most of the general criticisms are untenable and ethically inconsistent. And given that, one then needs to ask why someone would make untenable and inconsistent claims.
First, the largest Demographic group in Israel is Mizrahi Jews who were forced out of Middle Eastern countries or were relatively native to the MENA. (I think you know this?) Anti-zionist forces (or whatever we want to call the divided coalition who are united on this particular issue) are not going to spare that group destruction or oppression, as they have never exhibited anywhere close to such a level of discernment or precision in the past. Neither have they expressed strong concerns for the rights of that group, which indicates an inconsistent application of ethical standards.
If it is accepted that Israel is a valid country and vital to protecting the rights of the majority of Israelis, which includes both Jews and non-Jews, then the question of whether a Polish Jew, part of an acknowledged diaspora, has a Right of Return becomes a question of, at worst, whether, first, they threaten the lives and values of other Israelis and, second, whether Israel as a polity has the right to control its own borders. A random Polish Jew has a relatively very low chance of posing such a threat to other Israelis, and a reasonable chance of protecting the lives and liberties of Mizrahi Jews and even native Druze and Israeli Muslims and Christians. Palestinian groups, in contrast, have participated in the attempted overthrow of a few of their neighbors. Black September was welcomed into Jordan since they were former Jordanian citizens. They tried to overthrow the Jordanian government in thanks for the hospitality they received. They assassinated Jordanian prime minister Wasfi Tal. They were eventually forced out of Jordan, a country that they had the actual 'Right to Return to' under international law. And... nobody complains that Palestinians are unable to exercise their Right of Return to Jordan?
It was similar with Kuwait. Kuwait was willing to absorb Palestinian refugees. Arafat supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the foreign overthrow of the Kuwaiti government. The number of Palestinians in Kuwait dropped to near zero soon afterwards.
And, of course, Palestinian groups have participated in numerous military and terrorist actions against Israel, which is (can we agree?) an absolutely terrible way to try to get into any country unless you can completely conquer it in war. Which seems to be the intention.
I hesitate to blame an entire group for the decisions of their leaders. But these were some particularly bad decisions. And they didn't seem to lead to significant international or even local pushback against those leaders, which indicates at least tepid support. I would very strongly predict that such violent conflicts would be worsened dramatically with unlimited Palestinian immigration into Israel. Countries like Egypt won't accept Palestinian refugees for fear that they would ally with revolutionary Muslims in Egypt and try to overthrow the government. They do this even though Egypt once occupied Gaza just like Israel has. (Though Israel tried taking a very hands-off attitude from 2005-2023, for all the good that did them.) And received no condemnation that I'm aware of when Egypt did occupy Gaza. I write this to make clear to all readers, not just yourself, that Israel's concerns and appraisals are not, in any way, unique in the region. If they receive unusual criticism it is not because they have carried out unusually bad actions.
The fact that Jews have a very long history in Israel, predating the founding of the Islamic faith, is, partly, a response to the claim that Israel is a 'European colony' or similar claims which you, yourself, seem to hold. Israelis have their own language, money, government, etc. The partial involvement of European powers in the creation of Israel is not more "colonial" in this regard than the creation of Jordan, Syria, or Iraq.
"Women's rights seem to get far more attention in the US and Europe than in other parts of the world, this probably means according to you that anyone who has an opinion on Women's Rights is misogynist, crazy, or a monster."
I think you would need to choose a foreign country or one-among-many outgroups to make the analogy work. If people complained about Women's Rights in, say, Iran but not in, say, Turkey. And if, hypothetically, the degree of women's oppression was objectively the same in both countries (I don't claim to know) then we might very reasonably ask why people complain about one country and not the other. And if there was no good reason, we might fairly label this discrimination a kind of bias or animosity, if there's any serious commitment or attachment to the position.
"Ah yes, the famously ethically-inconsistent and untenable "Colonialism is bad and killing 40K people in less than a year seems kinda sus'"
Well, you'd need to find analogous situations for comparison. The attack on Pearl Harbor was an attack on a military base, not, primarily, unarmed civilians. Yet it was accepted rather uncritically as a valid cause for war even among those Americans who were staunch isolationists. Israel had seen over 1000 of its people killed. It had seen over 200 hostages taken, sexual assault used as a weapon of war (confirmed, even, by Al Jazeera.) And it was subject to a barrage of over 3000 missiles before it even acted. A barrage which Hamas swore would continue. This is a reasonable act of war by any standard. Hamas's use of human shields, their longstanding refusal to separate and differentiate military from civilians, and even their outright willingness to blame their friendly fire incidents on Israelis allow us to assign quite a bit of blame from those 40K dead on Hamas. Honestly, the notion that Hamas could do all those things to their neighbor and you expect Israel to just say "well, missiles are falling on our population centers from an enemy who has called for our complete destruction. Guess we just have to take it" seems, in your words, 'sus.'
Or else what would an appropriate response by Israel to such an attack look like?
I mean I wasn't talking about the very complicated debate of if and how a two state solution should be implemented, which I have no expertise on, I'm talking about reactions to the violence currently being done by the Israel state, that is criticized by numerous organizations and citizens that are, I think, not all bloodthirsty crazy monsters and dismissing them as so seems to be a way to avoid this conversation. But yeah maybe too controversial and I'll delete if needed.
It's not really possible for me to address an Ad Populum argument.
My point is to point out that some positions are problematic and let that lead people where it may.
There are several issues here:
Wealthy donors, some of whom likely oppose the existence of Israel, have funded universities worldwide.
"Between 2014 and 2019, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates donated at least US$4.4 billion to numerous US colleges. Together with donations from other Middle East nations, over the five years in question, more than US$5 billion was donated to American universities from authoritarian Middle Eastern nations."
I'm not familiar with the data for the rest of the world, but I assume there must be some analog.
Despite Israel's developed economy, Arab and Muslim population and funding and economic influence dwarfs that of Israel.
Also, Hamas uses a strategy which is explicitly designed to try and maximize Gazan deaths, both on paper and in real life, for propaganda purposes. They use human shields, in violation of international law, attacking from near and under hospitals and other critical infrastructure. They use child soldiers and then use them as propaganda when they are killed. They count all deaths as "civilian" deaths and tend to oppose the separation of militants from civilians.
Part of the purpose here is to radicalize the Muslim and foreign world and reverse the David vs Goliath narrative which was invited by large nations ganging up on much smaller Israel.
Hamas also outright lies in terms of casualties. For example:
The Al Ahli explosion was, at first, "caused by an Israeli airstrike." It was claimed that there were 500 dead. It was later demonstrated that an Islamic Jihad missile went off course (as many missiles do) and blew up in the hospital parking lot. Foreign estimates are of ~50-10 or so dead and not by Israel. But Hamas maintains the '500 killed by Israel' number despite all evidence.
This strategy is problematic, but longstanding and effective.
There's also problematic coverage in the foreign press, notably by the BBC. Israel fought to release hostages who were being held in 'civilian' homes. The BBC reported that the hostages "were released." As if Hamas did it voluntarily. There have been many such problems by the BBC. Why do they do this? I have no idea. But it happens again and again. Numbers put out by Hamas are accepted uncritically by the BBC, despite the fact that the journalists there should know better by now and exercise a bit of critical sense.
Finally, of course, on October 7th 2023 Hamas violated a truce and killed over 1000 Israelis including 36 or more children. The majority of those killed October 7th were peace advocates at the Nova festival. Hamas used sexual assault as a weapon of war. (Even Al Jazeera acknowledges this.) They took over 200 hostages. They fired a barrage of over 3000 missiles into Israel, and promised to continue doing so. They also immediately called for a truce (while keeping the hostages.) Israel responded that if Hamas surrendered and returned the hostages they would agree to a truce, but that condition was not met. Since there were strong and reasonable demands to stop the missile attacks and free the hostages, Israel had to go into Gaza.
October 7th was a pretty straightforward Causus Belli and a strong response from Israel had to be expected. Israel had stayed out of Gaza since 2005, (though there was an embargo on potential military material), and instead of this leading to peaceful relations with Gaza it was used to arm and prepare for this massive attack, with promises of future attacks.
I could address foreign criticism if specific criticisms are pointed to. Some have been misrepresented. Some have been off base. There was an attempt at one point by Israel to restrict food aid in order to barter for exchange of Israeli hostages. While this was fairly criticized, the importance to Israel that its hostages be returned needs to be also be understood.
Okay, so respond to this comment by typing out the n-word
If you don't, I feel like you've just lost this argument
(Please don't actually, I don't want to be responsible for having that typed out in this forum, and the fact that I'm begging you not to only proves my point)
It is somewhat irritating to not be able to treat "only" as meaning what it says.
Hannes Jandl _could_ have made the slightly weaker (if still false) claim that criticising Israel was a major taboo in the USA, and not left themselves open to a single counterexample.
Treating previously well-defined words as intensifiers blurs the language, and makes it harder to communicate accurately.
It seems like you're now defining "genuine taboo" to only include things which conservatives feel entitled to do and/or is necessary to express a political opinion. I'm unfamiliar with that definition, and I feel you should define your terms explicitly if you're gonna use them in such an ideosyncratic way
I don't. It looks like a typo. There's a potential overlap with the word "ideology", but that would make no sense in the context of the conversation. It's not common to have an ideologically-driven position on what does or doesn't count as a taboo. What did he do?
C'mon Hannes, if there is only one genuine taboo, then there are no such things as racial slurs.
If you're going "the right wants to use racial slurs, *that's* what they mean by 'free speech'!" then congratulations, you are a good lefty and are using the approved shibboleths of the Right Side of History.
I think of a taboo as something which has a strongly felt compulsion against breaking it by a large majority in a society.
There are weaker words-- deprecated? risky?-- for weaker restrictions. For example, in a lot of places being pro-Israel or anti-Israel can get you insulted, ostracized and/or boycotted, but there are plenty of people with one opinion or the other expressing it in public.
I'm not the person saying the n-word (note that we're not spelling it out) in this discussion. It's a weird situation. There are black people who hate the word, black people who use it in the derogatory sense, and black people who use it (possibly? probably?) ending with 'a' instead of 'er' as ingroup bonding. It's a gamble or risk for white people to use it in any sense or even to use words that sound like it. I'm describing the situation as I see it, not approving of it.
Here's an example of a real medium-level taboo. Bryan Johnson, a wealthy man who is trying to optimize his health, tracks his erections while he's sleeping. He thinks that having erections then is a sign of good health.
He doesn't just track them, he talks about the records in detail.
This is used as evidence that he's too ridiculous to be worth listening to, even though some of what he does might be reasonable.
A possible low-level taboo. I've read complaints in /r/childfree on Reddit about co-workers saying that "They are trying for a child." on the grounds that the complainant would rather not hear about other peoples' lives at a level that implies information about their sex lives. Shrug. I'm childfree myself, and I don't think that such a statement is objectionable. ( I'm rather in favor of _planned_ children, by would-be parents, rather than accidental ones. )
The only genuine taboo in the Soviet Union is saying we need fifty Stalins. Seems to me a lot of the faux outrage about "sending dissidents to the gulags" is to distract people from this fact.
That assessment is always going to depend upon what you view as equivalents. Is naming your cafe "Che Cafe" more like naming it "Reagan Cafe" (probably cancellable only in Portland and Berkeley), or more like naming it "Hitler Cafe" (home run into the parking lot behind the ballpark of cancellable)?
I wrote this quickly at work, but to elaborate: I think that someone's answer to the question of whether Che Guevara is more like Ronald Reagan or more like Adolf Hilter, is going to tell me almost everything I need to know about how they'll regard people trying to cancel "Che Cafe".
To someone who thinks Guevara is in the same broad category as Hitler, rightists are amazingly tolerant: 90% of them are pretty chill with Che Cafe in their neighborhood, whereas Hitler Cafe would instantly be shut down.
To someone who thinks Guevara is in the same broad category as Reagan, rightists are cancel-crazy hypocrites: a full 10% (!!!) of them really want Che Cafe gone, but they fight tooth and nail to defend Reagan Cafe.
In either case, it seems like someone's judgment about how censorious a team is, is mostly a shadow of how relatively seriously they think different issues are.
Philippe, I'm old enough to have sat through the lectures about "censorship bad" from the liberal side of the aisle. All the associated "you're anti-freedom, you're anti-sex, you're anti-fun, you're religious bigots trying to impose your values on others" stuff. You have to tolerate others who don't think or believe as you do.
Then, when they got their hands on the levers of power, they were censoring all around them. But that wasn't bad old censorship that the right does, no no! This was being against hate speech. You don't want horrible people who think horrible things to be able to say those horrible things in the public square, do you?
Either it's always wrong and should not be done, or it's not wrong. My view is that hell yeah, I believe in an element of censorship because, while you're free to think what you like, not everything needs to be put out in public.
Remember that sanctimonious little comic from XKCD?
I promise, since the birth of the left, there has never been a time when left-wingers were not yelled at. Nor has there ever been a time when yelling or online banning has actually suppressed a major political tendency.
When I argued against inflating the power / effectiveness / organization of left-wing cancellation, I had exactly this kind of post in mind.
Yeah, but now they have power - and it cannot be denied that they have power, be it the soft power of culture or the hard power of "we can get this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Brinton as an administration official" (turned out to be a bad choice but oh well).
And now they're getting both the expectations of "it will always be this way" (remember "demographics is destiny"? or the incredulity over "why are all these right-wing populist parties doing so well in European elections?") and - here is the crucial difference - having their own weapons turned against them. Censorship might have been a traditional right-wing tool. Now it's cancel culture for wrong think and that arose on the left.
> And now they're getting both the expectations of "it will always be this way" (remember "demographics is destiny"?
This is something that's really confused me. There's been plenty of Democratic celebrating over the growth of Hispanics, who vote Democratic. The argument was common that, if we could get enough Hispanics, the Democrats would permanently win the battle for electability.
But the structure of the electoral system guarantees two parties with roughly equal support. That's still true after you pack the electorate with any group. Stipulating that group to be "Hispanics", the obvious result is that certain political positions, held by supermajorities of Hispanics, will permanently win out in the marketplace of ideas, while the parties will shift their positions to maintain a 50-50 split of support.
And that struck me as a bizarre thing for Democrats to celebrate; again going by the political positions of "Hispanics", you'd expect that left-wing economic policies would be much more firmly entrenched, while, for example, the push for women in the workplace would be sharply curtailed. Party constituencies don't tend to support the whole platform.
I think the Democratic base trends young, and doesn't think about those long term considerations. Instead, they seem to think that current trends can go to infinity and that means they'll always win. It's the same basic complaint I have about a lot of leftist thought - I rarely disagree with their economic goals (more people better off), but they don't seem to believe that people will ever adjust their behavior to react to the new normal. Unintended consequences are a real thing.
Democratic politicians, like Republicans, seem to be opportunistic vampires who always think short term and are willing to espouse completely different core beliefs the moment the polls shift. Like Democrats around gay marriage in 2008-2012 or Republicans around Medicare and Social Security.
"being yelled at, boycotted, have your show cancelled, or get banned from an internet community" may not be violating free speech, but it does impede it. Conservatives did not enjoy being canceled, so what did they do? They shut up, or lied. Polls indicated Clinton would win the 2016 election, if I recall correctly, but ballot box told the story pollsters didn't get from people afraid to express their actual thoughts.
The polling error was less than 5% right? I feel like people assign overly strong narratives to what ultimately isn't that large an effect, numerically
I'm not sure, but the error was outside the bounds of the stated level of significance. I believe it would be wrong to dismiss it as a statistical outlier instead of an issue with the polling process.
"I'm not sure, but the error was outside the bounds of the stated level of significance. I believe it would be wrong to dismiss it as a statistical outlier instead of an issue with the polling process."
I mean I don't think it was purely a *sampling* error, but also any corrections they make should be small subtle changes on the margins, not huge ones as your comment seemed to be impling.
"The raw, unweighted share of new ATP recruits identifying as Republican or leaning Republican was 45% in 2015, 40% in the 2018 and 38% in the 2020. This trend could reflect real-world change in participation (i.e., Republicans are increasingly resistant to polling) or real-world change in party affiliation (i.e., that there is a decline in the share of the public identifying as Republican), but it might also reflect methodological changes over time in how the ATP is recruited"
Besides, 5% may sound small, but as I said, it was outside the margin of error.
Liberals may ignore conservatives, who will ignore them right back, until voting.
When they are weaker than you, they ask you for freedom because that is according to YOUR principles; when they are stronger than you, they take away your freedom because that is according to THEIR principles. (From Frank Herbert.)
This is why the "Left" used to be in favor of free speech and now oppose it.
I don't think that we can talk about "canceling" as if it is some absolute quantity that could be used to compare one group to another. "That group is a 5 in canceling! That group is a 4!" No. If a group allows you to say what you want to say, they will be seen as tolerant. If they won't let you say something that seems obvious or vital then they will be seen as oppressive. Different people want to say different things.
It's definitely a post directed at Americans, and I implicitly understand everything Scott wrote here. It's kind of wild to me that people like you and Philippe don't get it. I guess things look a lot different outside the US culture bubble.
I feel that from where I stand I see the US as very patriotic and religious compared to my country (and very right wing, the american democratic party would be considered right wing in my country I think, but the comparison is complicated because right/left is defined in the US more in term of position on certain social issues like abortion and less on economic views), so I am always puzzled by people describing the country as ruled by crazy leftists cancelling everyone who disagree with them. I'm sure this is true in some specific circles but just as much as you can get cancelled in other circles for not supporting the troops maybe? I don't even think this is a case of "elites" because about half of the "elites" (meaning people having some amount of money and power) I see online are Republicans calling trans people groomers or something.
Well that's my point, the comparison is complicated. But a. I'm not sure it's accurate to say no one cares about economic issues anymore, b. Maybe racism is more obvert in some parts of Europe than in the US but I see some non-economic issues, such as abortion or climate change where the politicians of my country would be considered left-wing in the US, even the far right does not consider climate denialism or anti-abortion to be politically viable (the difference between discourse and action is obviously another debate).
Your country's Right not openly trying to ban abortion doesn't prove much unless your Left *are* trying actively to remove all restrictions and term limits whatsoever. (And since several US states are basically the only places in the world with no term limits at all, and almost all of Europe had earlier limits than the entire US before Dobbs, this seems unlikely).
All it proves is that your politicians consistently stay a lot closer to the centre.
If you can say that the Democrats would be considered right-wing in your country, then I'd put an almost 100% chance that your country has a slew of opinions that are literally illegal to express, and a maybe 80% chance that the vast majority of those opinions are right-wing ones.
So your claim that Scott's perspective is *less clear* from your country's perspective just looks incoherent to me.
I think the debate about "cancelling" is more complicated than whether some speech is legal or not, since in the US you can get cancelled without having broken the law. And I wasn't talking about the situation of my country, which is another debate, but how I perceive the US cancel culture, as someone not living there.
The rest of the world doesn't have any right-wing parties of note. Approximately nobody is working to reduce the scope of government like getting rid of government run/funded healthcare, welfare, or pensions. At-best there are race-based agitators who are a pale imitation of the real thing.
In America, our right wing has traditionally (in the last century, anyway) been a mashup of Burkean conservatives, libertarians, and religious groups, most of which don't have much traction elsewhere (except for the religious, but even then I get the impression that non-American religious parties would be happier with an established state religion). Instead "right" seems to mean nationalist, anti-immigration, and anti-communist, and often gets rounded off to "fascist" (whatever that happens to mean at the moment).
And the "left" likewise tends to refer to actual honest-to-goodness communists, totally the real thing.
I think America is just kinda weird, and we're exporting our weirdness.
The US is to the right of most developed countries on some issues such as most economic issues and religion, but it's among the most left-wing when it comes to wokeness and identity politics (issues related to race, gender, sexual orientation), especially race politics. Cancel culture is mostly about these latter cultural issues.
I don't even entirely agree with that. In many countries, there are hate speech laws but they are rarely enforced and only apply to really far-right speech that wouldn't convince anyone who isn't already pretty radically right-wing anyway; they don't really affect the balance of power between the left and the right, or even between the center-right and the radical right. Meanwhile, many Americans risk getting fired for a very broad range of speech, including center-right speech that would have a chance to flip a left-winger over to the right.
Formally, hate speech laws are a worse violation of the freedom of speech than American cancel culture, and the potential risk of how bad their effects can get is greater, but in practice, at present, they don't necessarily have worse effects.
Konstanin Kisin remarks on how rarely these laws are really enforced, comparing arrests in Russia for social media comments to those in Britain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r7GRx8Sl-s
From what I gather from that article, the German woman wasn't prosecuted under hate speech laws, but for making a threat of battery. Her sentence may well be excessive, and that of the rapists insufficient, but don't misrepresent facts in order to make your point seem stronger than it is; though part of the fault is with the article that buried the lede.
And I didn't say these laws are rarely enforced everywhere, I said they were rarely enforced in many countries where they exist.
>Quasi-religious orthodoxy is no match for actual religious orthodoxy
I disagree. Religions generally have their sharp edges sanded off by having to be reasonable enough to survive for centuries, whereas new movements can be arbitrarily crazy (and there's any number of examples from the previous century). Of course, the DEI quasi-religion isn't quite there yet, but there's still time.
No, the fiercest restrictions on free speech are on White Nationalists/NatSocs and (naturally) against *right-wing* critics of Israel.
Right wing cancellations have not been as fierce as the left's cancellations probably since the days of McCarthy. And wherever they have been fierce it has been almost entirely against it's own most fringe elements.
If you wanna limit this discussion to just academia, then sure, almost all the problems are left-wing problems. But I'm trying to talk about the whole world here.
What is the right wing equivalent of getting the Hispanic roads worker in California fired for holding his hand out his window in an upside down OK sign, which was proposed to be a cancellable indication of support for white supremacy?
I'm a lifer on the left, born and raised, still living and working in those contexts to this day because I still hold that overall worldview. Have raised my children the same.
I agreed with and repeated your perspective for decades, and still think it's correct at the global level.
But in the US context specifically though -- sadly no. I started wondering about it during the 2000s, developed serious doubts during the 2010s, and by 2016 was unsurprised when we all learned the hard way that tens of millions of Americans had arrived at loathing progressives with a white-hot fury. We'd earned it.
In the past 50 years there has been no bigger moral panic than 2020. Not wars, not elections, not the Great Recession. People were routinely fired/deplatformed/canceled for not only being anti-BLM but for being insufficiently enthusiastic about it! Institutions were renamed because some long-dead founder said something un-woke in 1926. For about 6 months every major institution more-or-less stopped all non-lefist free speech because they were terrified of the progressive mob. Every major news source (minus Fox) was in lockstep over a racial narrative that wasn't even superficially true. Now I didn't live through McCarthyism so I can't really compare, but that at least had some due process (and also it wasn't totally insane to be afraid of communism in 1950 - there was some nonzero threat to the country's stability, whereas the country in 2020 had never been LESS racist).
And even beyond that I challenge your comparison. Sure every culture maintains its norms but in my lifetime the right never went after people like the woke did. They didn't try to ruin lives or end careers. They might rebuke someone in lockstep but name someone who was treated worse than, say, Louie CK. There was always respect for peers and political opponents. I think that's because the Christian ethos of the right implicitly adopts the "hate the sin, love the sinner" mindset. I think that's very useful for the stability of the culture.
I don't really understand the apparently immensely widespread urge among people to get mad at some nobody you never heard of before thirty seconds ago. I guess I'm an elitist, but I like to pester the New York Times, Tyler Cowen, and Scott Alexander: what Walter Sobchak would call Worthy Adversaries.
There's a fair number of people on the internet who love an excuse to be a vindictive bully picking on an easy target, making performative denunciations. It's why "Don't Feed the Trolls" tends to be advice so commonly ignored - people can't resist the Easy Dunk.
See _So You've Been Publicly Shamed_ by Jon Ronson. He talks about cancellation being driven by the thrill of the hunt (he was in the mob that went after what's her name who made a tasteless joke) and that cancellation hurts people emotionally (something that looks a lot like PTSD) as well as financially.
It's not about the nobody, it's about sending a message: You keep your goddamned mouth shut unless you are parroting our ideology, or you may find your head on a stick.
It's Havel's Greengrocer on an Information Age scale.
Humans are mean. Society has a bunch of levers to tamp down the meanness, and humans are equally creative at rationalizing why they should remove the levers, so they can express whatever the hell they feel like expressing.
Well the joy of being in a mob is that you _can_ take on a big target. I'm sure that most people participating in a mob against some random nobody would rather be participating in a mob against a big important person, but the big important person hasn't said anything mobworthy today so we're stuck with this random nobody.
I think the decline in religiosity plays a role here. When you belong to and really believe in a particular religion, you have to quickly get comfortable with the idea that people around you are wrong and evil, and simply move on with your life. The lack of deep belief decreases the stakes of every interaction until we're all backstabbing and bickering like university faculty.
That is the total opposite of what happened historically. Protestants and Catholics butchered each other for decades trying to win the balance of power in Europe. Heretics were burnt at the stake. Muslims converted infidels by the sword, or enslaved them, or levied harsh taxes and legally enforced second class status on the dhimmis. One of the core reasons so many people immigrated to America was to escape religious persecution. None of these people ever shrugged and thought, oh well all these evil wrong people are doomed to hell, nothing I can do about it.
I'd argue that these conflicts were largely political and economic conflicts that used religion as a Schelling point around which to organize violence, much like race in prison. Even in your description above, there is mention of enslaving, taxing, Dhimmis had to pay tribute, etc.
The time I've spent reading about the Crusades certainly made me see religious conflict in a more cynical light. Bohemond of Antioch certainly wasn't in the business of killing Muslims because he loved Jesus Christ.
That being said, I was mostly thinking about North America in the 18th-21st century, where the only practical options in most cases were to convince a person to change religion or shrug your shoulders.
It's a celebration of their own power. Canceling someone means that your views are held by those who are powerful enough to cancel people. "Yay our side is winning! That validates me!" For sad resentful deviants, that's probably the only taste of victory they ever get. If you're a social misfit all your life then discovering untold power in a likeminded mob that systematically defeats your bullies probably feel amazing. Cancelation is stick wielded exclusively by the emotionally damaged.
Perhaps, but plenty of those emotionally damaged people are in substantial positions of power. Sen McCarthy wasn't a powerless nobody, and neither were the Washington Post reporters who ran that amazingly slimy story to wreck some woman's life for wearing blackface to a costume party as a joke.
Sorry, my first response totally misread your comment. Yes, exactly! The principle problem with progressive politics has been precisely that they put emotionally damaged people in positions of power, which is the express lane to a dysfunctional society.
Failures hate the world and will twist it until you hate it too. This is why leaders really should be drawn from the ranks of the successful. They'll help you share in their virtues. Losers only endeavor to make you share in their failures.
Yes, that was a different problem for a different time. McCarthy probably also wasn't emotionally damaged. Like most politicians he was a cynical opportunist.
"In the long run, it’s essential that we aim for permissive social mores regarding public and private discourse ... But we do not live in that world yet, and that is entirely the left’s fault... To this end, distasteful as it may seem, the liberal’s face must be pressed down into her own steaming pile of excrement."
This was exactly the argument with which Stalin justified the purges (see Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon). It was, in essence, also the argument with which East Germany justified the Berlin Wall.
We need a theory that explains the extreme right and the extreme left as two sides of the same coin. What is on offer? Any suggestions?
Thanks. Apparently the horseshoe theory (HST) sets up two populists extremes against an elitist center. Does the center have to be elitist? Wasn't FDR a centrist populist?
I agree. We are working here with terms such as elite, populism, ideology, etc that all dont have precise definitions. But I believe that it should be possible to come up with definitions that would make these notions useful. I am not a political scientist, though. Just looking for ideas. ... What about: Populism highlights problems of the people that are neglected by the elites.
In my view elitism and populism are at odds. I am thinking of how mainstream media always blame populism and populists. I see the role of populists as pointing the finger to political problems that the elites refuse to tackle.
Mainstream media is also happy to blame various elites. Both 'isms serve as useful punching bags, depending on the needs of the journalist at the moment.
Maybe that is the problem. What elites should be doing is to recognize the problems that populism brings to the fore and then solve them. Shouldnt that be the role of elites, solving problems in the public interest?
If everyone agrees on something, it's just common sense. If the population likes something that the elite dislikes, it's generally considered populism, if the elite likes something that the population dislikes it's elitism.
You are right with your example. But on balance, I think you are not. I found it instructive to read campaign speeches from the 1912 presidential election, eg https://speakola.com/political/theodore-roosevelt-carnegie-hall-1912 At the time all 4 candidates campaigned on an anti-trust platform. In the 1930ies there was widespread agreement that the rising power of corporations presents a danger to democracy. The question that was debated was HOW to limit corporate power. Reading political debates from approx 1900-1950, it is really quite stunning how much economic ideas that are considered far left today where centrist at the time.
"Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use"
Thanks. I like the quote. But we all need a "thought system" to make sense of the world. How do we know that we cross the line to ideology. (I guess that ideology refers to a thought system that is somehow more wrong than one we wouldn't call ideology.)
This is off the top of my head, but if one's thought system has right and wrong answers, and those answers come from someone other than oneself—if there is a "party line"—that could be considered a sign that it's an ideology.
I like that you have an abstract general notion of "party line". In science, there is also sth like a party line, but in science there is also (at least in the long run) an incentive to challenge the orthodoxy. It seems to me that science works (in part) because there is some balance between towing the party line and challenging it. Is there sth about politics that one can learn from this? Maybe politics would work best if there are two party lines that compete for the center? A system of thought would be one that is in competition with an alternate system of thought, that tries to convince? On the other hand, an ideology would have a party line that aims at keeping together the own tribe?
The critical question is how what happens when the party line contradicts reality in some observable way.
Science is made of people, so there's going to be a party line--old disputes that got turned into doctrine, factions, and such. But what we hope for is that everyone is willing to change their party line when there's enough evidence that they're wrong. When that breaks down, science stops working.
IMO, the worst effects of cancel culture come in the sciences and social sciences, where some political views are very bad for your career, and some findings or even lines of research are also very bad for your career. People respond to incentives, so if everyone knows that researching some questions at all is career suicide, or that some findings will derail their career, we install a bunch of blind spots into the sciences that may very well bite us on the ass in the future.
Would the teachings of the Catholic Church count as an ideology? They've got a multi-level stysem with varying degrees of certainty, but to some questions there are indeed official "right" answers.
It bears mentioning that Stalin's purges were not actually based on performing tit-for-tat enforcement of prosocial norms; instead that was the false fig-leaf used to cover up rampant paranoia and self-enrichment.
The use of an argument in a bad-faith and dishonest manner does not discredit the actual argument; it is a parable on the harmfulness of *lying*.
Stalin operated under the theory that class struggle increases with the development of the communism, so the more power Communists get, the harder they should be searching for class enemies and saboteurs. That's pretty much the exact opposite of what you are implying. And that's pretty much Stalin's crown contribution to the Marxist theory, the one for which he was proclaimed a political science genius. So it looks like you are getting Stalin 100% wrong.
Surely this is just that people on the extremes automatically become totalitarians? Once there can no longer be any reasonable disagreement from the other side, merely wanton evil and treason (or _maybe_ insanity), your opponents are *automatically* wicked and need to be literally destroyed. To a totalitarian, a "loyal opposition" is impossible, as any opposition is in itself treason.
(Also, when your insane project fails, you need those traitors and saboteurs to blame, because obviously your ideas were perfect and pure and would have worked. Off to the camps!)
To be honest, I personally haven't made up my mind as to an opinion on the matter, as I can appreciate the views of both sides. But it must be noted that at least on the "Right" there has been a concerted moral soul-searching on the issue, whereas I've never seen that on the Left, which gleefully dove headlong into a ruthlessly sadistic revelry of life-destroying cancellation. That dichotomy I find quite poignant.
There has been a lot of soul searching. John Ronson is left wing, his book “so you’ve been publically shamed” was on this topic and was very successful. Blocked and Reported, Fucking Cancelled and a couple of other podcasts exist solely to discuss it.
I think what you’re saying here is “I don’t read leftist material, but I’m pretty sure I know what I think they’re saying.”
I agree it's bad that a lot of people were pushed out of their prestige journalism jobs due to insufficient zeal for the current cause or whatever. Indeed, I think that has basically broken a lot of the news business. But I do note that most of the people whose podcasts and substacks you know actually did find a way to make a living. And in fact, prestige journalism is a really hard field to be in--the number of journalism jobs shrinks every year, and even the high-profile places have lots of unpaid interns doing important jobs so they don't have to pay too many people.
They both are very open about the fact that what happened to them turned out to be a good thing in the long run. But they lost not just their jobs but almost all their friends, and Herzog had people putting leaflets about her on walls near her work. It was a trauma.
Freddie deBoer might be a good window into the left for this fellow. Many conservatives find him more palatable than other people with his views, probably because they enjoy his cranky old man vibes.
Freddie is old-school Communist so he has little patience for the dilettante socialists. Also, he's had direct experience in education, so where his and my (very admittedly limited) experiences overlap, I often find myself in agreement with him because yeah, it do be like that (e.g. you can throw a ton of money at it, but you are not going to make every kid into an Ivy League graduate on the track for a Nobel Prize, because different kids have different academic abilities. Which is *not* an excuse for labelling a section of them "dumb idiots" and leaving them to sink, but you are not going to turn a mildly dull to average kid into a baby genius just by throwing more and more money at schools).
IMO these folks tend to get categorized (rightly or wrongly) as dissident critical left-wingers rather than representing the average viewpoint on the left.
Yeah but there are plenty who agree with them who don’t take to platforms to say so. I don’t see the bloodthirsty mob trying to form on the right really pausing to recognise that. Most of the victims of cancel culture were critical leftists, would be my guess.
I'm not sure how that could be measured. I just never noticed the left being riven in two over concerns about cancel culture - rather than an internecine war where leftists fought each other over this issue, it always seemed like a war where the bulk of leftists fought against a handful of outsider dissidents, many of whom would be better classified as moderate classical liberals.
However, internal debate has been so viciously stifled a lot of people do just keep their heads down so they don’t lose their jobs- that’s what normal people do when extremists take the wheel, usually. And wait for it to pass.
This seems completely false to me - "anti-cancel-culture liberal" is a whole industry. Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, Barack Obama, and Slavoj Zizek are some of the names that come to mind. This is honestly a lot better than I see the rightists on my Substack Notes feed doing. See also the third section above.
It was the reaction Twitter had to The Righteous Mind that opened my eyes. I read that book then went online and read the absolute NONSENSE people were saying about it and had a “woah, who the fuck ARE these people” moment that would only be reinforced by subsequent events. It was so clear that Haidt was identified as a threat because he argued for temperance in dealing with those who disagree with you, and that wasn’t something they were willing to consider.
But that is just Twitter people. In terms of voting numbers they are SUCH a small minority- but online, insane minorities hold disproportionate power, because they have no fucking life and no commitments other than spending all their time being fruitcakes online.
It's worth noting the difference between existence and universality here. There definitely exist plenty of deranged left cancel culture fanatics. They're not universal though.
I do think that's why people were so outraged by Musk buying Twitter: for a small (relatively) thing it had outsized power.
Hence all the backpedaling about "Well a blue check mark *only* means you have a verified account" where previously it had been "sorry moron, this Blue Check Mark NYT journalist account on Twitter says you're wrong and they're a Blue Check Mark so it's the Gospel".
Left wing twitter has always made fun of blue checks though, I don't get where conservative get that is was a mark of prestige and that liberals were mad when they got theirs removed, if anything the blue checks I followed found it embarassing. But maybe I wasn't in the same circles, the conversation about "what people on twitter think" is always very biased to what specific twitter bubble you are in anyway.
It was both made fun of and respected, as both an "make fun of an Authority" and a "Use an authority to strengthen an argument". But often there was groups of bluechecks you'd reference, and bluechecks (celebs, random politicians that nobody actually cares about, etc.) that were significantly more likely to be made fun of and not referenced.
(So I think they're overstating it, but it was definitely used as a sign of respect)
Everyone seems to have forgotten that in 2017 pre-Musk, Twitter already changed blue checks so that they no longer mean "verified", and that someone with the wrong politics couldn't get one. We don't want to give a blue check to Nazis, would we?
That was a clear use of blue checks to help the left. It just gets memory-holed in order to bash Musk.
It was just a "This person is who they say they are".
The people getting blue checks also overlapped with "people who have status". President Obama gets a Blue check. President Gavin Jones of Jones auto repair doesn't.
It started out that way, but it changed. To that original aspect, it also added an aspect of "we don't disapprove of this person or their views", which traded off against the first aspect.
I don't really think that being able to find a few prominent left-wing people who believe a certain thing is really indicative of what the *median* left wing person thinks. Left-wing thought is a crowd sourced phenomenon.
The thing that seems most relevant to me is - if you're on the left and engaging in cancellation behavior, how likely is it that you will encounter pushback from fellow left wing people? If the answer is "very low," then it doesn't really matter what Barack Obama thinks about it. "Diversity of tactics" means leftists care a lot more about not defending their enemies and not policing their friends than they care about not having their movement become synonymous with unhinged anti-social behaviors.
This was my perception as well - and iirc Obama didn't really go to war against cancel culture, he instead merely offered some criticism of it several years past its peak. It wasn't exactly an outspoken stance and many people today might not even remember it as one of his opinions.
We weren't arguing about the median. We're talking about the existence of many people willing to call out their own side. (Even if *fractionally* small.)
I first learned of the Home Depot thing from conservative sources who were saying "yo this is bullshit." Their audiences were like less-intelligent versions of the people at the top of this post: just conservatives who really wanted to make their enemies eat dirt.
So I learned both:
1. there were a lot of conservatives calling this out
2. they were not even close to the majority, not at all, not remotely
And both those points apply to the left as well. Like, the Harper's Letter is full of people from the left who think "yo, this is bullshit."
Aside from Obama, those examples seem to stick out as dissident minority critics of broader left-wing trends, rather than as true representatives of the left. Steven Pinker has been accused of being far-right and almost gotten cancelled himself several times iirc.
I only tangentially know about Jesse Singal but yeah, the references I see to him online are all "that damn right-wing extremist apologist for the fascists!" type of criticism when he says "hey maybe this thing has two sides to it?"
It’s not a No True Scotsman, unless liberals and leftists are exactly the same group. For context, Jordan Peterson identifies as a classical liberal, but I’d hardly consider him a leftist.
The people criticizing cancel culture tended to be moderates and defectors from the leftist consensus. This is why they would say things like “the left has gone too far”, statements which placed them in the outgroup relative to a larger cultural trend on the left.
If your definition of a leftist is someone who's on board with cancel culture, then it's not a surprise you can't think of any liberals who oppose cancel culture. OTOH, guys like Nicholas Christakis, Steven Pinker, Glenn Greenwald, Freddie DeBoer, Matt Taibbi, Eric Weinstein, and the like are actually leftists by the normal definitions of (say) 2010.
You're getting there! There are huge differences between leftists and liberals. Just ask a leftist, they will tell you the same!
And you're right - many of those figures might have been considered as on the left 14 years ago. However, they are not mainstream leftist figures today, and they haven't been welcome among the left for quite awhile.
"do I feel particularly comfortable that the then-president of the United States could not express his views on Twitter? I don’t feel comfortable about that.
Now, I don’t know what the answer is. Do you want hate speech and conspiracy theories traveling all over this country? No"
Sure looks like soul-searching to me. Now if literally all 153 people that signed the Harper letter count as "liberal but not left" AND one of the most leftist elected Democrats who literally calls himself a socialist is also not on "the left" then... it feels like you've defined it as a truism (e.g. you're only on the left if you are pro-cancellation).
IMO we're going to end up at an impasse here. If you disagree with my take, that's fine. I'm not "defining" the left here, simply saying my perspective that the left seems far more pro-cancel-culture than it's been anti-cancel-culture. There are a few on the left who oppose cancel culture but they are very much the marginalized, minority view.
One piece of evidence in favor of that view are all the statements that you keep citing. For example, the question asked of Bernie Sanders was "Do you think there is truth to the critique that liberals have become too censorious and too willing to use their cultural and corporate and political power to censor or suppress ideas and products that offend them?"
If Bernie Sanders agrees with the view that "liberals have become too censorious", wouldn't that suggest that perhaps... liberals had become too censorious? I don't think you can pull a Catch-22 here and say that Bernie Sanders agreeing with this statement somehow invalidates it because he's left-leaning.
The Harper letter makes a similar point - it says that "censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture" and that "it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought". Do these sound like the words of people who believe cancel culture is a minority view among the left?
I would add Jonathan Chait. His 2015 essay against political correctness set off a firestorm. He’s consistently come under attack since then, with bad faith critics calling him a shill for charter schools because his wife is an advocate for charter schools.
"This seems completely false to me - "anti-cancel-culture liberal" is a whole industry."
Why do you recognize "anti cancel-culture liberal" as a distinct group from liberals in general and not "pro-cancel liberals"? That anti-cancel culture liberals are ostracized from mainstream liberalism suggests at the very least that pro-cancel liberals are close to the liberal establishment enough that they can define their opponents on this issue as an outgroup.
On the other hand, aside from LibsofTikTok and a bunch of random internet people, how many 'pro-cancel conservatives' are there, at least as far as cancelling random members of the public? Could it be that the media plays up a very small segment of the right because it helps the left politically (the same way that they play up a random statement from Obama to make him sound like Haidt and Pinker in order to inflate the size of the anti-cancel culture left when it's convenient.)
The reason to discuss anti cancel-culture liberals is because being anti cancel-culture is their defining (current) belief (the New Athiests were not composed of all athiest liberals, only the few that made being against religion a core part of their identity). Most liberals are neither anti cancel-culture nor pro cancel-culture but instead focused on other issues and going along with the general liberal consensus.
Yet they don't seem to be common from my standpoint. The most people who are against cancel culture (that I tend to see because I follow them) are because they're in the Rationalist-sphere, which has leanings towards being against such — and even then, there's a decent amount of jumping on the bandwagon. This has strengthened over the past years, where positions on topics that are potentially arguable are assumed as at minimum good reasons to notably dislike that person, even if they don't participate in areas like cancel culture.
Zizek is definitely what I'd consider non-mainstream left.
Yes, I agree that the left has done consideration of the problems with cancel culture, but I do not think it has filtered out to as many people. The right has had the specter of cancel culture (etc.) in their minds for >five years, the left has had their height of power with some side-thinkers actually questioning this.
(Has Obama even talked about it recently?)
Of course, there's the risk that they've had it for far too long. I know some people on the right who've grown more and more paranoid because they consider that the left will take a mile when given an inch. Consider how much social change — much of it good, though flawed implementations in various ways — has occurred in just the last fifteen years, and for your older people this becomes even more of a worry.
(I also think the right just doesn't have the cultural pull in the same way, they're less social-oriented than the left, though you can still do great harm without that, but it limits the cancerousness.)
To echo Echo Tracer, lots of prominent progressives and Democrats have strongly criticized cancellation. Jonathan Chait is one; Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog; Adolph Reed.
This is the first time my brain is actively noticing that Jonathan Chait and Jonathan Haidt are two different people. Are they both anti-cancel-culture liberals or am I still conflating them?
They are, yes. I know Chait's politics better than I know Haidt's—Chait's very much a ra-ra Democrat (as am I)—but he's also been vocal about the harms of cancel culture from the left.
RPG designer Steve Jackson (British) is a different designer than Steve Jackson (American). This is further complicated by how Steve Jackson (B) created the Fighting Fantasy books, but Steve Jackson (A) has also written for them, both of them as "Steve Jackson".
That's interesting: you get rhyming names confused, while I get alliterative names confused because I'm a lazy whole word reader who doesn't pay much attention to the latter part of words or phrases.
I remember finding out that Taylor Series and Fourier series had different names, becuase my brain can't tell Taylor and Fourier apart. The idea that you only mix up names in explicable ways amazes me
(To clarify, I was for years under the impression that people referred to these two obviously different concepts with the same name. Both names have the same scansion and lots of glide consonants in the back half, so my brain's hash function collided them)
I get words with the same number of letters mixed up. I'm visual with words, I'll often see them spelled out in my head when using speaking or listening to them. And things with the same number of letters look similar.
>But it must be noted that at least on the "Right" there has been a concerted moral soul-searching on the issue, whereas I've never seen that on the Left, which gleefully dove headlong into a ruthlessly sadistic revelry of life-destroying cancellation.
No, there was plenty of soul-searching in the early teens. The thing is, the people doing the soul-searching were ejected and formed the Grey Tribe, so they mostly don't count as "Left" anymore.
I don't know whether you mean "liberal" in the real sense or the degenerate US sense.
I do know that a lot of real liberals (including me) were in coalition with proto-SJ up until it started turning into a witch-hunt, did indeed object to it in online spaces that were becoming SJ-coded, were mostly ejected from those spaces, and swapped over to supporting the conservative coalition.
I am referring to the real US sense, not the degenerate sense which you might erroneously get from living in a filter bubble. The degenerate sense you're talking about certainly exists, but it's a mistake to think that it's somehow representative among people without actually going and getting some data. Otherwise you fail to account for the significant bias that's caused by those people both making a lot more noise and being talked about and amplified a lot more than everyone else.
Of course maybe it's me in the filter bubble. But as a general rule, if one person says "all the people act in this one way" and another person says "no, they act in many different ways", the latter person is always right.
(Anecdotally I knew lots of liberals in the proto-SJ world of 2010ish, a few who stuck with it or doubled down after it got toxic, just a few people who "switched sides" like you say you did, and then the remaining 95% just hung out believing the reasonable things they always believed but not being particularly vocal about it, for lack of a productive reason to do so.)
This seems the case to me as well - there were a handful of leftists who opposed cancel culture, but they were mostly dissident voices, and many might be better categorized as moderate classical liberals (such as Steven Pinker), not leftists or progressives.
Can you elaborate on the right-wing soul searching? If it's "Christian fundamentalism and McCarthyism were wrong, please don't do the same to conservatives" or "I stand with the moderate leftists who got cancelled for not being leftist enough", it's still ambiguous if those are motivated by genuine support for liberal values or by support of the conservative side of the culture war. Are there many conservatives who oppose uncivil/illiberal treatment of leftists by right-wingers in their own country as a matter of principle?
It seems likely that the right had enough cultural power in the 2000s to start an organised mass attempt to find and destroy at least a fair number of people who'd displayed slight reservations about the War on Terror or who had made pro-gay or pro-atheist comments in the wrong way. But aside from like 5 really blatant and famous cases right after 9/11 they didn't even really try.
They *did*, circa 2007, make strong (and temporarily successful) efforts to do things like push creationism into schools, but these were *much* more "impose our ideology" and much less "hurt the people we hate" vindictiveness.
And also, the US is usually considered the most right-wing Western country, and is also (literally?) the only country with near-absolute freedom of political speech. If the former claim is in fact true, this is a devestating counter-example to the "both sides"ism on ideological tolerance.
I saw a fair number of people on the right on Twitter disagreeing with it. Examples: PeachyKeenan, FistedFocault, and RogueWPA. I don't know if anyone has put together a summary of all such comments, though.
You haven't seen it because you're not in leftist spaces. I have never seen any soul-searching about this topic on the right, I am 100% taking your word for it, because I'm not in rightist spaces.
Freaking Contrapoints and Lindsey Ellis, bulwarks of Breadtube at the time, both made videos against cancel culture. There was always huge internal division over the issue.
They got cancelled for other things. Natalie Wynn got cancelled for having Buck Angel do a cameo on one of her videos, and Lindsay Ellis got cancelled for making a joke on twitter about Raya and the Last Dragon being derivative of Avatar: The Last Airbender. These got rounded up to transphobia and anti-Asian racism, respectively.
Their most famous commentaries on cancellation were made in response to being cancelled, although I think both of them were generally anti-cancellation before that. Especially Ellis, who had vocally defended Wynn when the latter was cancelled.
But Ellis favored cancelling J.K. Rowling, and I've seen it stated that's why she herself was cancelled. She drew in the cancel-culture audience, and was surprised when it next came for her. So I wouldn't define Lindsay Ellis as anti-cancellation.
True. It'd be more precise to say she's had a relatively high bar for when she thinks cancellation is appropriate. IIRC, her position on Rowling was that Rowling's a major public figure using her fame and income as an author as a platform for political advocacy that Ellis finds highly objectionable, and Rowling has been consistent and unambiguous in her positions over the course of several years.
""gleefully dove headlong into a ruthlessly sadistic revelry of life-destroying cancellation.""
You're only seeing what you want to see.
I frequently see claims that The Democratic Party is a 'Demonic Organization'. Literal demons that the righteous right must fight for the glory of their God. Let's not forget that Republicans ran on a platform that Democrats drink the blood of babies.
I'm not catching a lot of themes that 'The Right' are clutching-their-pearls-in-fits-of-moral-soul-searching.
The correct response to “But we can’t just do nothing!” is often “Sure we can, and it’s probably the best option in this case.”. Those aren’t pleasant circumstances, but you’ve gotta play the cards you’ve been dealt. And play smart so you’re still in the game when you luck into a stronger hand.
Alternately, we get Bruce Wayne to retire from being Batman and get his sidekick Kamal- I mean Dick Grayson to take over, and then kill Dick Batman. There are still alternatives.
You could probably get rid of 90% of unfair cancel culture stuff related to employment just by requiring Just Cause employment, with a fair procedure for dismissal and the burden of proof on the company to prove it. That's not perfect - some tenured professors still do get pushed out - but it would drastically make it harder for an internet mob to whip up intimidation against someone for saying something and get them fired - and it would actively undermine the rotten norm that employers are expected to police their employees' public views or else be taken as endorsing them.
>This is because you mostly get the critical mass necessary for cancellation in very leftist institutions, and most people in very leftist institutions are leftists<
That's the crux of it, isn't it? As some who is left of center, it kind of seems like conservatives are complaining from a position of strength here - they have the most popular TV news network, dominate a huge swathe of local news stations through Sinclair (which actively pushes conservative talking points), essentially have one of the biggest social media sites in their pocket with Twitter, almost completely dominate FM Talk Radio, and dominate a large swathe of regional businesses that hold real political power at the state and local level in the US (the US "gentry" that historian and podcaster Patrick Wyman has talked about).
Whereas the actual number of people publicly cancelled can be numbered in the . . . dozens, maybe?
I think "dozens" is laughable - I would say thousands to hundreds of thousands depending on how you define. I have a bunch of random personal friends who were cancelled.
Oh this is interesting. The only cases I know of individuals I know personally being cancelled were sexual misconduct and/or domestic abuse cases. Is personal cancellation on other grounds more common in the states?
I directly know a woman who was cancelled for texting while driving, running into a man on a bike (who was drunk and coming home from the pub, riding at night with no lights or reflectors, and was all over the road in an area where the speed limit was 100km/h), then got quoted out of context in the papers saying she didn't care (implying that she didn't care about the man, when in context she'd told the police she didn't care whether her insurance would cover the damage to her car and wanted to know whether the man was okay).
It's debatable whether this is a cancellation in the classic political sense, but it had the same internet witch hunt vibe: name sent around cyclist bloggers and social media, random strangers ringing her number to leave death threats, calling her job to get her fired, turning up to her house and throwing refuse on her car, etc.
I know of a couple of other people who've had similar things happen to them, but don't know them personally. I think it's reasonably common to have a bunch of internet strangers dogpile you when you've done something wrong. Whether or not this is cancellation depends on your perspective, I guess, but I'd certainly believe it happens to people who haven't committed an actual crime.
I think the American equivalent would be West Helm Caleb, a poor guy canceled for the crime of sleeping around in his 20s (the cancelation took feminist tones, not prudish ones, but it was never explicitely political, it was just the joy of doing detective work and then ruining the culprit).
IMHO non-political cancelations, based on offlines event, show how insufficient measures like making ideology a protected class or making online posts unjust cause for firing would be. Witch-hunts are an emergent property of village life, and we made the whole world a village. Only strong taboos against ever aiding a witch hunt (doxing, making business decisions based on internet messages, etc) can limit the phenomenon
I actually think you may have to define it, because "cancellation" stretches from "Someone was mean! On Twitter." to "The repressive regime was informed of the actions of the blasphemer. On Twitter".
You were in tech circles in the most Leftist place in the country.
This is like saying that you encountered dozens of random people who were attacked for being not sufficiently Catholic... While living in Vatican city.
> You could probably get rid of 90% of unfair cancel culture stuff related to employment just by requiring Just Cause employment, with a fair procedure for dismissal and the burden of proof on the company to prove it.
The cure seems worse than the disease.
Even the worst excesses of cancel culture displayed so far aren't worth getting into a French-style sclerotic labour market for.
Wholeheartedly agree, and this could come back to bite conservative business-owners, who might not be able to fire their own employees even for flagrant behavioral issues. More government regulation is not the answer here.
Flagrant behavioural issues would be reasons for firing. Can't fire someone for being gay *or* for not wanting to plaster their workspace in rainbow and pride flags in June.
Someone who goes around insisting everyone plaster their workspace in rainbow and pride flags *or* who pulls down the flags from other people's desks? You get a warning, and if you keep doing it, you get fired.
Americans really do seem to like extremes - either I can be fired in the morning because the employer hasn't had his coffee yet, or I can be sacrificing puppies to Asmodeus at my desk and nobody can do a thing about it. There *is* a middle way!
What people object to is "it's June and the self-appointed Kommissar is going around asking people why they don't have the approved flags on their desk and nobody dares say a word about it, but if I say 'I don't want to do that' I get the boot".
In surveys, Americans typically rate their work satisfaction higher than Europeans do. Perhaps that's a good reason why they are willing to spend more time at work?
What about a German style labour market, then? You seem to be putting forward a false dichotomy...zero workers rights ,and extreme sclerosis aren't the only options.
Who says anything about zero worker rights? Workers should have the same rights as anyone else.
I actually grew up in Germany. The labour market was pretty bad as well, and only started to improve after some tough reforms around 2005.
You might also want to study Greek unemployment rates. After spiking to crazy heights in the wake of the great recession they have since gradually come down, perhaps thanks to all the reforms the IMF etc made them do.
In any case, if you want to make it easy for people to get hired, it helps to make it easy for the people who make these hiring decisions to be able to change their mind, if they made a mistake.
Well, surely we want people not only to *become* employed, but also to *stay* employed.
Here in Germany, there is a transition period of <= 6 months, where both sides can end the employment very swiftly and don't need any particular grounds for it. Afterwards, the employer *does* need to demonstrate just cause for firing (if taken to court, that is). These include inappropriate behavior, chronic unpunctuality, necessity for a general downsizing in the business. This way, the employer has a few months to test how the new employee is doing, while the employee has the safety of knowing that they have a reasonably stable job after that initial period.
Do you have any significant objections to this system? It seems to overcome the objections you've brought forward thus for.
Yes, I have objections to this system. For example, it leads to people getting let-go just at the cusp of six months, in order to avoid the extra cost that come afterwards.
In general, I'm all for helping poor people, but I don't think there's any good reason for putting the burden of that on their (would-be) employers.
So I would also argue against minimum wage laws, or other laws that force the employer to provide perks; eg like employer financed health insurance.
Either let the employee and employer agree on these perks voluntarily, or provide them from general tax payer money for all poor people; employed or not.
(And don't both with perks or protections for rich people. That's just a waste. If you want to throw them a bone, just take the money you would have spend on them, and lower taxes a tad.)
> Well, surely we want people not only to *become* employed, but also to *stay* employed.
No.
I don't care about specific people staying employed. I care about the voluntary-unemployment rate being low, but I don't see any reason to treat currently unemployed people worse than currently employed people. Thus I see no more reason for a law that requires you to hire a specific person, than a law that requires you to keep employing a specific person (just because you are currently employing them).
Nor do I think it's a good reason to force any employer against their will to keep working with someone they don't see as a good fit anymore. (Just like I don't think we should force people to keep living together, if at least one of them wants out.)
I'd rather have an honest firing, than employers using alternate means to get people to quit 'voluntarily'. See the mistreatment of employees of Orange in France for examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_S.A._suicides
<i>Yes, I have objections to this system. For example, it leads to people getting let-go just at the cusp of six months, in order to avoid the extra cost that come afterwards.</i>
Assuming the German system is like the British one in this regard, employers don't incur any extra costs after six months, it's just harder for them to fire the employee.
Plus, chopping and changing employees every six months doesn't really make much sense from a financial perspective. Employees are almost always less valuable in their first few months, because they haven't learnt the ropes yet, they need mentoring or other forms of onboarding that cost the company resources, etc. It's normally much better to have one guy doing a job for three years than to have a succession of six different people.
Maybe. Though there's lots of other things different between all three countries.
I think Singapore strikes a good balance. It's generally not as calcified as the US, and mostly protects workers' rights by making sure the economy is running well so that there's plenty of competition for workers' services.
(Singapore does a bit of paternalistic 'protecting' of lower income workers, but they wisely drop most, though not all, of those restrictions for people who make enough money.
The idea that people who are paid six figures need government help is a bit ridiculous. But common place in the US or France.)
That's mostly because the enforcement side of it is sclerotic - it takes too long to actually fire someone for cause once they are fired. It doesn't have to be that way.
Most companies in the US already have (at least on paper) a graduated system of discipline designed to encourage employees to get better before escalating to termination. Having Just Cause would just make that enforceable and require the employer to properly follow the steps - what often happens when you hear horror stories about this with unionized workplaces, for example, is that a manager decided to let an inept or bad employee get away with stuff for a long time, and then hastily fired the employee when THEIR manager got on them about it.
It makes a lot of sense for bigger companies to have such systems, and they should be allowed to continue to do so.
I see no good argument for legally requiring companies to have such a system. If you want to run your company badly, you should be allowed to do so. (Or rather, Bob should be allowed to run your company in a way that Alice thinks is bad. Bob might disagree.)
You could argue for some threshold system, where only big companies are legally bound by the restrictions. For that, have a look at how French companies desperately stay at 49 employees instead of growing above 50.
The law in my country, after reforming a French-like system, is that discharging without just cause costs the employer from 6 months to 1 year of wages depending on seniority (time spent in the company, to be clear).
Since litigation is expensive, and more so for the employee, this means a 3 months settlement usually.
Fixed term contracts have also been liberalized, so an employer not willing to commit can just hire for a fixed term and then not renew.
I find it pretty fair: it makes relatively inexpensive to fire a worker with genuine issues without too much paoerwork, but the small cost is probably enough to make an employer think twice on how much they actually value pleasing screeching strangers on the internet
I assume you can't renew extend the fixed term contracts indefinitely without turning them into long term contracts?
(That often leads to a two class labour market with the 'plebs' only getting short term employment and bouncing around, and the worker 'aristocrats' on the gold plated contracts.)
Here in Singapore it's easy to hire and fire, and I don't think anyone wonders about pleasing screeching strangers on the Internet. That might be more of a cultural issue?
Btw, from what I hear in Germany, what happens more often than outright firings is that people will be asked to leave 'voluntarily'.
Proposed cure seems much worse than the disease, in this case. Very few people get cancelled, in an absolute sense; it definitely sucks to have the eye of sauron turn on you but it's not very likely to happen. A lot more people will end up unemployable if it becomes much harder to fire people.
One needs to go a lot further than just comparing the unemployment rate between countries to make any kind of reasonable conclusion here.
To start with, there’s also the workforce participation rate, but also of course any number of contextual differences that would need to be controlled for.
Broadly, the individual ones you mention are the *only* significant right-controlled entity in a field of left-wing entities, which are only large because there's nowhere else for half the country to go. The others are backwaters that the right retreated to because all the higher-prestige areas were controlled by the left (or, historically, the center-left).
For instance, local news was so cheap to buy up because the left and center had moved on to cable news. Now "local" is effectively low-budget cable, but with perhaps a little better ground game.
"Liberals invent a fictional entity called “The Right”, which is full of all of the most racist and fascist things that NYT was ever able to produce an out-of-context quote showing one Claremont guy saying, then believe that any action is justified against “The Right” because it’s an ontological threat against democracy, then rile up a mob against a Google guy who sends the wrong memo.
Likewise, conservatives invent a fictional entity called “The Left”, which is full of all the most horrible woke things that FOX was ever able to find one Gender Studies professor saying"
Oh come on. I'm the enemy. I'm a legitimate target of cancellation. In any normie right wing space, people would look in horror at what I write (GOP staffers and Tech Right donors of course are a different story and I write directly for them). If I get cancelled for it, well, I'd do the same thing if I were you. But the most awful things your people write are literally taught in all the schools, colleges, etc. And were someone to mention them in a normie-lib environment, people would at most bat an eye. Even in a Right-wing environment, most aren't really offended by them.
Now once again, I'm a combatant in this game. I fully understand why someone might go after me. But the normie-cons your people have gone after... they weren't in the game. Lefties crossed the line between normal political warfare and crimes against humanity, and they kept it going for a decade. I oppose any transition to cancelling normies by the right, but don't give me this bullshit.
"Your people"? Are you under the impression that Scott is a "leftie"? Scott was publicly doxed by the NYT and his politics are probably closest to libertarian.
Scott's politics have shifted and he's pretty much on the left now.
Yes, he was publically doxed. But he doesn't seem to have learned anything from the leopards eating his face. If he had read Metz's article and said "Maybe we should stop accusing people of racism..." But no.
I'm confused by this comment. Do you think Scott is a proponent of accusing people of racism? That... runs counter to pretty much everything he's ever posted.
That post seems to me to contain rather little "accusing people of racism". (It's mostly arguing that talk about "racism" is often confused and confusing and best avoided, and that many things commonly attributed to "racism" are actually best understood as having other less horrible-sounding motives, no?) Would you like to be more specific?
[EDITED to add:] Duh, I misread Ash's comment; disregard the above.
Note that this post is A) 8 years old, B) he took it down and, after realizing that was counterproductive, has left it up but with a huge disclaimer, and as Jiro notes he no longer says such things about Trump in particular or American conservatives in general.
I don't know if his positions have shifted, so much that he's not directly writing against left-wing insanity as much. Maybe he got that out of his system, or maybe he prefers a different tactic now.
Yeah my sense is he's pretty consistently fallen under "liberal-as-opposed-to-leftist." If Jiro or anyone else claims his politics have shifted they'd do well to point out a specific policy where they think his position has changed.
I think Scott deserves full credit for being anti-woke and pro-free speech (although he's greatly dialed down his condemnation of the left on those issues, which disturbs me, but since he's also dialed down his condemnation of the right I don't really hold it against him). But on many issues (abortion, trans issues) he is solidly on the left, sometimes far past even the leftist norm (e.g. embryo selection). I think it's important not to falsely shift the Overton Window by ignoring this.
I would have said embryo selection leaned *right*-wing, insofar as it's (a benign form of) one of the left's great bogeymen, eugenicism. The current religious, abortion-debate streak in the American political divide admittedly complicates this, but I can far more easily imagine a future where the right shifts to openly supporting embryo selection than the left.
Trying to assign ideas outside a very narrow range to the left or right is just going to lead you off a cliff. Embryo selection isn't an issue that really distinguishes right and left, though to some extent it may distinguish religious Catholics and Evangelicals from everyone else.
Embryo selection is an interesting look where certain 'principles' and the left-right spectrum completely fall apart. Ie, comparing attitudes on selective abortion to embryo selection generates some weird opinions.
Per Scott's own statement that most cancelling is done by leftists to those not left enough, isn't the NYT dox evidence of him being a moderate leftist?
I got a chuckle out of this one, but in seriousness, I think a libertarian is exactly the kind of not-left-enough heretic that Progressive cancellation would target. Holds some left beliefs (trans rights, abortion, etc), but also some intolerable heresies (anti-woke, IQ discourse, anti-big-government, etc). Narcissism of small differences.
Jokes aside, I don't think Scott could fairly be described as a leftist, and certainly not a partisan one. But he does live in the bay area, and I don't think anyone can live in that blue tribe bubble and not be affected to some degree.
He did say that grey tribe drives from blue tribe. And I'd bet that at some point, moving forward from close friends to distant friends, a majority of his friends would be poly and/or queer and/or trans (I have been in such a position myself, and I've never lived in SF). I suspect that he does not fully subscribe to some of the more extreme positions that advocates for those things take, but that he's learned his lesson about leaked emails and hyperstitious cascades, and is keeping those differences verbal and in confidence with close friends.
I'd look more toward EA and its culture of, well, ahimsa. Taking that as a starting point, adding a lack of visceral opposition to poly/queer/trans stuff, and it's possible to generate a lot of blue tribe positions from first principles.
This comment won't weigh in on cancel culture, but I'm curious about the "old psychoanalyst’s trick".
> if somebody ruminates too much over some decision, it’s to distract from some other decision they’re trying not to notice.
So how does the psychoanalyst (or whoever) proceed from "I see you are ruminating too much on decision A" to "The decision you are distracting yourself from noticing is definitely decision B over here and not any of these other decisions your life is awash in."
Talk to them, get a sense of their life, and notice that the decision they focus on is inconsequential next to this big thing that they don't spend much time consciously thinking of?
1. If you've ever knowingly participated in a cancel mob, I will do everything I can to see you hunted down, your life destroyed, and everything you personally value destroyed, if you ever in your life say anything even the tiniest bit controversial. Or maybe even if you don't.
2. If you haven't participated in a cancel mob, I will defend to the death your rights and your freedoms.
So if you ever follow the steps in 1 (maybe you already have), would it be just for someone to do everything they can to see you hunted down, etc.? Or is this a Barber Paradox thing where only you could cancel yourself for cancelling yourself?
You're right, there's an implicit exception to 1 for those who were themselves restricting their targets to those who had cancelled others. I should have spelt that out.
If you were in a cancel mob against someone who e.g. disowned their children for being gay, or fired someone or unfriended them for not being Christian, then you're actually in my second category. Even if you did it to 100 people, as long as *every single one of them* had done something like that, you're fine. But if you, even once, tried to cancel an innocent person for their opinion on gay rights or whatever, who had never themselves done that, you're forever my enemy and there's nothing you don't deserve. You should spend the rest of your life in unbearable fear that that one time you were in such a mob will be discovered, and you will lose your job, lose all your friends, and have your whole life destroyed. And spend the rest of your life thinking "if only, oh god if only I had shown, ten years ago, a shred of empathy for someone not exactly like me. And now it's too late."
Why would I be joking? Are you questioning the horrible psychological and material harm these disconcerting and sadistic bullying campaigns have on innocent people who were yesterday just living their lives? Or suggesting the kind of person who will gleefully watch and participate in that suffering should somehow be treated with sympathy?
I think since you are able to taste, in such exquisite detail, the urge to ruin people's lives, you should be able to feel empathy with others who have also acted on that urge, even if for bad reasons. The similarity in what you want for them and what they want for others suggests you are both reacting to a human urge, rather than them inventing a unique depravity.
I think it's like the difference between wanting to watch a murderer hang, and wanting to watch someone, doesn't matter who, hang. Yes, they're similar on the surface, and maybe a true saint wouldn't have either of those feelings. But they're also a universe apart: one is motivated by *anger* and one by *sadism* (in virtue terms). One has the effect of deterring cruel acts and the other of encouraging them (in consequentialist terms).
On the consequentialist point I'm more inclined to agree with Scott than with you about the most effective way to incentivize people not to be cruel in this way.
It seems pretty clear to me that while "mercy for everyone" is better than "cruelty for everyone" for reducing cruelty, far better again is "carefully targeted cruelty for the deliberately and unjustifiably cruel, mercy for everyone else".
This is just Machievelli's basic point. And the reason for having prisons and police at all. If you go soft on everyone, most people will treat you kindly...and a handful will say "sucker! i can hurt others with no consequences then!"
Those people make up a small fraction of the population but the vast majority of cancel mobs.
There isn't a "doesn't matter who" in this narrative, though. It definitely matters to the cancel mobs who they are cancelling. They're just using different criteria. From their perspective, they are largely motivated by 'anger', too, they don't realise you see it as 'sadism'.
I encourage you not to personally associate with people who you know have participated in cancel mobs if you want to avoid them, but don't ruin their lives. If you had made a horrible mistake once, or if you were wrong about something important, you would still want people to care about you. You would still want a chance at earning a livelihood, or supporting your family if you have one. That's still true even if the mistake is 'participated in a cancel mob'.
Tit for tat doesn't work among huge amorphous groups, and *especially* doesn't work when a substantial number of the cancellers are in fact basically sociopathic and don't care that much if people on their own side get hurt.
It seems relevant that I don't agree at all with your classification of what counts as "acceptable" cancellations
Every canceller will explain why their victims' crimes make this a simple matter of turnabout. "I'm just giving them a taste of their own medicine."
Maybe that's making black people uncomfortable, or kicking out a gay son, or violating someone else's safe space. There's no way to draw the line in a principled manner that doesn't allow basically all cancellation, or basically none of it
You sounded like a principled line-drawer, until you gave examples, and reminded me to be skeptical of all such lines
So you don't even tolerate people to choose who they are friends with. I have ceased being friends with christians given that it's maximally evil devil-worship given the punishment of infinitely long unrelenting intense pain (and still involves much intentional unjust suffering without that) - and you support my life being ruined for it. Just like yahwheh, another instance of the general pattern of those holding the most indignantly righteous attitudes being among the least legitimate to hold it.
I'm pretty sure I've heard that "the only people who are against punching Nazis are, themselves, Nazis". But maybe that's "prevenge"?
(The following is not to be taken seriously:)
It sure looks like you want to go easy on some bad people. That might lead to suspicions that you sympathize with the bad people. If you want to prove that you're not one of the bad people, you're going to need to demonstrate your zeal, right here and now, by going after these bad people in a very visible way. Otherwise you're next. Go on. We're watching.
The average big internet poster has posted millions of words across thousands of days in drastically different moods, constantly shifting contexts etc. I bet you that 99% of people who post frequently about politics for multiple years, left-wing or right-wing have participated in a call that someone be fired for some political act. It's incredibly common on both the left or right. "blocked. blocked. blocked. youre all blocked. none of you are free of sin". I certainly look more leniently on cancellation attempts when the person in question has been a big canceller in the past, especially the recent past, but you're going to have to set your bar higher than that if you want to have any allies left at all.
I think there's a world of difference between saying on a random day, in the abstract, that someone should be fired or even killed, and *on the day* that everyone else is screaming those things at one person, and while the firing is happening, to enthusiastically join the crowd with "yeah, get them, make them suffer". The latter, *not* the former, is what I mean by "cancel mob".
And also, a hundred times more so to do this *while the target is pleading for understanding, and trying to apologise*. I mean, I'm pretty suspectible to extreme anger (see this thread), but I cannot imagine myself continuing to hold this level of anger against someone who is pleading with me not to hurt them, no matter what they've done. I'd feel horrible, even if I had committed to a principle like the one above and I rationally believed they deserved punishment.
If even I, angry as I am, can say that, then the kind of person who is capable of maintaining gleeful sadism in such circumstances is someone I can barely view as human.
I think, and I am genuinely sad about this, that you may find yourself disappointed by human nature, because I see this constantly from both the left and the right. Not necessarily a majority of the population, but certainly a supermajority of the very politically active population. How many rightists are there, for example, who didn't rejoice in Colin Kaepernick's cancellation and job loss, or join in that ongoing mob effort that went on for months. Almost everyone who was very politically active at the time on the right on on Twitter would have at least one Tweet.
> I bet you that 99% of people who post frequently about politics for multiple years, left-wing or right-wing have participated in a call that someone be fired for some political act
This is one of the most intense typical-mind fallacy pronouncements I've ever seen. The marketplace of rationalizations is strong with this one.
Yeah, I'd bet I've written more prolifically — unfortunately, mostly in media slightly less lasting than isopropanol — than 99% of the population, and I've never done this that I can recall. I've certainly posted a lot of "boy this person is a fucking moron", but I've never called for a firing.
1. How bad does "participation in a cancel mob" have to be for a person to justifiably get their life ruined? Is it enough to tweet "yeah" in response to "let's cancel person X!!!", without doing anything else? What's the lower boundary?
2. If your goal is to discourage people in the future from canceling others, note that a lack of proportionality can be counterproductive. If your lower boundary for what's unacceptable is low, then people who know they'll pass that boundary anyway will not be scared to go arbitrarily far beyond - it doesn't matter then if I just tweet a "yeah", or show up to someone's house with a pitchfork - your punishment will be the same, so why should I care (so the people may justly reason).
3. As others have pointed out, this tactic is unjustly cruel. If my actions have contributed (not even caused) someone to be cyberbullied for 2 days on twitter 5 years ago, that's bad. But do I thereby deserve the punishment of losing job, income, the respect of my loved ones, and generally getting my life ruined (or whatever it is you intend to do to those you wish to harm)? This is so, so far beyond "an eye for an eye", or any other principle of proportionality.
You seem to be making the same mistake as those who think that Popper's paradox of tolerance is a license to persecute anyone you want as long as you can contextualize it as a war on intolerance.
The point of the paradox is that liberty has an inverse recursive nature, whose stable solution involves some degree of tolerance on every level that is neither 0% nor 100%. You think that cancelling cancellers is fundamentally more justified than cancelling racists because it's one level more sophisticated than the object level, but it accounts for just one level and loses the recursion. You end up being just another guy who would pester people over a single old problematic tweet, and the morsel of sophistication is cancelled out (heh) by the irony of embodying the behavior you fight against.
Popper's paradox is frequently misunderstood: https://x.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1367869888157646850 It's about people who cannot be dealt with any other way. For people that only respect violence, violence is the only tool to be used on them.
First, I really do mean the second part, which everyone is mostly missing. It's just as important a part of my proposal as the first part. The essential point is that there's a bright clear line (with maybe a small vague area) and if you're on one side you're *absolutely protected* no matter what, and if you're on the other you're absolutely condemned. Surely this is in any many ways much better than a vague "you might be destroyed for anything at all, or you might get away with anything" that is the status quo?
Second, I don't think it's remotely fair to call this cruel in anything like the same sense as cancel culture in general is cruel. I think it's like comparing support for the death penalty to support for collective mass murder of a population (e.g..collective punishment in war). To someone who supports the death penalty, you can disagree, you can say they're sinking to the level of what they hate, you can say it feeds a cycle of violence, and you can say it's based in an ultimately evil instinct of vengeance despite the trappings of justice. But comparing them in any way to an advocate of collective punishment (let alone collective murder) is utterly beyond the pale. The two are not mere differences in degree: they're complete differences in kind.
Third, if you prefer rephrase my proposal as "I'll spend 100% of my effort defending those in the second category, and spare literally zero sympathy for those in the first". The central part of this is nobody, ever, should be cancelled for being on the wrong side or having the wrong opinion while being personally innocent of causing deliberate harm...which is contrary to large parts of the right (see Scott's quotes) and virtually the entirely of the current left.
I don't actually believe you mean the second part because you posted a clarification listing several exceptions to the first part, strongly suggesting the principles you claim to hold are … well, if not non-existent, at least flexible.
Liberalism can only function if you are willing to be illiberal specifically towards people who promote and use illiberal means. This is basic, paradox of tolerance stuff. Maybe the OP takes it a bit far, but the basic instinct is not only correct, but necessary. Liberalism died in America specifically because it did not know how to defend itself from illiberalism from the left.
The paradox of tolerance, as it's usually used as an argument, is a misconception, both when it's used by SJWs and when it's used by the anti-cancel-culture right.
It's correct that it's generally justified and often necessary to be intolerant of those who are intolerant of others without a good justification *to a similar extent as they are intolerant*. People who criticize others for bad reasons deserve to be criticized. People who disparage others deserve to be disparaged. A company that refuses to do business with people for bad reasons (i.e. fires them) deserves that we refuse to do business with it (i.e. boycott it). Someone who uses extrajudicial coercion deserves the cops' and prison wardens' coercion. Words deserve words; gunmen deserve the bullet.
But most people using the paradox of tolerance argument are trying to justify a higher level of intolerance against intolerant people than those use themselves. Economic harm or even prosecution for words. Legal force for private business decisions. That's not justified or necessary, or at least not nearly as the paradox of tolerance concept makes it seem.
And only those using illiberal means deserve intolerance; those who merely promote them only deserve counterargument, just like those who support other bad policies. Many if not most policy proposals imply prosecuting those who disobey some proposed law, or exposing them to lawsuits; that doesn't mean that if you disagree with the proposal, you should support prosecuting or fining those who promote it. Target companies that yield to cancel mobs for economic harm instead, in an attempt to reverse their incentives.
Participating in a cancel mob to get someone who has participated in a cancel mob fired is in itself the same level of intolerance against him as he has engaged in himself, but if his employer abides it, then he is subjected to economic harm for mere words; if one doesn't support that, one shouldn't demand it.
"Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal. "
I agree most people get this wrong, but honestly I don't understand how.
Unfortunately I can't take it up with Popper considering he's dead, but I disagree with him about this. That would-be tyrants use this as an excuse to suppress dissent is a greater threat than that of tyranny arising because we fail to suppress intolerant words with force. If you oppose cancel culture, you must know how the SJ left loves to invoke the paradox of tolerance argument to justify its actions. That Popper said something doesn't make it unassailable truth; all sorts of smart philosophers have said all sorts of wrong things, sometimes contradicting each other.
I was pushing back on the implication that I (and by extension, Popper) was operating under a 'misconception' of the Paradox of Tolerance.
Also, it is not clear that you disagree with Popper, you might, but your examples are not very clear.
Popper does not provide a justification for SJ left cancel culture, he is in fact saying that people who engage in cancel culture are the people who can be justifiably canceled. To be clear, the 'intolerant' behavior that Popper thinks justifies being intolerant, is refusing to engage in the marketplace of ideas or trying to subvert it.
He is not talking about 'intolerance' as used in the modern parlance, like racism or other forms of bigotry. He is saying, you can be as racist as you want, as long as you are arguing for your positions in a fair and open exchange of ideas, but the second you start trying to de-platform somebody, we call the cops.
I didn't mean that it was a misconception that the paradox of tolerance was formulated this way, but that it was a misconception that the claim it makes was true, that there was a paradox.
What I especially dislike about the the usual, simple formulation of the concept of the paradox of tolerance is that it's (perhaps unintentionally) misleading. At first it sounds *obvious* that intolerant people don't deserve the tolerance of others. I always felt that something was off about the way the argument is often used, but it took me a while to figure out what was wrong with it—that what's obvious is that intolerant people don't deserve the sort of tolerance they don't extend to others, but it's often used to argue that they deserve a stronger form of intolerance, which doesn't follow. It may or may not be the case that intolerant words deserve a stronger form of intolerance (I say not), but at a minimum it's debatable and depends on the situation, rather that obvious as the simple forms of "we shouldn't tolerate the intolerant" make it sound.
It's also not really clear to me from the quote that Popper would support suppressing cancel culture by law; it seems to me that he's primarily concerned about violent intolerance and advocacy of such.
My preference would be to target not those who participate in a cancel mob, but those who yield to them. If a cancel mob threatens to boycott company A unless it fires X, don't try to create a mob to get those who participated in the previous mob fired, but instead try to create a mob to threaten to boycott company A *if* it fires X, until/unless it reinstates him.
This allows us to preserve a principled and consistent stance about free speech, without having to make exceptions, and exceptions to exceptions and so on. It also avoids issues around the fuzzy boundaries of participating in a cancel mob: many "participants" who may ultimately be instrumental in getting X fired may merely criticize X without explicitly calling for him to be fired, some of them may not even actually want him to be fired.
In general, the right solution to cancel culture is for employers, schools, and the like to get the memo that an outrage mob on Twitter is a dumb reason to fire someone, kick them out of school, evict them from their apartment, etc. This will be helped along by pushing back where we can on these actions.
What does "ever knowingly participated in a cancel mob" mean?
Jon Ronson participated in the mob going after Justine Sacco, and it took him a while to figure out what was going on and that there was something wrong with it.
I was among DC Dem elites and the decision to pick Kamala gave people zero pause before calling it stupid. The idea that "cancel culture" was in any way causally related to the VP pick is insane and made me downgrade anything written here as factual. Institutional decisions are hard to identify causally but "drop out and you will be VP" is a particularly easy one to identify and the misattribution here is silly.
Read the actual memo again. James Damore was not fit to be a hiring manager and Google absolutely made the right choice. If that is a supposedly unjust cancellation, then cancel culture is fine.
A deeply shocking moment for me was reading a Medium article by a scientist versed in gender differences. The first third of the article was pleasantly toned and made comments on how Damore made some accurate and supported claims
Suddenly the tone shifted and she spent the rest of the article talking about him as an enemy of the people. Having supporting facts and matching intentions was totally insufficient
(As far as I remember, he wasn't personally asked to write it, but the company asked for feedback in general.) EDIT: you wrote you worked at Google, so you probably know better.
I don't have SUPER detailed insider knowledge here, but my general expectation from doing Google stuff is that there was probably a survey sent out after it, like, did you think this was valuable [0-10], any comments, not "write a lengthy essay and share it with the whole company".
I remember reading an article, which is now unfortunately paywalled, which gave me the impression that google employees were *very* politically active in the pre-Damore era. Google's brass encouraged this, because they sincerely believed in "don't be evil". I think each faction had slack channels where they would meme at each other's expense.
this doesn't match your experience? Like, I acknowledge that the article probably exaggerated some bits for rhetorical effect. But it seems like the facts of the story set a certain bar of expectations of how politically active in the Culture Wars the campus was. And in this light, Damore's memo doesn't come off as especially surprising to me.
I read the memo. It featured several good ideas about increasing female staffing, but it committed a Great Heresy and assumed men and women are different, and are not interchangeable.
I was at Google at the time and I didn't think firing him was a good idea, although I do think it's ironic that he had a bunch of complaints about programs to promote race/gender diversity but also suggested we/they needed to work on making things more welcoming to conservatives, which feels like a variation on the theme discussed in this post.
After Damore was fired, how long do you suppose it will be until the next time a Google employee who values his job gives any honest feedback of this kind?
This is the Darth Vader school of management in action--when someone tells you something you don't want to hear, force choke them. That way, nobody will ever disturb your serenity with unwanted information.
Respectfully, this is very disconnected from the reality I experienced at Google at the time. I don't remember the exact order in which these happened, but while I was there there was also:
- A mass protest by employees of Google working with the US military to analyze drone footage, which was subsequently cancelled
- A mass protest by employees of Google building a tracked and censored search engine for China, which was subsequently cancelled
- A multi-city walkout in protest of sexual harassment in the workplace as documented by the NYT
- A campaign to support the unionization of the food service contractors, including a memorable videoconference that management joined and tried to reschedule, only to have the employee organizers tell them to their face they were going to have the meeting anyway, and do so
- A company-wide employee-led meeting to air claims of retaliation against some of the organizers of the above
As the last indicates, management definitely did try to tamp down some of these efforts but the culture at the time was one of considerable agency on the part of the rank-and-file. Perhaps after I left, when there were multiple layoffs for no reason, people stopped ticking their necks out quite so far, but I honestly doubt it and have seen news to the contrary.
Also, I think an honest reading of why Damore was fired was "everybody read his memo and got pissed off and yelled about it until he was fired", NOT that "management" wanted to get rid of him because of their own politics. The memo was EVERYWHERE for a few days and got discussed by every ERG (Employee Resource Group) and produced a ton of very angry messages from the tank-and-file. It was what everybody was talking about in the cafeterias. It probably literally amounted to millions or tends of millions of dollars in lost work.
As I said, I DIDN'T think firing him was a good idea, but I felt very much like that was the minority opinion. (I thought we should host a debate with him. I would have been delighted to rake the other side.)
What laws could there be that wouldn’t violate the First Amendment?
Yes, I’m familiar with protected class; apologies I read your comment too quickly! I’ll have to give that some thought.
> Until the Left is willing to do that, we should show no mercy, because they have offered nothing tangible to PROVE that their opinions have changed.
Good luck with showing no mercy when the left controls most of the institutions and nearly all of the culture.
Yes, well - good luck with that fantasy.
I’m pretty sure that sneering is actually counter productive outside the bubble.
The thing that hurts them the most is the respectful, thorough, intellectually rigorous destruction of their ideas in the most public possible way. Cancelation is the opposite of that. The left cancels because their ideas are terrible and can't withstand scrutiny. The right can get its best revenge all while strengthening the norms of free speech. I don't want the intersectional nonbinary freak canceled, I want him defrocked in the town square. Defend your ideology and let everyone see exactly what kind of a person Woke protects. Once all of your magic incantations (racist! sexist! homophobe!) stop working you'll be revealed for the pathetic envious mendacious mentally-ill loser that you are.
Well if nothing else we know how to spell 'fellatio', presumably because we're not too beta to get our women to perform it on us. But I challenge you to an idea face-off. If I can present a right-coded idea that you can't defeat then I win. Deal or are you a sniveling coward?
He won't. It's just some dumb 15 year old kid.
> Well if nothing else we know how to spell 'fellatio', presumably because we're not too beta to get our women to perform it on us.
This one line made reading all these hundreds of comments worth it.
I'd say there are things you can do to a person that hurt far, far more than that.
Jesus man, chill out. I hate progressives too but there are better ways to win.
Do you remember the end of The Princess Bride when Wesley said of the defeated Prince, "no matter what happens I want him to live a long life alone with his cowardice"? That's the way to win. It's worse for them, better for you, and better for the culture.
We can't plow salt into their fields because they're our fields too. We eat from the same bounty. I'd advise you to reflect on that. Think not of Carthage but of Lincoln and reconstruction. He sought not to punish but to mend.
You will never be part of your death squad, but you may wind up in their sights.
You won't.
After we create a norm against cancel culture, I want a norm against people sarcastically describing "this thing I heard from my enemies one time" as "the received wisdom that nobody dare question."
I like this perspective and wish there was more of it.
California DID raise lots of money for the homeless... but they failed to build any housing because the problem was regulations rather than a lack of funding.
The problem is that vagrants strip down anything they have access to in order to convert it to cash for drugs. The average vagrant is either so mentally ill they're basically rabid or, more often, a rotten person comfortable dumping massive costs onto the people around them as long as they can get high.
3 is just "You're a bad person because you recognize reality." Did you have a point, or are you just reacting against someone reminding you that your fantasy land is just a fantasy?
I didn't call you a bad person, I just speculated that you're also a massive drain on society.
Yes, you can build something indestructible. It's called a prison, and the reason it's indestructible is that the inmates are watched all the time by guards, who stop them when they try to remove the pipes.
Nothing is indestructible without human intervention, and it doesn't take all that long for motivated humans to do incredible amounts of damage.
Even if the pipes don't get removed, someone can still kick holes in the walls. And then a reporter calls and says "How are they treating you?" And takes pictures of the holes and then writes an article about how badly this public housing is maintained.
Take away all the guards and see if the prisoners can kick holes in the walls before they starve.
Prison walls are built to be much harder to destroy than housing.
My point was that if you don't have other humans to stop them, humans can destroy pretty much anything with sufficient time and motivation. It doesn't even take much in the way of tools.
They have sufficient time, since they don't have anything else to do. They have sufficient motivation because they can sell some of the stuff extracted from the walls, and a lot of humans get a kick out of destroying things.
>"I do not really support raising taxes to buy homes for unhoused persons
>but I will savage everyone who calls them homeless."
My impression is that the Venn diagram between these two has a lot of overlap, unless you're not counting it as support for raising taxes if it's directed at "the rich" or "corporations" or "billionaires" etc etc.
Blobs mostly just emulate whatever their leaders do, so those do have some influence.
Amen. It’s gotten to the point where I think if you strongly identify as democrat or republican, chances are you’ve been had. The two most useless categorical descriptors of human beings these days are in no particular order “left” and “right.”
Do you consider it impossible for some of your enemies to be "your fellow countrymen"? If not, what would people who happen to be "your fellow countrymen" have to do before you'd consider them enemies?
Okay, but that is not the way most people use the word "enemies."
> But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you … Do to others as you would have them do to you.
Hmm, I wonder what happened to the guy who preached this. If he ends up dying painfully, maybe treat it as a cautionary tale and NOT do what he says?
I don't think it's true that the only solution is war. You probably need SOME displays of force to establish a credible deterrent, but mutually-beneficial truces are possible.
Do you consider it beneficial to declare enemies of people you disagree with? Friends, family, fellow citizens? When you designate one of these people as an enemy, what are you hoping to accomplish that couldn’t have been accomplished otherwise?
You characterizing it as a mere "disagreement" is the kind of thing I hope getting people to see this in terms of friend vs. enemy would stop. Ben Mordecai's post (in the screenshot in Section 4) lists a few of the things the other side has done to his. I would characterize those as the actions of an enemy to be fought back against, not those a friend with whom you have disagreements to be reasoned with, and to the extent that my pointing that out makes people more likely to fight back instead of bending over, I DO consider it beneficial.
I’m not that eager to join people on the left and right waving their fists in the air and threatening to fight their neighbors, coworkers, teachers, caregivers, service people, etc. And I’m not even sure who your “other side” is.
I’m sorry you think it’s come to that. I don’t.
I took him to mean surprising numbers of Dems oppose cancel culture
I agree, I squinted at that chart a good bit to make sure I was understanding Scott correctly. Pretty sure his claim is "you won't find many instances where >50% of Democrats take the Cancel position and simultaneously >50% of Republicans take the no-Cancel position."
This is true. 38% pro-Cancel is less than 50%. (On Q 24, the Ds do narrowly break 50%, and one Q 23 they do so significantly -- so how rare is rare?) But in any event, there are still significant differences in the percentages between D and R responses, pretty consistently in the direction of Ds being more pro-Cancellation. So while Scott's narrow claim is true depending on how we define "hard," the stronger claim "Ds and Rs have basically the same balance of views when it comes to cancellation" is not true.
Correct, but he is answering the question “But wasn’t the Left monolithically united behind cancel culture?”
Agreed, and agreed that the answer to that question is "No."
So, uh, 38% isn't 'most', right?
Collective punishment makes the most sense when you can't identify the culprit responsible for the act being punished, but the collective they belong to can. When people are being cancelled for social media posts, they CAN be individually identified. People are just too lazy to bother to check whether the individual who endorsed Trump's assassination also endorsed cancelling anyone.
Let's not pretend this is about justice. You get to hurt someone small, really f--k up their life. Maybe ruin them. Smear shit in the face of some member of the hated outgroup.
All the rest is post-hoc justification.
I've been pseudonymous on the 'net for twenty five years, and it still seems crazy to me that at the middle of noughties everybody collectively seemed to decide to renounce pseudonymity. Of course, what actually happened is that normies took over, and have been getting what they deserve since.
Ditto.
Richard Hanania has been deriding pseudonymous people recently, talking about how he was worse when he wrote as "Richard Hoste". But not every pseudonym was nearly that bad. For example... Scott Alexander.
Yeah. Sometimes people need social reinforcement from parts of society to hold to decent standards of behavior. Or maybe it's the crowd Hoste found himself running with - if he'd fallen into Scott's circle, maybe he'd have found that he could be decent and principled even using a pseudonym?
I think social feedback matters a lot, but also, people choose the environment in which they live. If I hang around in an online community that rewards nastiness, it will pull me in a nasty direction...but also, if I'm inclined in a nasty direction, that online community will be more appealing to me.
I was going to say something about places that reinforce our worst impulses vs our best, but I suppose that would require first having a solid grasp on which is which.
"people choose the environment in which they live."
Very yes! An annoying trope: "he's a good kid, just fell in with the wrong crowd". Meanwhile, the "good kid": "fuck off bro, my homies are awesome!".
This just confirms my sense of what Hanania is. If the only reason one is being civil is fear of negative consequences, one is... not exactly a model citizen now, no? "If mom weren't watching I'd poop on you" is bad even for a kindergartner.
Everyone responds to consequences. You say "even for a kindergartner" because we teach children (one might say "civilize them") by exposing them to differential rewards/punishments over time.
Yeah. I also find myself in the position of generally disliking cancel culture, and not really wanting to cancel others, but at the same time not caring to defend those who had been cancelling others from getting cancelled themselves.
Did the home depot lady take part in previous cancellation mobs? Or the dude who quit his job as a firefighter after being dragged online?
"I’m OK with Tenacious D having to cancel their tour."
That was shooting yourself in the foot, right enough. I don't know about cancelling the tour, it was a stupid joke by a guy who thinks he's a comedian and is a lefty. Should have been left up to the audiences if they wanted to go see them after that. But an old fat white guy like Kyle Gass trying to be edgelord was just silly and in bad taste and poor timing. Cancel worthy? No idea. But Jack Black was smart enough to go "oh sugarlumps" about the possible immediate effect on his career and he pulled the tour.
After a decent interval they'll probably be back on the road.
"A doctor at a hospital I used to work at was fired for posting on an anonymous internet message board “some women deserve to be raped;” I’m fine with that decision too."
I agree. Posting "some people make really bad and stupid decisions and get themselves into situations where they're then surprised bad consequences happen" may get you in trouble, but it's true (if blunt). "Bitch was asking for it" is not.
I'll agree on the first part, not the second. Venting on an anonymous message board should not be a firing offense.
I agree, as long as it was actually anonymous, and he himself didn't bring the hospital into it.
“Thinks he’s a comedian” “trying to be edgelord” - are you at all familiar with Tenacious D? I ask that sincerely, because their entire schtick is being an edgy comedic band.
Comedians should be allowed to bomb occasionally. The correct response is heckling, not being fired by their agency.
When it comes to cancel culture, you can say that both sides have tendencies to do it, but I find it a little weird to focus on "left bubbles" when it comes to wishing death on political opponents when January 6 showed the same willingness on the right ("hang Mike Pence").
I personally don't think getting people fired is taking things further than trying to kill people.
Trying to kill people is already a crime, and we do actually put people into prison for it. Saying you wish someone would die, or you wish someone would murder X, or you're sorry X didn't get murdered, all that is indeed very nasty, but it's very different from actually trying to do it.
In Pelosi's case, there wasn't just a plot, there was a serious physical attack on her husband. Presumably, the only reason she wasn't attacked is that she wasn't home.
There aren't many radical rightwingers in SF - like the attack on Gabby Giffords, the Paul Pelosi attack appears to have been the work of a genuinely disturbed person without much coherent contact with any reality, let alone politics.
That dude seems like a good example of the kind of person that should have been in a mental institution somewhere.
The Whitmer plot was organized and operated by an FBI "informant". He wasn't just the prime mover, he's the only reason the "ringleader" ended up in charge of a group. It was an FBI false flag.
And the assault on Paul Pelosi appears to have been a crazy bum doing crazy bum things accidently to a fame-adjacent person.
I think the Whitmer plot followed the pattern of a bunch of post-9/11 FBI arrests:
a. FBI agents/informants recruit some hapless losers who are vaguely inclined toward terrorism.
b. The FBI agents/informants hatch the plot, organize everything, supply the weapons and bombs (ideally bombs that won't blow up), etc., and the hapless losers follow along and feel important and dangerous and powerful.
c. The FBI then sweeps in and arrests the hapless losers and announces that they have saved America from another dastardly plot.
Now, the hapless losers in these cases aren't people I particularly mind seeing in prison--they did go along with a terrorist plot or a kidnapping scheme or whatever, and presumably could have been recruited by a real terrorist instead of a pretend one. But I doubt that many actual successful attacks have been prevented this way.
I think the guy who wanted to kill Nancy Pelosi was a standard nutcase, not really politically motivated in the normal sense. Though this might be more of an example for the "bring back the bughouse" thread.
But this is the same as the attempted Trump assassin right? (And the guy who tried to kill Nancy Pelosi did a lot more harm, physically).
Trump's would-be assassin killed a dude standing behind him, which seems worse than Pelosi's would-be assassin, who tried to murder her husband but failed.
I think the leftist response/rationalization for this would be something along the lines of: "yes, its wrong to wish for violence on a political opponent, but Trump has the potential to irreversibly damage our democracy and has demonstrated willingness to do so in the past with Jan 6 and the false elector scheme, therefore the line here is blurry and it is not clear exactly how morally unjustified this is." (Similar to how expressing support for assassinating Hitler seems morally justified).
I suspect the cultural conflict has more to do with evidential weight than any kind of fundamental moral incongruity, as is the case with many disagreements between the left and right.
Most people on the left I know would contest this categorization; they'd probably say that the right is much more pro-violence (eg Jan 6) than the left, not just "damage democracy" in the abstract.
They'd also point to clips of Trump and supporters making fun of Paul Pelosi's attack, which afaik no high-ranking Democrats have done about the Trump assassination (and hence why a lowly nobody from Home Depot was the one cancelled).
How was he revealed if it was an anonymous message board?
I'm surprised that Scott didn't address this. Expressing regret that Trump wasn't murdered in front of a crowd of his supporters is unambiguously worse than, to pick something, Carol Hooven saying that sex is binary. The main reason we want a culture of free speech is that we don't have to settle differences of belief through violence. If some people are now saying that it's too bad that their political disputes weren't solved by violence, what claim do they have to free speech?
Problem is, while you are defending your enemy's right to speak, they are saying "Your speech is violence and my violence is speech."
I'm prepared to defend someone's *right* to free speech. I'm not necessarily prepared to defend someone from the loss of a job for saying something odious.
I've proposed a razor: if you abominate the liberal order, you forfeit the protections of the liberal order. Jubilating in violence against your enemies is an abomination of the liberal order.
https://dissidentmuse.substack.com/p/terms-of-surrender-for-the-cancelers
That just moves us back one level. Is intentionally misgendering someone or stating that homosexuality is an abomination before God abominating the liberal order? How about calling someone a race-traitor for marrying outside their race? Or saying that white people are the cancer of history?
The argument made by many cancellers and many supporters of hate-speech laws is that these statement undermine the liberal order and deserve punishment.
I have heard them claim that they deserve punishment but never that they undermine the liberal order. They don't care a whit about the liberal order.
I'm talking about the liberal order in which we solve our differences through dialogue and answer wrong speech with right speech. People who want to solve differences through violence and answer wrong speech with threats and censorship, as far as I'm concerned, can be canceled or counter-canceled without qualms.
> Expressing regret that Trump wasn't murdered in front of a crowd of his supporters is unambiguously worse than, to pick something, Carol Hooven saying that sex is binary.
This is just billion-dust-specks vs. eternity-of-torture-for-one-guy, isn't it?
Trump has the potential to do much more than analogous dust specks, so it's more like certain torture for one individual vs possible torture for many individuals.
Reading Carol Hooven's account, it doesn't seem straightforwardly about cancellation perpetrated the left, or simply about the 'sex is binary' statements. My summary:
Hooven deliberately entered into a contentious public debate by going on Fox and Friends saying we need to use biological terms male and female in medicine, and got some criticism by a trans graduate student in her department on twitter and she responded on twitter (so far, so good; this seems within the bounds of regular discussion/debate).
Subsequently the right media (and mob) started attacking the graduate student, and the left started attacking her for having unleashed all the inevitable harrassment on the student. (This is where it all went off the rails, it honestly seems like if she'd had a private conversation with the graduate student they could have dealt with it amicably)
Weeks later, a DEI committee chose to include a comment from yet another student complaining about Hooven in some email (not clear who the email was sent to, seems like probably sent to faculty in a particular department?). She claims additional quotes from her were added out of context to smear her character.
Hooven felt like this was uncalled for and expected a defence or retraction or something from the university. She felt the response was insufficiently apologetic to her, and therefore felt unsupported by her employer. She developed mental health issues and went part time before ultimately quitting her job.
It's a sad story and an indictment on media and online culture, but in the end, it really doesn't seem to be about the free speech to say sex is binary. It wouldn't have occured without both the right and the left outrage machines, and Hooven naively not understanding going on media like Fox and Friends your words are obviously going to be taken out of context and court controversy. Subsequently she didn't understand the perils of fame and the harm you can inadvertantly cause on others.
Hooven's story is an unambiguous case of cancellation visited upon her for saying that sex is binary. After her Fox appearance, the Director of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force at Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology condemned the remarks as transphobic and harmful. This wasn't the product of a bipartisan outrage machine, it was the product of hateful progressives coming together to punish a colleague for giving credibility to their enemies by saying something that's true.
You say it's unambiguous and then state facts taking all the ambiguity out.
The graduate student (one person) directing some DEI taskforce felt the need to tweet that her "remarks" were "transphobic and harmful". That in itself doesn't seem to rise to the level of cancellation (though as events unfolded, it was an unwise thing to tweet). I think people should be able to call remarks transphobic if that's their opinion.
This is immediately jumped on by the right wing media (the same day), in which Hooven says her position was misrepresented in click-bait headlines. I think it's safe to assume the graduate student received a tonne of abuse after that. I mean, just look at the replies to her tweet: https://twitter.com/LauraSimoneLew/status/1421128429068554250).
Do you think it's irrelevant that she became the cause célèbre for the transphobic right wing? It seems to me if the tweet had been ignored this whole thing would have blown over.
The same student later defends Hooven saying “I also want to reiterate that I respect Carole as both a scientist and valuable member of our department" https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/8/11/biology-lecturer-gender-comments-backlash/
Hooven faced no formal consequences and indeed receives a letter stating “It was not the intent of our DIB Committee to cause damage to Dr. Hooven’s reputation, but to raise important issues about best practices in science communication and respect for the serious impact our scientific opinions may have on others. We apologize.”
The DIB Committee apologized because they baldly tried to destroy Hooven's reputation, and for doing so, their noses were rubbed in their excrement. Postcards From Barsoom is correct.
> It seems to me if the tweet had been ignored this whole thing would have blown over.
It seems to me that if the cancelers had ignored Hooven's Fox appearance this whole thing would have blown over. They didn't want it to blow over. They wanted to destroy Hooven.
So let me get this right, for people baldly attempting to destroy Hooven's reputation "their noses were rubbed in their excrement" and they were forced to apologise. And this is evidence of her being cancelled?
I don't think it's plausible for the person tweeting to expect a media firestorm to result. All the subsequent events were more to do with people unfairly blaming Hooven for that firestorm. It rapidly became more about the meta story than about the actual things Hooven said. Going on about "hateful progressives" who "wanted to destroy Hooven" just makes me think you're predisposed to seeing the worst in her critics and ignores the nuanced reactions many people had. I'm sure there were individuals who wanted her fired, but high-profile controversy inevitably attracts extreme voices.
Faithful amplification of a person's actual statement is not "character assassination." Taking a screenshot of someone wishing death on a prominent political figure is significantly different from, say, taking a picture of a guy resting his hand out the window of his truck and then claiming that his fingers are forming a White Power symbol, therefore he's racist.
The trick is determining whether the “wishing of death” is sincere or just a case of poor taste in edgy humor. Which is basically impossible on Twitter. Which is why we shouldn’t mob randos.
Or just a dumb thing someone said in a moment of idiocy. If you dislike cancellations based on someone using a racial slur in a moment of drunken idiocy, or based on someone telling a racist joke in a setting they thought was private, then I think you should also dislike this kind of cancellation.
I mean, you shouldn't scream racial slurs at people, or wish people dead, or say all kinds of other ugly things that people sometimes say. But saying those things doesn't seem like it is a good reason to fire you from a job as a cashier.
If I discovered my dentist, plumber, tax preparer, doctor, etc., had done one of those things, I wouldn't refuse to do business with them. I want my cavities filled, my leaks repaired, my taxes done properly, my illnesses treated, and so on; I don't need the people doing those things to have never said something ill-considered and nasty.
A tangent: I suspect there is a lot of preference falsification when people treat it as a taboo to wish that a politician were assassinated, and pretend it's totally unreasonable, while probably many people actually occasionally have such thoughts themselves.
The death of one man, in a country of many millions, as a wrong in itself, is easily outweighed by even minor political effects, and one may consider the direct effects of an especially bad politician on the other side dying to be good.
There is of course the argument that it would normalize political violence, perhaps even lead to a civil war, that it deters smart people from going into politics by making it a risky job, or that it forces politicians to use even more expensive security precautions. These are good reasons to not want assassinations, but not not slam dunk obvious ones that only a totally unhinged person may disagree with: after all, four US presidents have been assassinated, and little of these concerns materialized. Arguably we *should* treat it as taboo to openly wish for an assassination in order to discourage attempts (though it's questionable that the sort of people who would commit one would be influenced), but that's an argument that we should pretend that only totally unhinged people wish for one, not an argument that actually only totally unhinged people wish for one.
This taboo seems to be respected by some to a weirdly extreme extent. Senator Lindsey Graham got a lot of flak from both parties when he wished Putin to be assassinated. If it's right to send weapons to poor Ukrainian conscripts to shoot tens of thousands of poor Russian conscripts (as I do, as does some three fourths of the US Congress), why would it be wrong to wish the very guy who started the whole war were shot? The US *organizing* his assassination would be dangerous, but *wishing* that some Russian shot him, as Graham did, isn't. I wonder if this is some implicit pact between politicians: do not wish for the death of even a leader of a proxy war enemy, lest you be assassinated yourself. In which case it's kind of cowardly: send soldiers to shoot each other, but not be willing to take a small risk themselves.
Yeah. There's a big difference between wishing your political enemies would drop dead and wishing them assassinated (because assassinations are destabilizing in a lot of ways, and having them become commonplace would do all kinds of harm to our political system and country), but I think this is the sort of thing that comes only with thinking about it a bit, not with popping off with the first thing that comes to mind on Twitter.
Agreed on the exception for Putin, for basically the reasons you cite. He has a _lot_ of blood on his hands, and in a very direct way.
Sure, but it's not at all obvious that an assassination would've make the world better, if anything the most recent attempted coup is some evidence against (former head of Wagner didn't exactly sound like a pleasant guy).
Many Thanks! True. If his coup had succeeded, that might indeed have been worse. Even for any replacement to Putin there is always a question about the devil you know vs the devil you don't know...
I always find posts like this a bit puzzling. Why are we debating whether the right should try to match the left's willingness to cancel? They already exceed it.
The right has always been more aggressive about that stuff, not less. Quasi-religious orthodoxy is no match for actual religious orthodoxy, and the fiercest restrictions I've seen on free speech in America are aimed at left-wing critics of Israel.
Or at least, that's how it seems from where I'm sitting. If I'm wrong, you can try and prove me wrong. But it'll take more than vibes and anecdotes.
"At no point do I ever recall any left-wing institution adopting a policy against hiring people for any kind of right-wing belief."
And this is the point at which I think we differ. I work for a public, for-profit company - not a place I'd describe as left-wing; and if I had a Pride flag on my desk, and a picture of Harvey Milk, absolutely no one would object. I'd be incredibly reluctant to have a Confederate flag and a portrait of General Lee on my desk, even though historically those are much more honored causes.
You don't even need to be that inflammatory. "An Appeal To Heaven" or "Don't Tread On Me" is probably enough for people to start giving you the side-eye.
> I'd be incredibly reluctant to have a Confederate flag and a portrait of General Lee on my desk, even though historically those are much more honored causes.
I feel like the problem with this analogy is that we can read the Confederacy's constitutional documents today and see that the 'Lost Cause' narrative falls apart quickly. So while I'm pro-free speech and all that, if I see you have a Confederate flag on your desk, what inference am supposed to make?
1. You are ignorant of the historical documents and haven't done the research, but just grew up in a place where that wasn't questioned. You truly just see it as a flag that says nothing more than "I'm from the South / I like the Rural Aesthetic".
2. You aren't ignorant of the historical documents, you disagree with them, but feel like the historical context doesn't matter anymore and its just a cool flag from your hometown.
3. You aren't ignorant of the historical documents but you agree with them.
Those are honestly the only 3 options I can think of. If I'm missing some 4th option, I'm curious what it would be, but it should be illustrative that I couldn't think of one. And while I think #3 is the least likely, I'd have to go based off the rest of your vibe to really guess which of the 3 it is. And none of them are particularly charitable.
Now if it was, y'know, 1980 or whatever, I'd likely myself not know about the history in enough context, but the Internet uh, exists now?
I wouldn't cancel you for it, but I'd just have a lower opinion of you and if I were your boss I wouldn't trust you to not accidentally cause a PR/HR scandal.
Correct, I didn't know that and had never heard of the guy. Which is why my comment was only about how I'd see the Confederate Flag vs Pride Flag. Can you link me a source about your claim? I couldn't find anything on Wikipedia and even ChatGPT4 doesn't seem to know anything about that? https://chatgpt.com/share/217de218-d414-4993-be60-c454b0c11b09
Isn't that the most famous thing about him?
Obviously no? It's that he was the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. Or possibly "He's that guy who had that Oscar-award winning movie about him" (which was centered around the former thing). If you genuinely believe otherwise, you live in a weird bubble.
You should go back in time and watch a bunch of "Dukes of Hazzard" episodes. The Confederate iconography there is clearly being used as a symbol of #Resistance against a corrupt and overbearing government.
You don't get to pick and choose what symbols mean to other people. Or, well, you can try, and that's where we get Culture War. *shrug*
> You should go back in time and watch a bunch of "Dukes of Hazzard" episodes. The Confederate iconography there is clearly being used as a symbol of #Resistance against a corrupt and overbearing government.
Yeah, this is what I meant by "the rest of your vibe". If you're some dude old enough to have been watching Dukes of Hazzard on TV, that's definitely going to weight me towards #1. Since I know that the Dukes of Hazzard choice of iconography was itself downstream of the 'Lost Cause' narrative perpetuated after the Civil War as a result of the failure of reconstruction.
> You don't get to pick and choose what symbols mean to other people. Or, well, you can try, and that's where we get Culture War. *shrug*
This is why it is important to become cognizant of the fact that these symbols do in fact mean different things to different people and treat them as such, instead of just thinking that your interpretation is the obviously correct one, and then taking it as a personal attack when you learn that someone else has a very different view of what that symbol means, for pretty well justified reasons.
"if I were your boss I wouldn't trust you to not accidentally cause a PR/HR scandal."
That's exactly the point. If right-wing beliefs were as acceptable as left-wing beliefs, "this guy thinks the Confederacy was pretty awesome, and General Lee was the epitome of gentlemanliness" would be just as acceptable, and just as implausible as a source of an HR crisis, as "this guy thinks there's nothing wrong with homosexuality, and that guy from the Village People is pretty cool."
Sorry, what. The Confederates pretty unambiguously betrayed the United States, I would've thought that most conservatives would dislike them too.
Pride feels pretty inoffensive? I don't think people associate them with violence and certainly not high treason against the republic.
If your lib example was the USSR flag or the guy who shot Ronald Reagan, at least the comparisons would be somewhat analogous.
Che Guevara?
maybe? Treason feels worse than a foreign enemy on foreign soil, plus there was the whole slavery thing.
>"The Confederates pretty unambiguously betrayed the United States..."
From the Union's POV; from the Confederacy's POV the other States were reneging on the deal thatt was made to get the South into the Union in the first place.
Irreconcilable differences of opinion, hence war.
Sure, but we live in the United States of America, not the Confederate States of America
The point is it's not "unambiguous", it's just that history is written by the victors.
Many universities require applicants to academic jobs to make diversity statements. And that's just the explicit political litmus tests, most examples of cancel culture are rather firings without a formal rule.
I work in academia and I am gobsmacked to hear someone say that colleges bend over backwards to hire conservatives. What right-wing influencers are you thinking of? These were people hired recently?
7 months in prison for a Hillary Clinton meme is the Douglas Mackey case. Definitely not false.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglass_Mackey
You could certainly argue that that _particular_ meme could be considered election interference, but it's a pretty common joke that others in other elections have made without being prosecuted.
The prosecution proved its case by introducing electronic communications between the conspirators discussing how to most effectively interfere with the election.
I don’t think the memes can be described as jokes, even if the content is similar to actual jokes, because jokes are intended to be funny. The discussions between the conspirators makes clear that the memes were intended to interfere with the election; being funny was not a goal.
As someone in the so-called "Bible Belt", no one cares one bit about an atheist bumper sticker. The Bible Belt has more angry disaffected ex-Christians who hate their parents than other places, and as a consequence has a great deal of performative atheism which draws no attention outside of an occasional eye roll.
I’m on the left and I think the left was more cancelly from about 2015-2021. I’m not sure what evidence would convince you, though.
You'd have to start by staking out what you mean by the left and the right. If you're talking about the world as a whole, I don't think the claim's defensible; as far as I know, nobody cancelled by the left gets the Salman Rushdie treatment.
Perhaps if you limit this to the West, and focus specifically on the social pressure style of cancellation rather than the kind with real teeth, you could convince me. But even then I'd want to see numbers.
What numbers could one show? What numbers would you show to demonstrate that right-wing religious cancellation is a problem (which I do believe)?
I did mean the West. You're right that no one cancelled by the Left in the West gets the Salman Rushdie treatment, but then they aren't treated like Solzhenitsyn either.
As for teeth, I think losing one's job, for instance, has teeth. It's certainly a powerful disincentive for a lot of people. Was anyone during McCarthyism on the receiving end of teeth? I would say so, but I don't think any of them were Rushdied.
Philippe brought up Rushdie, not me, but would you disagree that Islamist-governed countries like Iran still have a left-right spectrum and that the further to the right one is on that spectrum, the more one would be expected to support repressive acts like attacking Rushdie?
At the same time, I do think it's fruitless to try to work out a consistent view of "left" and "right" in a global context, especially for the purposes of keeping score on who's doing more canceling.
<i>Philippe brought up Rushdie, not me, but would you disagree that Islamist-governed countries like Iran still have a left-right spectrum and that the further to the right one is on that spectrum, the more one would be expected to support repressive acts like attacking Rushdie?</i>
TBH I'm not sure the terms "left" and "right" really make sense in the context of somewhere like Iran. In the west, meanwhile, Islamism is more associated with the extreme left than the extreme right -- the average "From the River to the Sea" chanter is not a member of a right-wing party, for example.
There may be something to what you say, which could also help explain why cancellation in academia (where supply of workers greatly exceeds demand) is so feared. Regardless, I think almost no one is indifferent to being fired even during good economic times—apart from material problems (not just the money but the stress of finding a new job, etc.), being judged to be a bad person and made to leave a workplace for that reason seems like it would feel humiliating and perhaps unjust to most people.
Also, I'm not sure how it was in the 1950s, but now pretty much every job (at least that I've come across) requires a reference from your last employer, which might be a difficult hurdle to jump if you were fired for having extremist opinions.
Someone would have to do a real study, I think. Maybe someone has?
The survey questions Scott quoted are a decent start. I'd want to see specific examples, though. Because the rhetoric of free speech has become associated with the right, but the practice is quite another story.
"If a schoolteacher were to post STATEMENT X to Facebook, should they be fired", that kind of thing.
You could also count up anti-speech laws and criminal convictions made under them.
Even without a study, you seem pretty confident that the right wing has consistently been worse than the left when it comes to cancellation. Maybe you are also relying on vibes and anecdotes? I think that's unavoidable when it comes to cultural phenomena like this. Similarly, your suggestion of counting anti-speech laws I think is pretty limited because a lot of cancellation is done via social and professional pressures (hence cancel *culture*). To my knowledge the people blacklisted under McCarthy weren't convicted of any crimes, but that didn't protect their jobs.
I mostly look at laws and extra-legal state actions. Because that's where the real power, and the real violence, is.
Beyond that, I hope I haven't given the impression that I hate anecdotes and vibes. They're a big part of everyone's thinking, mine included. I just wanted to make clear upfront that I can't be swayed by them, because I have my own vibes and my own anecdotes.
You've probably noticed that within the West, I haven't tried to convince you that the right is actually cancel-ier. I believe it is, but I'm fully aware that I don't have strong enough evidence on hand. My vibes and anecdotes won't convince you, right?
There are studies. Metrics on professor sanctions are tracked.
Typically 'the right' have organized groups external to the university, that attack liberal professors. More like roving hit squads.
Not just universities. Anybody that has followed state politics has seen this happen, 'the right' is very heavily funded and go after smaller targets that don't get the large media attention, so 'anecdotally' it appears 'the left' cancel more because they are bigger headlines, while 'the right' win many more smaller battles.
https://www.thefire.org/news/report-scholars-punished-their-speech-skyrocketed-over-last-three-years
"Sanction attempts initiated by on-campus groups typically come from the political left of the scholar, including 75% of the attempts from undergraduates and 82% from other scholars.
On the other hand, sanction attempts from off-campus groups typically come from the political right of the scholar, including 78% of the attempts from the general public and 86% from government officials."
>Someone would have to do a real study, I think. Maybe someone has?
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who want to control the output of the function "look for studies on which side of politics is worse". Many of them care enough and have the resources to do bogus studies. Many of them care enough and have the resources to control which such studies get published. And many of them care enough and have the resources to control which such studies are popularised.
Hence, I'm afraid you mostly have to do this yourself or rely on already-trusted people to do it for you.
> The survey questions Scott quoted are a decent start. I'd want to see specific examples, though.
Honestly, I think you'd see a huge swing in numbers if you simply replaced "hateful" with a different descriptor. The culture war has taught the right to believe that "hateful" is just a word the left uses as a synonym/dog-whistle for "not woke enough" (or to be more blunt, many people *on both sides* think it means "pro-white"). They're responding to its use in kind in the poll with that in mind.
I would like to see, for example, how republicans would feel about opinions that "damage the fabric of society".
You seem to put religious people in the 'Right' by default?
Have you looked at what eg the Pope is saying about the economy?
Globally, left and right barely have any meaning. They are just locally useful tribal identifiers. Any relation to actual positions or policies is purely coincidental.
The Pope appears to have made the Catholic Church hierarchy into the Anglican Church.
Which was for a long time the church to belong to in order to appear part of the secular hierarchy, but generally inspired the opposite of fervent belief. You show up on Sunday, stick money in the collection plate, and ignore them the rest of the time.
The *fervent* Catholic believers these days? Many of them reluctantly acknowledge the Pope's authority, but do a lot of "interpretation". Others just call him apostate.
That's an excellent point, Matthias.
Some links to more nuanced ways to measure and express our various political/social/ideological viewpoints, then trying to pin them solely on a crude, single "left/right" axis ...
https://incentivesmatter.substack.com/p/warning-labels/comment/13563281
I mean, if you're going to count Iran as being on "the Right" then I think you've got to count all Soviet/Chinese state oppression as being on "the Left". Then we get to have an argument about whether the Holocaust was right wing cancellation. I don't think any of that stuff can be credibly linked to the contemporary American mainstream right or left.
In terms of what actually happens, I suppose the example I'd go with was Gina Carano, who was fired from an apolitical acting job basically for being a Republican. It amazed me, a Democrat, at the time. Republicans are like half the US population and except for a few subcultures like country music, they are either absent or have to hide their identity in cultural institutions. No wonder these people are vengeful.
Reading the Wiki, it doesn't look like you're correct about this, at least when it comes to why she was fired for The Mandalorian. It seems like she was fired for social media posts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Carano#Political_views
Yeah, and the post she was fired for was pretty mild. She compared the hatred being stirred up against the unvaxxed to the hatred the Nazis stirred up against Jews. It was a dumb analogy, but if everyone who ever made a dumb Hitler analogy was fired from their jobs, crops would rot in the fields. She was pretty clearly fired for being MAGA.
You have to admit, though, that religion is incredibly censorious in our culture. It's much easier for an "anti-woke" person to achieve political office in the US than an atheist. Growing up in an evangelical family, there were tons of "un-Christian" artists and intellectuals who we were supposed to boycott- Seinfeld was pure evil, metal bands were all satanists, and Carl Sagan was an insidious atheist propagandist. Even now as an adult, admitting to my family that I'm an atheist or that I have a moderate liberal view of culture is unthinkable- not even because I worry about their reaction, but because I worry about the reaction their social circle would have toward them.
As a culture, we seem to take religious mobs in stride. When a gigantic group of religious people condemn and boycott something innocuous, rather than reacting with the fear and outrage that accompanies progressives doing that sort of thing, we often just laugh it off. But those groups do still exist, and still have an enormous amount of cultural and political power.
If you live in a very religious community, tons of things- usually enforced by social pressure, but people certainly do lose jobs or face similar consequences for being "un-Christian" all the time. Comments in support of abortion, for example, are very much a cancel-able offense in a lot of American South.
Even in broader American society, there can be a pretty big chilling effect- when was the last time you saw a politician who could admit to agnosticism, let alone atheism?
I don't know what your threshold is for "major," but the South does have cities with significant populations, even if they're not global superstar economies. My local metro area of ~1.5 million is still subject to state law that recently mandated the display of the ten commandments in public schools and made being visibly LGBT explicitly cancellable in schools and libraries. Broad swaths of the country have to live with censorious Evangelical cultural power, mostly in areas that don't offer the education and economic opportunities necessary to afford to move to a more tolerant place.
I don't recall any specifics aside from an accusation of Sagan being atheistic- which in those circles in the '90s, might as well have been an accusation of pedophilia or neo-Nazism. I haven't actually seen Contact, but it doesn't surprise me that a middle-ground theist position would be interpreted as atheism- imagine the left's reaction if an intellectual tried to argue for a middle ground between racism and anti-racism.
Sagan was an agnostic, but to religious people, wanting to apply the rules of evidence to miracles and arguing evolution comes to much the same thing.
Agnostic was what you used to call yourself when you were an atheist who didn't want to get canceled (murdered) by a religious mob. \S
I think it depends on what one means by "our culture." I grew up in a left-wing town and have attended and worked at left-wing institutions my whole life (and I still consider myself on the left). *I* never felt like anyone I knew was being prevented from watching Seinfeld, but there were a few years there (the period I identified) where I did feel a certain amount of pressure towards ideological conformity. So a lot depends on what circles one moves in.
As far as the *mass* culture, though—what one encounters in mass-market movies and TV, or in a college classroom other than at an explicitly religious college—I think religious pressure is still very weak and has been for decades. I have kids and all kinds of kids' entertainment (Inside Out 2 is a recent example) has characters who wear hijabs, who are queer-coded, etc. But I don't think I've ever seen a character in any of these works wearing a cross necklace. (All of that is orthogonal to cancel culture; I'm just talking about who is wielding power in mass culture these days.)
I think there's a lot of local variation in how dominant religious culture is.
"Growing up in an evangelical family" means "in the past, before the left got this powerful".
HIs comment indicates that he does not dare to speak openly about his atheism even today. That should suffice to demonstrate the ongoing power of the religious right.
Eh, the Left has backed off hard atheism as well, since pretty much everybody in the coalition except coastal elites takes that stuff reasonably seriously.
"Culture" seems to imply something broader than his family and immediate friend circle. Otherwise it's just an anecdote - meaningful to him for sure, but not really saying much about the broader picture.
No, that goes to show that they value what their family thinks of them.
There is a significant distinction between "my family would disapprove of my choices/beliefs" and "if this was public information, there are decent chances someone could convince their boss to get them fired".
> not even because I worry about their reaction, but because I worry about the reaction their social circle would have toward them.
Wasn't the above about how his family's social circle would react to his family?
The evangelical subculture still has enormous influence in the American South, especially (though not exclusively) in rural areas. That might all be a bit invisible to people living in larger liberal cities, but it's still tens of millions of people.
I grew up I a small Mississippi town full of Evangelicals. I felt out of place and eventually left. But I can't remember ever feeling like I need to stay quiet and let people assume I was evangelical because I was scared of social censure. I don't think there's a job in my home town I couldn't get because I'm not Evangelical besides pastor (mayyyyybe mayor?) No in my town was ever fired from a job or pressured into resigning because of ideological sins against Evangelicalism.
Would you have had difficulty getting a job if you were perceived as anti-Evangelical in an active sort of way? That's really what we're talking about here--cancel culture is generally aimed not at those perceived as not being in the ingroup, but rather at those perceived as being against the ingroup.
This is all true and I agree with it. But there's an important asymmetry, one that goes both ways: conservative/religious tyranny is almost always concentrated in particular families, or maybe small communities. It affects only a handful of people, even indirectly, but it affects them extremely strongly. While woke/progressive tyranny is far broader but also weaker.
You can make arguments for either being worse than the other. You suffer horribly as a child (if you're unlucky) but if you later escape and leave your family you're completely free of that control entirely, and most people are never affected by it at all. Or most people are to a small extent affected (chilling effects), some a fair bit more (but still nothing like a religious familiy) but across whole industries, pillars of society and even on the internet itself you can never fully escape it.
Personally, I think the first is much scarier (without a doubt) but the second is much more disgusting and outrageous (because of just how many people and institutions are complicit in it).
>But there's an important asymmetry, one that goes both ways: conservative/religious tyranny is almost always concentrated in particular families, or maybe small communities. It affects only a handful of people, even indirectly, but it affects them extremely strongly.
Partially I agree with you, but one exception with a broader reach is abortion laws, and, prior to SCOTUS rulings, laws on gay sex and marriage and on contraceptives. Those are generally statewide, rather than only affecting residents of small communities.
That might be specific to where you grew up and whom your parents were. As someone who grew up in the extremely secular Northeast, for as long as I can remember, overtly religious people were viewed with suspicion - especially if they were not the more acceptable "ethnic religious" types like Irish Catholic, Greek Orthodox, or Reform Judaism (where it was more about maintaining ties and traditions with your fellow co-ethnics than about the religion itself). Someone who was, for example, an Evangelical Christian and was open about it was viewed as either a potentially dangerous religious fanatic or else a grifter like Jim and Tammy Bakker. And this was back in the 1980s...it's even more pronounced today. Granted, I grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb; so the general vibe was that strong religious fervor was something reserved for overweight people living in trailer parks, or maybe for uneducated immigrants from impoverished countries.
I did live in the Bible Belt for a few years as an young adult; and noticed that while a majority would describe themselves as "Christian," in most cases the Christianity seemed to be a mile wide and an inch deep. However, it was certainly more socially acceptable to be overtly religious than it was in the Northeast. I don't recall anyone being cancelled or ostracized for atheism; but I also don't recall anyone being really overt about it, either - I would imagine many folks were in a similar situation to you, where they tended to be quiet about being an atheist so as not to upset their more-religious families.
That being said, a friend of mine swears he was fired from not one but two jobs for being an atheist. It seemed odd to me that both Guitar Center and Reptile World would be hotbeds of religious fervor, but according to him they were (this was in eastern Maryland, in the 1990s/early 2000s).
I think the most cancelly thing is being anti first amendment. Because when the government cancels you, you don't just get mean tweets, you go to jail.
So a loose list of anti first amendment stuff from the right: Donald Trump talks about wanting to open up libel laws, or Desantis wants to compel speech https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_WOKE_Act, Desantis going after corporations because he thought they were too woke; Florida, Montana, Tennessee and Texas all have drag show bans. This stuff is worse than obnoxious people on Twitter.
But people who get fired and blacklisted don't just get mean tweets either—their careers are ruined, their livelihoods are threatened. I'm against opening up libel laws, but I don't see how *taking a position* about libel laws (a position which he doesn't have the power to put into effect) could be worse, cancel-wise, than making someone unemployable.
Yes, I agree that your livelihood being threatened is bad. That's why I take government imprisonment very seriously! You're not very employable in prison.
Or after prison, for a good many lines of work.
Seems like a non-sequitur. Are you under the impression libel is a criminal offense, or that Trump suggested imprisonment ought to result in imprisonment?
I don't think either of these is true, off the top of my head. Trump said something about "I'm gonna open up libel laws so you can win lots of money by suing" or words to that effect, IIRC.
Even if you can't literally go to prison (though it looks like Florida's drag show ban does make it a misdemeanor criminal offense), I would argue that taking people's money with state force (via lawsuits or fines) is more dangerous and more effectively censorious than threatening someone's revenue with social pressure. You can at least theoretically resist social pressure, but resisting the police is much harder.
The other thing is that a sufficient number of mean tweets adds up to a denial of service attack, and also, a great many people are emotionally affected by a big barrage. Maybe they shouldn't be. If they were emotionally tougher, they wouldn't care, but the truth is that a high proportion of people aren't that emotionally tough.
I'm not even sure that it would be good if people in general were so emotionally tough they couldn't be affected-- being unshamable removes a social control which can be valuable.
And their family members may also be targeted.
Most groups have their anti-first-amendment contingent. For some, it's what constitutes harassment. Employers, acting under the threat of lawsuits, become proxies who censor workplace speech so that governments don't have to.
The bumper stickers on cars in the parking lot have been submitted as evidence in trials.
And perhaps an expanded understanding of harassment accomplishes good ends. I'm not trying to address that, one way or another. It's still a curtailment of speech.
"I think the most cancelly thing is being anti first amendment."
This is a strange argument to use against the right, since the First Amendment is the *only thing* stopping people being arrested for misgendering or sent to jail for having religious objections to homosexuality. Going by the fact that (as far as I can tell) *every westerm country other than the US* has either had those things happen or serious attempts to make them happen.
There's a reason you're not citing specific examples in the US like I did.
You'd have a point if California tried to ban hate speech. But they didn't.
Except for that time they made it a misdemeanor for long term care staff to intentionally misgender elderly patients. I doubt they stopped with that due to lack of ambition.
And in polls it's the left/Democrats who are much more likely to want to change the first amendment and ban "hate speech" or whatever.
I don't think we would ever reach agreement on who is the worst on this.
Is the "Stop WOKE Act" compelling speech? What speech is it compelling? It doesn't seem to even *prohibit* speech — only prevents employers from requiring employees to receive instruction that endorses the listed concepts.
"Obnoxious people on Twitter [sic]" is a strange thing to bring up, since no one is talking about standards of online politeness or anything. Unless—hold on, is it your contention that no one has been fired for being publicly "un-Woke", nor (e.g., since compelled speech has been mentioned) been made to sign/profess/endorse DEI statements lest they be fired, in the U.S.?
> This stuff is worse than obnoxious people on Twitter.
No it's not. The "obnoxious people" against freedom of expression are by far the more powerful side, and diminishing their power (or more likely, trying in vain to) is a good and noble thing.
Teachers working at publicly funded educational institutions are not 'speaking their mind' as free citizens when they attempt to invert alleged oppression hierarchies within society. The idea this should get a free pass is to suggest that voters and parents should have no influence over the contents of their childrens' curriculum, which is ludicrous.
In any case, this goes beyond constitutional principles. Stare at South Africa for more than fifteen seconds and tell me the woke coalition isn't an existential threat to civilisation at a basic physical level. Most people in the DR sphere are aware that home depot employees shouldn't really be high priority targets, but entertainers like Jack Black or Destiny and *especially* the parasites infesting the halls of academe and running the 4th estate *need* to be dislodged to avoid another holodomor at the hands of the charming people who think anti-vaxxers should be in internment camps. The point of cancellation is not to "teach them a lesson", but to remove malicious actors from power and staff the vacant positions with people who are, at minimum, less insane.
I think the evidence for the general efficacy of education is extremely weak when appropriate controls are introduced and I know Scott has written about this at some length...
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even
...so I'm actually broadly sympathetic to the 'end kid jail' argument. I'm just saying that free speech arguments don't really apply to the programs of publicly funded institutions.
Now that you mention it... I plan to homeschool my kids and give them a rigorous education, but for the parents who just need somewhere for their kids to go to keep them out of trouble... Who aren't really learning anything anyway... They might actually be just as well off playing video games all day.
Yes, end truancy laws, and... How about a free PlayStation and Meta Quest for households below the poverty line? Maybe Tim Minchin was on to something :D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSmuaaH1g60
One of the ironic parts is that basically *the original* case of cancel culture, long before Justine Sacco, was Stacy Snyder, a teacher who was cancelled due to a MySpace photo captioned "drunken pirate".
The intensity is cancel culture is a function of motive and opportunity. In the 2015-2021 period the right wing had not the cultural power to cancellations happen.
I think we need actual statistics here. Even at the height of woke cancel culture, it seemed that actual cancellations of academics were more likely to be Ward Churchill or Steven Salaita than someone who said something right wing.
As far as actual statistics I can definitely recommend this that was shared above: https://www.thefire.org/news/report-scholars-punished-their-speech-skyrocketed-over-last-three-years
As far as anecdotes, here are the prominent examples I can think of off the top of my head of people being disciplined, fired, or had jobs or opportunities withheld because they were taken to be saying or doing something right-wing or offensive to progressives:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/us/usc-chinese-professor-racism-intl-hnk-scli/index.html
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2021/10/11/professor-not-teaching-after-blackface-%E2%80%98othello%E2%80%99-showing
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/us/ucla-dei-statement.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/us/yale-professor-and-wife-targets-of-protests-resign-as-college-heads.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/us/dorian-abbot-mit.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/us/smith-college-race.html
(the last did not target academics, but college staff)
I do hope that FIRE keeps this database going forward. I had some concerns about the database because the early years were less well documented, so I was a bit skeptical about the magnitude of the supposed increase since 2000. But it'll be good to have a longer-running record to see how much these features change.
>Diversity statements are a new flashpoint on campus, just as the Supreme Court has driven a stake through race-conscious admissions. Nearly half the large universities in America require that job applicants write such statements, part of the rapid growth in D.E.I. programs. Many University of California departments now require that faculty members seeking promotions and tenure also write such statements.
(Woke) loyalty oaths for the 21st century?
FIRE has a number of resources along these lines, like
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/campus-deplatforming-database
and
https://www.thefire.org/news/introducing-fires-campus-deplatforming-database
To put it other words: even if I agree with most of your individual points, I can't agree with the post as a whole because it seems built upon a worldview that just isn't true. A worldview where leftwing cancellation is far more powerful than it is.
Take Richard Hanania. You favourably cite him here, as if he was an actual thinker and not a professional rationalizer. And you're in good company! Stanford brought him over to teach a seminar!
This is the "white nationalism is our only hope, black people are incapable of self-government, and we need to forcibly sterilize a quarter of the population based on IQ test results" guy. The ideologically pro-bullying guy. He's as offensive to the left - and to decent people in general - as a talking head can be. And he's doing fine. That should, I think, make you question your premises a bit.
Pardon me if I'm misreading you but it sounds like you're saying that Hanania *should* in fact be canceled—that he shouldn't be brought to teach at Stanford, that one should show one is a decent person by not citing him under any circumstances. And so your point is that, as long as he's *not* canceled, cancel culture from the left is weak and not strong. Do I have that right?
If so I disagree with it, but I also think you might have missed the point Scott made that cancellations by a side are most potent against those who share that side. If we're talking about academics, I'd point to Yoel Inbar as someone who seems to have had a job offer spiked over statements he made skeptical of DEI which caused grad students to circulate a petition demanding he not be hired. Inbar isn't a rightist like Hanania, he's a liberal academic, which is precisely what made him vulnerable to other liberal academics. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/us/ucla-dei-statement.html
I actually agree strongly with Scott's point there, sorry if that wasn't clear.
And the left absolutely does hold its people to a much higher standard than the right does. If that's what you mean when you say the left is (was?) more cancel-y, then we may not actually disagree.
But this post is about right-wingers retaliating for their own ostensible mistreatment. Taking revenge for their allegedly brutal oppression. Somebody else responded to my comment saying "their houses and plants burned down, and their lives destroyed". Which seems like a wildly inaccurate frame to me. I bring up Hanania as an example of how conservatives aren't actually being destroyed by cancellation.
...are you familiar with the story of the TikTok Couch Guy, by the way? I think it's an interesting one because someone was cancelled for no sane reason at all, completely apolitically. And I think keeping it in mind provides a bit of a corrective to the worldview where your all-powerful political enemies are using cancellation to crush those who defy them.
> I bring up Hanania as an example of how conservatives aren't actually being destroyed by cancellation
I mean, this is the trouble with arguments about "cancellation". It's impossible to come up with examples of people who have been truly "cancelled" because anyone who got truly cancelled is someone you can no longer bring to mind.
What about Michael Richards? Or Bill Cosby?
Bill Cosby got actually imprisoned for actual crimes, doesn't seem like "cancel culture" to me.
I had to refresh my memory on the Michael Richards situation. I'm not sure that going on a lengthy racist tirade in a stand-up show and having your career suffer somewhat afterwards is really a central example either.
I'm not familiar with that, but I don't see how a guy being canceled for apolitical reasons could possibly act as evidence against the idea that people do get canceled for political reasons.
As for the left holding its people to a higher standard, I'm in favor of high standards of *behavior,* not conformity. I mentioned Yoel Inbar; there's also Dorian Abbott as an example of someone who was disinvited from a talk for heterodoxy. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/us/dorian-abbot-mit.html That's not about high standards, it's about purity tests.
Completely random bullshit lightning strike cancellations help put political cancellations in perspective. If you're not aware of the internet's capacity for this kind of nonsense, cancellations feel far more planned than they actually are.
Once you've seen a similar process play out in service of absolutely no agenda, you stop looking for the unseen hand of the conspirator. Which is good, because as a scroll through this comment section shows, there are many people who feel as though cancellation is a well-orchestrated policy campaign. Which it isn't, in any direction.
Anyway, I'm not sure how much we actually disagree here. I talked about how we'd have to define the left and the right and the region and so on, but I probably didn't go far enough: we'd also have to be clearer about what exactly it means to be more inclined towards cancellation. And what cancellation actually is.
I regret the way I wrote the comment that started this chain. "More aggressive about this stuff"? Did I really expect everyone reading this to know what I meant by "this stuff"?
Kinda did, because I wrote that comment in three minutes and one draft. Rather silly in retrospect. Still, I hope this conversation has given some insight into my perspective, and why even someone who agrees with Scott on most of the object-level points might find this post disagreeable.
(One thing I appreciate about our host is his ability to actually make himself understood. Most people discussing this stuff have to spend half their time clarifying.)
I definitely don't think there is a conspiracy or organized agenda, BUT I think the fact that the internet makes cancellation so easy and tempting makes political cancellation a very powerful force, politics being something that makes us feel justified in much of what we do. At any rate, yes, thanks for the discussion!
Tom -- to your point regarding being in favor of high standards of behavior, not conformity, do you still stand behind your statement in an earlier Slow Boring comment that "I think honesty about despicable positions is not good! Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue." ? It seems like you're broadly sympathetic to the point that cancel culture is not good, but this particular normative position is kind of a core cancel-culture rationale / goal expression, in which the point (and the problem) is to dominate the information-space by making only one brand of opinion within-the pale.
For the record, normally I think this kind of old-comment dredging / referencing is dumb and, ironically, potentially inhibitory of free exchange in exactly the way that I'm saying is bad here, but in this case this particular comment of yours actually made more of a lasting impression on me than like 99% of SB comments, because I honestly felt viscerally repelled by it as seeming to endorse some of the worst impulses of cancel culture, viz., the incapacity to obtain--or even express--accurate information or even have clearly delineated opposing sides and values because everyone's terrified of expressing politically disfavored preferences; "despicable positions" obviously being a political judgment. This particular expression of sentiment by you has honestly been living rent-free in my head since February, and I promise I am genuinely just looking for closure as to your actual answer / position, not trying to play some stupid form of gotcha.
Well, I don't know how interesting my views will be to others here, but I'm flattered you remembered, even if not for the reasons I might like! I'll do my best to answer:
—I don't think my belief that some positions are despicable compels me towards cancel culture. Cancel culture, as I understand the term, means trying to make someone suffer personal or professional consequences for their views. I'm not in favor of that at all. If anyone is terrified of expressing their views around me, then I'm flattered again, but the fear is totally misplaced because I'm not going to do anything to them over it.
—I have no desire to dominate an information-space. If I am in a space where opinions I find despicable are commonly expressed and no one bats an eye, I may make myself scarce, but that's different from wanting to dominate anything.
—My standards for finding a position "despicable" are quite exacting. I don't think it's accurate to say I only want "one brand" of opinion represented. (I want to say that the comment in question was about how schools named after George Washington Carver have worthless students in them or something like that but I could be totally wrong.)
—I think almost everyone could identify some views they find despicable. Do you not have anything like that? I think "hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue" has proven its worth in the Trump era, where the failure to pay lip service to values like shared humanity, generosity, etc. hasn't felt like refreshing honesty to me, but like the End Times for civil society.
Telling someone that you don't want them to speak at your event (because you are concerned they may embarrass your organization) is not cancelation. This is true even if it is done by many organizations. I would argue that this is just capitalism.
Universities aren't supposed to be run on capitalistic principles!
What's the story about the TikTok couch guy?
I googled it, and determined it was a TikTok video in 2021 about a teenage girlfriend surprising her teenage boyfriend with a visit, and people commenting about all the "red flags" in the video indicating he was probably cheating on her or something. Comments like they had never seen someone so unhappy to see their girlfriend, did he slip something unknown to someone else, where did that cell phone come from, etc.
The couple is apparently still together, so no lasting harm was done to their relationship, but they did gain inadvertent (in)fame.
That some of us get big enough to avoid cancellation is not an argument against the existence of cancel culture. Yes, Aristocrat Officers receive greater consideration than conscripts and even greater consideration than random civilians who get their houses and plants burned down, and their lives destroyed.
---
You guys destroyed random civilians, who had never contributed more than 100 bucks to your enemy. Do you not see how awful that is?
Who are “you guys” here? I don’t believe there has ever been a period where this sort of thing happened only to people on one half of the political spectrum, or even a 75-25 split.
Also, there are no monolithic groups here. Liberals like Nicholas Christakis have been arguing against cancellation consistently for years, alongside conservatives like Robert George and moderates like Conor Friedersdorf.
Scott is attempting to convince Right readers of how to act. You aren't the audience.
I don't know how retarded one needs to be for an enemy to convince him to change how he acts.
Prospective from the right here.
Scott seems to be condemning cancel culture in general, and also pointing out that two wrongs don't make a right. As it happens I agree with the general thesis that it's wrong to cancel people over expressed opinions (punishment doesn't fit the crime), that just because the shoe's on the other foot now doesn't mean people with leftist opinions should be canceled, and that the idea of demonstrating how wrong it is will cause the left to feel remorse and stop them from canceling people won't work.
I'm very confused here. Is 'the left' no longer in power? Pre-emptively or something? And so 'the right' has hands on all the levers? I suppose I'm just a bit pea-brained, but I just can't keep up.
I don't think "the left" is an actual entity here, but rather the grass-roots people who identify with left-leaning goals. In this case, they exercise power en-masse by publicly, often with social media, causing offending businesses and/or people hardship by announcing they are all offended and refusing to deal with that company/person. Similarly, "the right" now has a target to cancel, and as a whole decided to do it.
"The Left" is still in control of the presidency and Senate. The government itself doesn't cancel anyone. If they do, it is done by arresting and/or suing them.
I think the one thing you and I are in agreement on, Philippe, is that Hanania annoys the socks off us both. I don't consider him to be an intellectual, but oh well, what do I know, I'm just a peasant clod.
> This is the "white nationalism is our only hope, black people are incapable of self-government, and we need to forcibly sterilize a quarter of the population based on IQ test results" guy.
While he is still a race realist, as far as I can tell, Hanania has since entirely repudiated white identitarianism, and is now some sort of open borders, elite human capital maximalist.
He’s even criticized race realism on pragmatic grounds.
If Present Hanania had first emerged then he’d be considerably less hated, but most of his haters don’t even know what Present Hanania believes.
>open borders, elite human capital maximalist
If he means "Yay, brain drain, H1B visas" then I agree with him (with some reservations during a tech industry downturn). That would match up with "elite human capital", but isn't the usual interpretations for "open borders".
Like others have said, Hanania has repudiated white nationalism. He is in fact now a big fan of immigration, and routinely mocks white nationalists for being dumb fucks.
Of course right-wing opinion bloggers/journalists don't get cancelled for being right-wing, just as left-wing opinion bloggers/journalists don't get cancelled for being left-wing. Journalism, especially opinion journalism, is inherently political; people care about the views of the writers they read, so if left-wing media get rid of right-wing writers, there is enough demand to support explicitly right-wing media that hires them (or in a blogger's case, they support him directly).
The important sphere of cancel culture is not-inherently-political institutions. The overwhelming majority of these have become left-wing in practice in terms of what speech they allow or disallow, and what messages they put out, at least when it comes to cultural (as opposed to economic) issues and among those that take a stance at all; and in some sectors the overwhelming majority do take a stance. But it only directly affects the small minority of employees who especially prominently express their opinions, so there's insufficient demand to sustain right-wing alternative institutions. The indirect effect is that less politically engaged people, who don't explicitly seek out right-wing or left-wing media or institutions, are disproportionately exposed to a marketplace of ideas that's artificially tilted in favor of the left.
Are there areas where Hanania was doing real research? Why did Stanford want him?
I think your comment is disingenuous.
You are presenting things Hanania wrote anonymously under a pseudonym in the past and completely disavowed as soon as they were brought to light as if they are things he manages to be successful while espousing. I am pretty sure he would be completely cancelled if he started saying these things today!
You are also inaccurately minimizing the professional repercussions he experienced in spite of those things. While it's true Stanford didn't rescind the invitation to talk about his book that was extended before they were revealed, he lost his affiliation with UT-Austin.
I'm not hugely familiar with Hanania, but it strikes me that if he writes something objectionable under a pseudonym (black people are inferior to whites), but in public presents a more acceptable version of a similar intellectual argument (let's get rid of civil rights law), it's reasonable to suspect that his 'private' statement might be indicative of his true beliefs. I think that's the (theoretically) cancellable offense here. If Hanania had been publicly espousing these things all along, he probably wouldn't be in a position to be 'cancelled' at all, he'd never have become famous or notable in the first place.
To draw a parallel hypothetical, let's say a pro-Palestine author/activist was revealed to have written something celebrating 9/11 or the holocaust under a pseudonym in the past. It seems fair to suspect their views even if they disavow those statements today. Whether they should be cancelled or not, the 'offense' is that they are secretly motivated by anti-semitism and Islamic fundamentalism, not that they openly espouse it.
Richard Hanania disavowed his right wing views and is now basically a center-right guy (who is more socially liberal than most democrats) who spends most of his time mocking conservatives. Is he really good example of conservative impunity to cancellation? It would be an own goal for progressives to cancel him. And isn’t this anecdote training pretty pointless? One could point out that Angela Davis is still a celebrated - and employed - public figure on the left, or any of the myriad of openly racist progressives or writers who still have jobs at think tanks or universities or newspapers, and it would prove just as little.
Do you honestly believe that a conservative could talk as freely and derogatorily about black peoples or women as is common for many people on the left to talk about white people or men, and not have a higher chance of being fired or sanctioned? I know the reply is ‘but it’s different, our motives are better, something something power differentials,’ but conservatives disagree with that model, and this isn’t a dispute that can be resolved empirically.
I suppose the conclusion is, your conception of how merciful your side is depends on your side’s conception of what is sinful and the magnitude of the sin. Two ideologies with differing ideas about what is wrong and how wrong it is will probably never agree on which side is more punitive even if they are privy to all the same information.
The only genuine taboo in America is criticizing Israel. Seems to me a lot of the faux outrage about „cancel culture” is to distract people from this fact.
Due to the First Amendment, in these sorts of protests law enforcement is legally only allowed to punish violence or other violations of the law (and incitement to imminent lawless action, and true threats of violence, and technically fighting words but that doctrine is basically dead.)
It's because you're seen as associating with the bloodthirsty palestinian groups? (Tbh I assume, perhaps unfairly, that you are a bloodthirsty monster based on your question.)
Few people have a genuine opinion on Israel unless they're Jewish, crazy, monsters, antisemitic, or reacting to the crazies and monsters.
"Few people have a genuine opinion on Israel unless they're Jewish, crazy, monsters, antisemitic, or reacting to the crazies and monsters." why do you think so?
This seems accurate to me, also. Israel gets far more attention in the West than other parts of the world outside the US and Europe, proportionately, so that tends to influence who responds.
The Palestinian Authority has consistently refused a 'Two State Solution," demanding as an unmet requirement the opportunity for all Palestinians to become Israeli citizens and live in Israel. Given the history of violence in the region, this is rather like demanding a complete surrender followed by an invasion. The Right of Return as defined by Geneva 4 attaches to citizenship more than land, and Israel would be able to choose between which of the two (citizenship or land) should be used to repatriate refugees, if needed. And denizens of the West Bank were former citizens of Jordan before Jordan (somewhat understandably) washed its hands of the situation. If West Bank Palestinians had a "Right of Return" at all, it would be to Jordan and not to Israel which they were never citizens of.
And Gazans were, similarly, never Israeli at all. Though many wouldn't have a prior citizenship to revert to unless we went back to the Ottoman Empire and decided they were Turks. Egypt's control was an occupation. Gazans were not granted Egyptian citizenship just like they were never granted Israeli citizenship.
In short: the reasonable solutions to where Palestinians should live are severely hampered by Palestinian rejection of a 'two state solution' due to their idiosyncratic demand for a Right of Return to Israel despite never being Israeli citizens. If critics of Israel ignore that problem, one is forced to ask 'why?'
That may be a problematic level of detail and too controversial for Scott. If so, he's welcome to remove the post. But I think that's what it boils down to: while specific criticisms of Israel are possible (since everyone has a list of bad deeds somewhere), most of the general criticisms are untenable and ethically inconsistent. And given that, one then needs to ask why someone would make untenable and inconsistent claims.
First, the largest Demographic group in Israel is Mizrahi Jews who were forced out of Middle Eastern countries or were relatively native to the MENA. (I think you know this?) Anti-zionist forces (or whatever we want to call the divided coalition who are united on this particular issue) are not going to spare that group destruction or oppression, as they have never exhibited anywhere close to such a level of discernment or precision in the past. Neither have they expressed strong concerns for the rights of that group, which indicates an inconsistent application of ethical standards.
If it is accepted that Israel is a valid country and vital to protecting the rights of the majority of Israelis, which includes both Jews and non-Jews, then the question of whether a Polish Jew, part of an acknowledged diaspora, has a Right of Return becomes a question of, at worst, whether, first, they threaten the lives and values of other Israelis and, second, whether Israel as a polity has the right to control its own borders. A random Polish Jew has a relatively very low chance of posing such a threat to other Israelis, and a reasonable chance of protecting the lives and liberties of Mizrahi Jews and even native Druze and Israeli Muslims and Christians. Palestinian groups, in contrast, have participated in the attempted overthrow of a few of their neighbors. Black September was welcomed into Jordan since they were former Jordanian citizens. They tried to overthrow the Jordanian government in thanks for the hospitality they received. They assassinated Jordanian prime minister Wasfi Tal. They were eventually forced out of Jordan, a country that they had the actual 'Right to Return to' under international law. And... nobody complains that Palestinians are unable to exercise their Right of Return to Jordan?
It was similar with Kuwait. Kuwait was willing to absorb Palestinian refugees. Arafat supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the foreign overthrow of the Kuwaiti government. The number of Palestinians in Kuwait dropped to near zero soon afterwards.
And, of course, Palestinian groups have participated in numerous military and terrorist actions against Israel, which is (can we agree?) an absolutely terrible way to try to get into any country unless you can completely conquer it in war. Which seems to be the intention.
I hesitate to blame an entire group for the decisions of their leaders. But these were some particularly bad decisions. And they didn't seem to lead to significant international or even local pushback against those leaders, which indicates at least tepid support. I would very strongly predict that such violent conflicts would be worsened dramatically with unlimited Palestinian immigration into Israel. Countries like Egypt won't accept Palestinian refugees for fear that they would ally with revolutionary Muslims in Egypt and try to overthrow the government. They do this even though Egypt once occupied Gaza just like Israel has. (Though Israel tried taking a very hands-off attitude from 2005-2023, for all the good that did them.) And received no condemnation that I'm aware of when Egypt did occupy Gaza. I write this to make clear to all readers, not just yourself, that Israel's concerns and appraisals are not, in any way, unique in the region. If they receive unusual criticism it is not because they have carried out unusually bad actions.
The fact that Jews have a very long history in Israel, predating the founding of the Islamic faith, is, partly, a response to the claim that Israel is a 'European colony' or similar claims which you, yourself, seem to hold. Israelis have their own language, money, government, etc. The partial involvement of European powers in the creation of Israel is not more "colonial" in this regard than the creation of Jordan, Syria, or Iraq.
"Women's rights seem to get far more attention in the US and Europe than in other parts of the world, this probably means according to you that anyone who has an opinion on Women's Rights is misogynist, crazy, or a monster."
I think you would need to choose a foreign country or one-among-many outgroups to make the analogy work. If people complained about Women's Rights in, say, Iran but not in, say, Turkey. And if, hypothetically, the degree of women's oppression was objectively the same in both countries (I don't claim to know) then we might very reasonably ask why people complain about one country and not the other. And if there was no good reason, we might fairly label this discrimination a kind of bias or animosity, if there's any serious commitment or attachment to the position.
"Ah yes, the famously ethically-inconsistent and untenable "Colonialism is bad and killing 40K people in less than a year seems kinda sus'"
Well, you'd need to find analogous situations for comparison. The attack on Pearl Harbor was an attack on a military base, not, primarily, unarmed civilians. Yet it was accepted rather uncritically as a valid cause for war even among those Americans who were staunch isolationists. Israel had seen over 1000 of its people killed. It had seen over 200 hostages taken, sexual assault used as a weapon of war (confirmed, even, by Al Jazeera.) And it was subject to a barrage of over 3000 missiles before it even acted. A barrage which Hamas swore would continue. This is a reasonable act of war by any standard. Hamas's use of human shields, their longstanding refusal to separate and differentiate military from civilians, and even their outright willingness to blame their friendly fire incidents on Israelis allow us to assign quite a bit of blame from those 40K dead on Hamas. Honestly, the notion that Hamas could do all those things to their neighbor and you expect Israel to just say "well, missiles are falling on our population centers from an enemy who has called for our complete destruction. Guess we just have to take it" seems, in your words, 'sus.'
Or else what would an appropriate response by Israel to such an attack look like?
"any random Jewish rando who has never been to the Middle East in the past 2000 years". No one has been anywhere for 2000 years.
The past lives in people's imaginations very vividly.
I mean I wasn't talking about the very complicated debate of if and how a two state solution should be implemented, which I have no expertise on, I'm talking about reactions to the violence currently being done by the Israel state, that is criticized by numerous organizations and citizens that are, I think, not all bloodthirsty crazy monsters and dismissing them as so seems to be a way to avoid this conversation. But yeah maybe too controversial and I'll delete if needed.
It's not really possible for me to address an Ad Populum argument.
My point is to point out that some positions are problematic and let that lead people where it may.
There are several issues here:
Wealthy donors, some of whom likely oppose the existence of Israel, have funded universities worldwide.
"Between 2014 and 2019, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates donated at least US$4.4 billion to numerous US colleges. Together with donations from other Middle East nations, over the five years in question, more than US$5 billion was donated to American universities from authoritarian Middle Eastern nations."
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20231208230952463#:~:text=Between%202014%20and%202019%2C%20Qatar,over%20half%20a%20billion%20dollars.
I'm not familiar with the data for the rest of the world, but I assume there must be some analog.
Despite Israel's developed economy, Arab and Muslim population and funding and economic influence dwarfs that of Israel.
Also, Hamas uses a strategy which is explicitly designed to try and maximize Gazan deaths, both on paper and in real life, for propaganda purposes. They use human shields, in violation of international law, attacking from near and under hospitals and other critical infrastructure. They use child soldiers and then use them as propaganda when they are killed. They count all deaths as "civilian" deaths and tend to oppose the separation of militants from civilians.
Part of the purpose here is to radicalize the Muslim and foreign world and reverse the David vs Goliath narrative which was invited by large nations ganging up on much smaller Israel.
Hamas also outright lies in terms of casualties. For example:
The Al Ahli explosion was, at first, "caused by an Israeli airstrike." It was claimed that there were 500 dead. It was later demonstrated that an Islamic Jihad missile went off course (as many missiles do) and blew up in the hospital parking lot. Foreign estimates are of ~50-10 or so dead and not by Israel. But Hamas maintains the '500 killed by Israel' number despite all evidence.
This strategy is problematic, but longstanding and effective.
There's also problematic coverage in the foreign press, notably by the BBC. Israel fought to release hostages who were being held in 'civilian' homes. The BBC reported that the hostages "were released." As if Hamas did it voluntarily. There have been many such problems by the BBC. Why do they do this? I have no idea. But it happens again and again. Numbers put out by Hamas are accepted uncritically by the BBC, despite the fact that the journalists there should know better by now and exercise a bit of critical sense.
Finally, of course, on October 7th 2023 Hamas violated a truce and killed over 1000 Israelis including 36 or more children. The majority of those killed October 7th were peace advocates at the Nova festival. Hamas used sexual assault as a weapon of war. (Even Al Jazeera acknowledges this.) They took over 200 hostages. They fired a barrage of over 3000 missiles into Israel, and promised to continue doing so. They also immediately called for a truce (while keeping the hostages.) Israel responded that if Hamas surrendered and returned the hostages they would agree to a truce, but that condition was not met. Since there were strong and reasonable demands to stop the missile attacks and free the hostages, Israel had to go into Gaza.
October 7th was a pretty straightforward Causus Belli and a strong response from Israel had to be expected. Israel had stayed out of Gaza since 2005, (though there was an embargo on potential military material), and instead of this leading to peaceful relations with Gaza it was used to arm and prepare for this massive attack, with promises of future attacks.
I could address foreign criticism if specific criticisms are pointed to. Some have been misrepresented. Some have been off base. There was an attempt at one point by Israel to restrict food aid in order to barter for exchange of Israeli hostages. While this was fairly criticized, the importance to Israel that its hostages be returned needs to be also be understood.
Okay, so respond to this comment by typing out the n-word
If you don't, I feel like you've just lost this argument
(Please don't actually, I don't want to be responsible for having that typed out in this forum, and the fact that I'm begging you not to only proves my point)
It is somewhat irritating to not be able to treat "only" as meaning what it says.
Hannes Jandl _could_ have made the slightly weaker (if still false) claim that criticising Israel was a major taboo in the USA, and not left themselves open to a single counterexample.
Treating previously well-defined words as intensifiers blurs the language, and makes it harder to communicate accurately.
So using the n-word is something conservatives feel is their right to do? You can’t express your political opinion without using a racial slur?
It's a genuine taboo
It seems like you're now defining "genuine taboo" to only include things which conservatives feel entitled to do and/or is necessary to express a political opinion. I'm unfamiliar with that definition, and I feel you should define your terms explicitly if you're gonna use them in such an ideosyncratic way
I see what you did there with “ideosyncratic”.
I don't. It looks like a typo. There's a potential overlap with the word "ideology", but that would make no sense in the context of the conversation. It's not common to have an ideologically-driven position on what does or doesn't count as a taboo. What did he do?
C'mon Hannes, if there is only one genuine taboo, then there are no such things as racial slurs.
If you're going "the right wants to use racial slurs, *that's* what they mean by 'free speech'!" then congratulations, you are a good lefty and are using the approved shibboleths of the Right Side of History.
The point is that the naughty word is taboo, so therefore it shows that criticizing Israel is not the only taboo.
I'll let George Carlin do it for me. I'm not skilled enough to use that particular word myself without upsetting people.
https://youtu.be/mUvdXxhLPa8?si=3SlPIol-xxVG3TwU
How can it be a taboo when so many people criticize Israel?
I agree with you in the more general sense, but Americans' relationship with the n-word is genuinely schizophrenic.
I think of a taboo as something which has a strongly felt compulsion against breaking it by a large majority in a society.
There are weaker words-- deprecated? risky?-- for weaker restrictions. For example, in a lot of places being pro-Israel or anti-Israel can get you insulted, ostracized and/or boycotted, but there are plenty of people with one opinion or the other expressing it in public.
I'm not the person saying the n-word (note that we're not spelling it out) in this discussion. It's a weird situation. There are black people who hate the word, black people who use it in the derogatory sense, and black people who use it (possibly? probably?) ending with 'a' instead of 'er' as ingroup bonding. It's a gamble or risk for white people to use it in any sense or even to use words that sound like it. I'm describing the situation as I see it, not approving of it.
Here's an example of a real medium-level taboo. Bryan Johnson, a wealthy man who is trying to optimize his health, tracks his erections while he's sleeping. He thinks that having erections then is a sign of good health.
He doesn't just track them, he talks about the records in detail.
This is used as evidence that he's too ridiculous to be worth listening to, even though some of what he does might be reasonable.
A possible low-level taboo. I've read complaints in /r/childfree on Reddit about co-workers saying that "They are trying for a child." on the grounds that the complainant would rather not hear about other peoples' lives at a level that implies information about their sex lives. Shrug. I'm childfree myself, and I don't think that such a statement is objectionable. ( I'm rather in favor of _planned_ children, by would-be parents, rather than accidental ones. )
The only genuine taboo in the Soviet Union is saying we need fifty Stalins. Seems to me a lot of the faux outrage about "sending dissidents to the gulags" is to distract people from this fact.
That assessment is always going to depend upon what you view as equivalents. Is naming your cafe "Che Cafe" more like naming it "Reagan Cafe" (probably cancellable only in Portland and Berkeley), or more like naming it "Hitler Cafe" (home run into the parking lot behind the ballpark of cancellable)?
I wrote this quickly at work, but to elaborate: I think that someone's answer to the question of whether Che Guevara is more like Ronald Reagan or more like Adolf Hilter, is going to tell me almost everything I need to know about how they'll regard people trying to cancel "Che Cafe".
To someone who thinks Guevara is in the same broad category as Hitler, rightists are amazingly tolerant: 90% of them are pretty chill with Che Cafe in their neighborhood, whereas Hitler Cafe would instantly be shut down.
To someone who thinks Guevara is in the same broad category as Reagan, rightists are cancel-crazy hypocrites: a full 10% (!!!) of them really want Che Cafe gone, but they fight tooth and nail to defend Reagan Cafe.
In either case, it seems like someone's judgment about how censorious a team is, is mostly a shadow of how relatively seriously they think different issues are.
Philippe, I'm old enough to have sat through the lectures about "censorship bad" from the liberal side of the aisle. All the associated "you're anti-freedom, you're anti-sex, you're anti-fun, you're religious bigots trying to impose your values on others" stuff. You have to tolerate others who don't think or believe as you do.
Then, when they got their hands on the levers of power, they were censoring all around them. But that wasn't bad old censorship that the right does, no no! This was being against hate speech. You don't want horrible people who think horrible things to be able to say those horrible things in the public square, do you?
Either it's always wrong and should not be done, or it's not wrong. My view is that hell yeah, I believe in an element of censorship because, while you're free to think what you like, not everything needs to be put out in public.
Remember that sanctimonious little comic from XKCD?
https://xkcd.com/1357/
Well now it's happening to them, so enjoy "being yelled at, boycotted, have your show cancelled, or get banned from an internet community".
I hate that we got to this point, but it's an undeniably potent feeling to shove their faces in their own cant.
"Now" it's happening to them?
I promise, since the birth of the left, there has never been a time when left-wingers were not yelled at. Nor has there ever been a time when yelling or online banning has actually suppressed a major political tendency.
When I argued against inflating the power / effectiveness / organization of left-wing cancellation, I had exactly this kind of post in mind.
Yeah, but now they have power - and it cannot be denied that they have power, be it the soft power of culture or the hard power of "we can get this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Brinton as an administration official" (turned out to be a bad choice but oh well).
And now they're getting both the expectations of "it will always be this way" (remember "demographics is destiny"? or the incredulity over "why are all these right-wing populist parties doing so well in European elections?") and - here is the crucial difference - having their own weapons turned against them. Censorship might have been a traditional right-wing tool. Now it's cancel culture for wrong think and that arose on the left.
> And now they're getting both the expectations of "it will always be this way" (remember "demographics is destiny"?
This is something that's really confused me. There's been plenty of Democratic celebrating over the growth of Hispanics, who vote Democratic. The argument was common that, if we could get enough Hispanics, the Democrats would permanently win the battle for electability.
But the structure of the electoral system guarantees two parties with roughly equal support. That's still true after you pack the electorate with any group. Stipulating that group to be "Hispanics", the obvious result is that certain political positions, held by supermajorities of Hispanics, will permanently win out in the marketplace of ideas, while the parties will shift their positions to maintain a 50-50 split of support.
And that struck me as a bizarre thing for Democrats to celebrate; again going by the political positions of "Hispanics", you'd expect that left-wing economic policies would be much more firmly entrenched, while, for example, the push for women in the workplace would be sharply curtailed. Party constituencies don't tend to support the whole platform.
I think the Democratic base trends young, and doesn't think about those long term considerations. Instead, they seem to think that current trends can go to infinity and that means they'll always win. It's the same basic complaint I have about a lot of leftist thought - I rarely disagree with their economic goals (more people better off), but they don't seem to believe that people will ever adjust their behavior to react to the new normal. Unintended consequences are a real thing.
Democratic politicians, like Republicans, seem to be opportunistic vampires who always think short term and are willing to espouse completely different core beliefs the moment the polls shift. Like Democrats around gay marriage in 2008-2012 or Republicans around Medicare and Social Security.
>Nor has there ever been a time when yelling or online banning has actually suppressed a major political tendency.
You can argue about whether GamerGate was "major", but it was basically shut down that way.
Also, remember that for the most part you can't see successfully-crushed ideas.
"being yelled at, boycotted, have your show cancelled, or get banned from an internet community" may not be violating free speech, but it does impede it. Conservatives did not enjoy being canceled, so what did they do? They shut up, or lied. Polls indicated Clinton would win the 2016 election, if I recall correctly, but ballot box told the story pollsters didn't get from people afraid to express their actual thoughts.
The polling error was less than 5% right? I feel like people assign overly strong narratives to what ultimately isn't that large an effect, numerically
I'm not sure, but the error was outside the bounds of the stated level of significance. I believe it would be wrong to dismiss it as a statistical outlier instead of an issue with the polling process.
See e.g.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-just-a-normal-polling-error-behind-clinton/
(written just before the 2016 election)
"I'm not sure, but the error was outside the bounds of the stated level of significance. I believe it would be wrong to dismiss it as a statistical outlier instead of an issue with the polling process."
I mean I don't think it was purely a *sampling* error, but also any corrections they make should be small subtle changes on the margins, not huge ones as your comment seemed to be impling.
Pew looked into polling errors, and found it overrepresented liberal voters. https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2021/04/08/confronting-2016-and-2020-polling-limitations/#:~:text=Retiring%20overrepresented%20panelists.,the%202016%20and%202020%20elections.
"The raw, unweighted share of new ATP recruits identifying as Republican or leaning Republican was 45% in 2015, 40% in the 2018 and 38% in the 2020. This trend could reflect real-world change in participation (i.e., Republicans are increasingly resistant to polling) or real-world change in party affiliation (i.e., that there is a decline in the share of the public identifying as Republican), but it might also reflect methodological changes over time in how the ATP is recruited"
Besides, 5% may sound small, but as I said, it was outside the margin of error.
Liberals may ignore conservatives, who will ignore them right back, until voting.
When they are weaker than you, they ask you for freedom because that is according to YOUR principles; when they are stronger than you, they take away your freedom because that is according to THEIR principles. (From Frank Herbert.)
This is why the "Left" used to be in favor of free speech and now oppose it.
Outgroup homogeneity bias.
This is why the "Left" used to be in favor of free speech and now oppose it.
I don't think that we can talk about "canceling" as if it is some absolute quantity that could be used to compare one group to another. "That group is a 5 in canceling! That group is a 4!" No. If a group allows you to say what you want to say, they will be seen as tolerant. If they won't let you say something that seems obvious or vital then they will be seen as oppressive. Different people want to say different things.
"If I'm wrong, you can try and prove me wrong."
I'm honestly not sure we could.
I'd rather not repeat everything I said to Tom Hitchner to you. You'd be better off reading my conversation with him.
Yeah, as a non american I am very puzzled by this and I think this might be a bias of Scott and Scott's audience being in very liberal circles.
It's definitely a post directed at Americans, and I implicitly understand everything Scott wrote here. It's kind of wild to me that people like you and Philippe don't get it. I guess things look a lot different outside the US culture bubble.
I feel that from where I stand I see the US as very patriotic and religious compared to my country (and very right wing, the american democratic party would be considered right wing in my country I think, but the comparison is complicated because right/left is defined in the US more in term of position on certain social issues like abortion and less on economic views), so I am always puzzled by people describing the country as ruled by crazy leftists cancelling everyone who disagree with them. I'm sure this is true in some specific circles but just as much as you can get cancelled in other circles for not supporting the troops maybe? I don't even think this is a case of "elites" because about half of the "elites" (meaning people having some amount of money and power) I see online are Republicans calling trans people groomers or something.
Well that's my point, the comparison is complicated. But a. I'm not sure it's accurate to say no one cares about economic issues anymore, b. Maybe racism is more obvert in some parts of Europe than in the US but I see some non-economic issues, such as abortion or climate change where the politicians of my country would be considered left-wing in the US, even the far right does not consider climate denialism or anti-abortion to be politically viable (the difference between discourse and action is obviously another debate).
Your country's Right not openly trying to ban abortion doesn't prove much unless your Left *are* trying actively to remove all restrictions and term limits whatsoever. (And since several US states are basically the only places in the world with no term limits at all, and almost all of Europe had earlier limits than the entire US before Dobbs, this seems unlikely).
All it proves is that your politicians consistently stay a lot closer to the centre.
If you can say that the Democrats would be considered right-wing in your country, then I'd put an almost 100% chance that your country has a slew of opinions that are literally illegal to express, and a maybe 80% chance that the vast majority of those opinions are right-wing ones.
So your claim that Scott's perspective is *less clear* from your country's perspective just looks incoherent to me.
I think the debate about "cancelling" is more complicated than whether some speech is legal or not, since in the US you can get cancelled without having broken the law. And I wasn't talking about the situation of my country, which is another debate, but how I perceive the US cancel culture, as someone not living there.
I mean, yeah, obviously where there are hate speech laws, nobody bothers with the hue and cry; they just alert the police.
The rest of the world doesn't have any right-wing parties of note. Approximately nobody is working to reduce the scope of government like getting rid of government run/funded healthcare, welfare, or pensions. At-best there are race-based agitators who are a pale imitation of the real thing.
I feel like there's a definitional problem here?
In America, our right wing has traditionally (in the last century, anyway) been a mashup of Burkean conservatives, libertarians, and religious groups, most of which don't have much traction elsewhere (except for the religious, but even then I get the impression that non-American religious parties would be happier with an established state religion). Instead "right" seems to mean nationalist, anti-immigration, and anti-communist, and often gets rounded off to "fascist" (whatever that happens to mean at the moment).
And the "left" likewise tends to refer to actual honest-to-goodness communists, totally the real thing.
I think America is just kinda weird, and we're exporting our weirdness.
The US is to the right of most developed countries on some issues such as most economic issues and religion, but it's among the most left-wing when it comes to wokeness and identity politics (issues related to race, gender, sexual orientation), especially race politics. Cancel culture is mostly about these latter cultural issues.
Outside the US culture bubble, blasphemy and hate speech laws make the very idea of free speech risible.
I don't even entirely agree with that. In many countries, there are hate speech laws but they are rarely enforced and only apply to really far-right speech that wouldn't convince anyone who isn't already pretty radically right-wing anyway; they don't really affect the balance of power between the left and the right, or even between the center-right and the radical right. Meanwhile, many Americans risk getting fired for a very broad range of speech, including center-right speech that would have a chance to flip a left-winger over to the right.
Formally, hate speech laws are a worse violation of the freedom of speech than American cancel culture, and the potential risk of how bad their effects can get is greater, but in practice, at present, they don't necessarily have worse effects.
I recently read of this hilarious story from Germany of a woman calling a man who raped a 15-year-old girl a "dishonorable rapist pig" and getting a harsher sentence than he did. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/woman-jailed-for-insulting-gang-rapist/news-story/e07e47bdc9869fe517c70ac900bddf7b. I'd consider that kind of thing a pretty bad effect.
Konstanin Kisin remarks on how rarely these laws are really enforced, comparing arrests in Russia for social media comments to those in Britain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r7GRx8Sl-s
From what I gather from that article, the German woman wasn't prosecuted under hate speech laws, but for making a threat of battery. Her sentence may well be excessive, and that of the rapists insufficient, but don't misrepresent facts in order to make your point seem stronger than it is; though part of the fault is with the article that buried the lede.
And I didn't say these laws are rarely enforced everywhere, I said they were rarely enforced in many countries where they exist.
>Quasi-religious orthodoxy is no match for actual religious orthodoxy
I disagree. Religions generally have their sharp edges sanded off by having to be reasonable enough to survive for centuries, whereas new movements can be arbitrarily crazy (and there's any number of examples from the previous century). Of course, the DEI quasi-religion isn't quite there yet, but there's still time.
Yes, and there's probably an additional factor of the political standing of the religion's adherents.
A century of the Coliseum would've sanded more vigorously than a millennium of Papal supremacy.
No, the fiercest restrictions on free speech are on White Nationalists/NatSocs and (naturally) against *right-wing* critics of Israel.
Right wing cancellations have not been as fierce as the left's cancellations probably since the days of McCarthy. And wherever they have been fierce it has been almost entirely against it's own most fringe elements.
> against *right-wing* critics of Israel.
Bootlicking Israel seems to be the one consistent thing that the parasitic human-like species known as US politicians largely agree on.
The students who had their names plastered on a moving van weren't right-wing.
Sure they were, at least on this issue if not in general
In the domain of academia, FIRE has clearly documented cancel culture skews left.
It's academia, everything skews left.
If you wanna limit this discussion to just academia, then sure, almost all the problems are left-wing problems. But I'm trying to talk about the whole world here.
The non-Fox mass media skews left to a similar extent. So that is another part of the world.
I've read claims that the bulk of government employees skew left as well.
I've also read claims that the bulk of HR departments also skew left.
What is the right wing equivalent of getting the Hispanic roads worker in California fired for holding his hand out his window in an upside down OK sign, which was proposed to be a cancellable indication of support for white supremacy?
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/502975-california-man-fired-over-alleged-white-power-sign-says-he-was/
Whether the right *should* match the left's willingness to cancel can be debated regardless of what they are doing at present.
I'm a lifer on the left, born and raised, still living and working in those contexts to this day because I still hold that overall worldview. Have raised my children the same.
I agreed with and repeated your perspective for decades, and still think it's correct at the global level.
But in the US context specifically though -- sadly no. I started wondering about it during the 2000s, developed serious doubts during the 2010s, and by 2016 was unsurprised when we all learned the hard way that tens of millions of Americans had arrived at loathing progressives with a white-hot fury. We'd earned it.
In the past 50 years there has been no bigger moral panic than 2020. Not wars, not elections, not the Great Recession. People were routinely fired/deplatformed/canceled for not only being anti-BLM but for being insufficiently enthusiastic about it! Institutions were renamed because some long-dead founder said something un-woke in 1926. For about 6 months every major institution more-or-less stopped all non-lefist free speech because they were terrified of the progressive mob. Every major news source (minus Fox) was in lockstep over a racial narrative that wasn't even superficially true. Now I didn't live through McCarthyism so I can't really compare, but that at least had some due process (and also it wasn't totally insane to be afraid of communism in 1950 - there was some nonzero threat to the country's stability, whereas the country in 2020 had never been LESS racist).
And even beyond that I challenge your comparison. Sure every culture maintains its norms but in my lifetime the right never went after people like the woke did. They didn't try to ruin lives or end careers. They might rebuke someone in lockstep but name someone who was treated worse than, say, Louie CK. There was always respect for peers and political opponents. I think that's because the Christian ethos of the right implicitly adopts the "hate the sin, love the sinner" mindset. I think that's very useful for the stability of the culture.
I don't really understand the apparently immensely widespread urge among people to get mad at some nobody you never heard of before thirty seconds ago. I guess I'm an elitist, but I like to pester the New York Times, Tyler Cowen, and Scott Alexander: what Walter Sobchak would call Worthy Adversaries.
There's a fair number of people on the internet who love an excuse to be a vindictive bully picking on an easy target, making performative denunciations. It's why "Don't Feed the Trolls" tends to be advice so commonly ignored - people can't resist the Easy Dunk.
See _So You've Been Publicly Shamed_ by Jon Ronson. He talks about cancellation being driven by the thrill of the hunt (he was in the mob that went after what's her name who made a tasteless joke) and that cancellation hurts people emotionally (something that looks a lot like PTSD) as well as financially.
Justine Sacco is who youre thinking of.
Sounds like a fairly apt description of K Harris.
It's not about the nobody, it's about sending a message: You keep your goddamned mouth shut unless you are parroting our ideology, or you may find your head on a stick.
It's Havel's Greengrocer on an Information Age scale.
Humans are mean. Society has a bunch of levers to tamp down the meanness, and humans are equally creative at rationalizing why they should remove the levers, so they can express whatever the hell they feel like expressing.
If I take on someone big, they might hit back.
Home Depot worker, or SDG&E guy, or weirdo internet nerd who likes Warhammer: they can't do shit.
Well the joy of being in a mob is that you _can_ take on a big target. I'm sure that most people participating in a mob against some random nobody would rather be participating in a mob against a big important person, but the big important person hasn't said anything mobworthy today so we're stuck with this random nobody.
If the levers only tamp down on you and not your enemies, to hell with them.
I think the decline in religiosity plays a role here. When you belong to and really believe in a particular religion, you have to quickly get comfortable with the idea that people around you are wrong and evil, and simply move on with your life. The lack of deep belief decreases the stakes of every interaction until we're all backstabbing and bickering like university faculty.
That is the total opposite of what happened historically. Protestants and Catholics butchered each other for decades trying to win the balance of power in Europe. Heretics were burnt at the stake. Muslims converted infidels by the sword, or enslaved them, or levied harsh taxes and legally enforced second class status on the dhimmis. One of the core reasons so many people immigrated to America was to escape religious persecution. None of these people ever shrugged and thought, oh well all these evil wrong people are doomed to hell, nothing I can do about it.
I'd argue that these conflicts were largely political and economic conflicts that used religion as a Schelling point around which to organize violence, much like race in prison. Even in your description above, there is mention of enslaving, taxing, Dhimmis had to pay tribute, etc.
The time I've spent reading about the Crusades certainly made me see religious conflict in a more cynical light. Bohemond of Antioch certainly wasn't in the business of killing Muslims because he loved Jesus Christ.
That being said, I was mostly thinking about North America in the 18th-21st century, where the only practical options in most cases were to convince a person to change religion or shrug your shoulders.
It's human nature--a certain fraction of people really get a charge out of hurting someone, the most miserable they can make them the better.
I agree with "a certain fraction" since 90% is a fraction.
It's fucking fun to destroy someone. Try it. It's a blast.
Or don't, because it's evil. Liberalism exists to stop us from going to our base instincts and wiping each other out.
It's a celebration of their own power. Canceling someone means that your views are held by those who are powerful enough to cancel people. "Yay our side is winning! That validates me!" For sad resentful deviants, that's probably the only taste of victory they ever get. If you're a social misfit all your life then discovering untold power in a likeminded mob that systematically defeats your bullies probably feel amazing. Cancelation is stick wielded exclusively by the emotionally damaged.
Perhaps, but plenty of those emotionally damaged people are in substantial positions of power. Sen McCarthy wasn't a powerless nobody, and neither were the Washington Post reporters who ran that amazingly slimy story to wreck some woman's life for wearing blackface to a costume party as a joke.
Sorry, my first response totally misread your comment. Yes, exactly! The principle problem with progressive politics has been precisely that they put emotionally damaged people in positions of power, which is the express lane to a dysfunctional society.
Failures hate the world and will twist it until you hate it too. This is why leaders really should be drawn from the ranks of the successful. They'll help you share in their virtues. Losers only endeavor to make you share in their failures.
Senator McCarthy wasn't a progressive.
Yes, that was a different problem for a different time. McCarthy probably also wasn't emotionally damaged. Like most politicians he was a cynical opportunist.
> The principle problem with progressive politics has been precisely that they put emotionally damaged people in positions of power
I really want you to replace "emotionally damaged" with some word starting with P or PR.
Lol I did that without even realizing. What a missed opportunity.
Psychologically pained, perhaps?
"In the long run, it’s essential that we aim for permissive social mores regarding public and private discourse ... But we do not live in that world yet, and that is entirely the left’s fault... To this end, distasteful as it may seem, the liberal’s face must be pressed down into her own steaming pile of excrement."
This was exactly the argument with which Stalin justified the purges (see Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon). It was, in essence, also the argument with which East Germany justified the Berlin Wall.
We need a theory that explains the extreme right and the extreme left as two sides of the same coin. What is on offer? Any suggestions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
Thanks. Apparently the horseshoe theory (HST) sets up two populists extremes against an elitist center. Does the center have to be elitist? Wasn't FDR a centrist populist?
Elitism and populism aren't really at odds with each other, I think?
"Populism" just isn't a well enough defined term to be useful. To first approximation it means "policy that is popular, but which I wish to dismiss".
I agree. We are working here with terms such as elite, populism, ideology, etc that all dont have precise definitions. But I believe that it should be possible to come up with definitions that would make these notions useful. I am not a political scientist, though. Just looking for ideas. ... What about: Populism highlights problems of the people that are neglected by the elites.
In practice, populism seems more about specific styles, than about specific content.
To a second approximation , it's policy which is popular, but known to be a bad idea , like simultaneous tax cuts and welfare hikes.
I dont agree that populism is policy. In my view, the role of populism is to point out problems that need solution and are neglected by the elites.
Interesting ... can you tell me more?
In my view elitism and populism are at odds. I am thinking of how mainstream media always blame populism and populists. I see the role of populists as pointing the finger to political problems that the elites refuse to tackle.
Mainstream media is also happy to blame various elites. Both 'isms serve as useful punching bags, depending on the needs of the journalist at the moment.
Elites see their role as pointing out that populist solutions won't work.
Maybe that is the problem. What elites should be doing is to recognize the problems that populism brings to the fore and then solve them. Shouldnt that be the role of elites, solving problems in the public interest?
If everyone agrees on something, it's just common sense. If the population likes something that the elite dislikes, it's generally considered populism, if the elite likes something that the population dislikes it's elitism.
As far as I can tell, the populism label is more about style than substance.
Populism doesn't have to be popular. Otherwise populists would win all elections ever.
The opposite of populist is perhaps wonkish.
Interesting ... wonkish is different than elitist, but related. I need to think about that.
If you think FDR was a "centrist", you might be really far to the left (or getting your views from there).
FDR was centrist at the time. Many of his signature laws passed with a large majority and bipartisan support.
FDR was probably the most left wing president America ever had, lmao
My claim is that FDR was centrist at the time. If he looks left-wing today that says sth about how much politics changed.
He was not centrist at the time. SCOTUS rejected his legislation until he threatened to pack the court with liberals.
You are right with your example. But on balance, I think you are not. I found it instructive to read campaign speeches from the 1912 presidential election, eg https://speakola.com/political/theodore-roosevelt-carnegie-hall-1912 At the time all 4 candidates campaigned on an anti-trust platform. In the 1930ies there was widespread agreement that the rising power of corporations presents a danger to democracy. The question that was debated was HOW to limit corporate power. Reading political debates from approx 1900-1950, it is really quite stunning how much economic ideas that are considered far left today where centrist at the time.
"Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use"
—Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless
https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23
Thanks. I like the quote. But we all need a "thought system" to make sense of the world. How do we know that we cross the line to ideology. (I guess that ideology refers to a thought system that is somehow more wrong than one we wouldn't call ideology.)
This is off the top of my head, but if one's thought system has right and wrong answers, and those answers come from someone other than oneself—if there is a "party line"—that could be considered a sign that it's an ideology.
I like that you have an abstract general notion of "party line". In science, there is also sth like a party line, but in science there is also (at least in the long run) an incentive to challenge the orthodoxy. It seems to me that science works (in part) because there is some balance between towing the party line and challenging it. Is there sth about politics that one can learn from this? Maybe politics would work best if there are two party lines that compete for the center? A system of thought would be one that is in competition with an alternate system of thought, that tries to convince? On the other hand, an ideology would have a party line that aims at keeping together the own tribe?
The critical question is how what happens when the party line contradicts reality in some observable way.
Science is made of people, so there's going to be a party line--old disputes that got turned into doctrine, factions, and such. But what we hope for is that everyone is willing to change their party line when there's enough evidence that they're wrong. When that breaks down, science stops working.
IMO, the worst effects of cancel culture come in the sciences and social sciences, where some political views are very bad for your career, and some findings or even lines of research are also very bad for your career. People respond to incentives, so if everyone knows that researching some questions at all is career suicide, or that some findings will derail their career, we install a bunch of blind spots into the sciences that may very well bite us on the ass in the future.
Would the teachings of the Catholic Church count as an ideology? They've got a multi-level stysem with varying degrees of certainty, but to some questions there are indeed official "right" answers.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
It bears mentioning that Stalin's purges were not actually based on performing tit-for-tat enforcement of prosocial norms; instead that was the false fig-leaf used to cover up rampant paranoia and self-enrichment.
The use of an argument in a bad-faith and dishonest manner does not discredit the actual argument; it is a parable on the harmfulness of *lying*.
Stalin operated under the theory that class struggle increases with the development of the communism, so the more power Communists get, the harder they should be searching for class enemies and saboteurs. That's pretty much the exact opposite of what you are implying. And that's pretty much Stalin's crown contribution to the Marxist theory, the one for which he was proclaimed a political science genius. So it looks like you are getting Stalin 100% wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensification_of_the_class_struggle_under_socialism
Surely this is just that people on the extremes automatically become totalitarians? Once there can no longer be any reasonable disagreement from the other side, merely wanton evil and treason (or _maybe_ insanity), your opponents are *automatically* wicked and need to be literally destroyed. To a totalitarian, a "loyal opposition" is impossible, as any opposition is in itself treason.
(Also, when your insane project fails, you need those traitors and saboteurs to blame, because obviously your ideas were perfect and pure and would have worked. Off to the camps!)
Let's just say this shouldn't be your *premise* in a democratic country?
To be honest, I personally haven't made up my mind as to an opinion on the matter, as I can appreciate the views of both sides. But it must be noted that at least on the "Right" there has been a concerted moral soul-searching on the issue, whereas I've never seen that on the Left, which gleefully dove headlong into a ruthlessly sadistic revelry of life-destroying cancellation. That dichotomy I find quite poignant.
There has been a lot of soul searching. John Ronson is left wing, his book “so you’ve been publically shamed” was on this topic and was very successful. Blocked and Reported, Fucking Cancelled and a couple of other podcasts exist solely to discuss it.
I think what you’re saying here is “I don’t read leftist material, but I’m pretty sure I know what I think they’re saying.”
They get a substack and make more money than they were making before in their media job?
Should have used the snark font.
I agree it's bad that a lot of people were pushed out of their prestige journalism jobs due to insufficient zeal for the current cause or whatever. Indeed, I think that has basically broken a lot of the news business. But I do note that most of the people whose podcasts and substacks you know actually did find a way to make a living. And in fact, prestige journalism is a really hard field to be in--the number of journalism jobs shrinks every year, and even the high-profile places have lots of unpaid interns doing important jobs so they don't have to pay too many people.
They both are very open about the fact that what happened to them turned out to be a good thing in the long run. But they lost not just their jobs but almost all their friends, and Herzog had people putting leaflets about her on walls near her work. It was a trauma.
Freddie deBoer might be a good window into the left for this fellow. Many conservatives find him more palatable than other people with his views, probably because they enjoy his cranky old man vibes.
Freddie is old-school Communist so he has little patience for the dilettante socialists. Also, he's had direct experience in education, so where his and my (very admittedly limited) experiences overlap, I often find myself in agreement with him because yeah, it do be like that (e.g. you can throw a ton of money at it, but you are not going to make every kid into an Ivy League graduate on the track for a Nobel Prize, because different kids have different academic abilities. Which is *not* an excuse for labelling a section of them "dumb idiots" and leaving them to sink, but you are not going to turn a mildly dull to average kid into a baby genius just by throwing more and more money at schools).
IMO these folks tend to get categorized (rightly or wrongly) as dissident critical left-wingers rather than representing the average viewpoint on the left.
Yeah but there are plenty who agree with them who don’t take to platforms to say so. I don’t see the bloodthirsty mob trying to form on the right really pausing to recognise that. Most of the victims of cancel culture were critical leftists, would be my guess.
I'm not sure how that could be measured. I just never noticed the left being riven in two over concerns about cancel culture - rather than an internecine war where leftists fought each other over this issue, it always seemed like a war where the bulk of leftists fought against a handful of outsider dissidents, many of whom would be better classified as moderate classical liberals.
There were small numbers of both fighters and dissidents and the bulk of people just quietly living their lives. That’s always how it is.
Jon Ronson went on to say in 2016 that he no longer thinks cancel culture is a big deal. He may have changed his mind again, since then.
However, internal debate has been so viciously stifled a lot of people do just keep their heads down so they don’t lose their jobs- that’s what normal people do when extremists take the wheel, usually. And wait for it to pass.
This seems completely false to me - "anti-cancel-culture liberal" is a whole industry. Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, Barack Obama, and Slavoj Zizek are some of the names that come to mind. This is honestly a lot better than I see the rightists on my Substack Notes feed doing. See also the third section above.
It was the reaction Twitter had to The Righteous Mind that opened my eyes. I read that book then went online and read the absolute NONSENSE people were saying about it and had a “woah, who the fuck ARE these people” moment that would only be reinforced by subsequent events. It was so clear that Haidt was identified as a threat because he argued for temperance in dealing with those who disagree with you, and that wasn’t something they were willing to consider.
But that is just Twitter people. In terms of voting numbers they are SUCH a small minority- but online, insane minorities hold disproportionate power, because they have no fucking life and no commitments other than spending all their time being fruitcakes online.
It's worth noting the difference between existence and universality here. There definitely exist plenty of deranged left cancel culture fanatics. They're not universal though.
I do think that's why people were so outraged by Musk buying Twitter: for a small (relatively) thing it had outsized power.
Hence all the backpedaling about "Well a blue check mark *only* means you have a verified account" where previously it had been "sorry moron, this Blue Check Mark NYT journalist account on Twitter says you're wrong and they're a Blue Check Mark so it's the Gospel".
Left wing twitter has always made fun of blue checks though, I don't get where conservative get that is was a mark of prestige and that liberals were mad when they got theirs removed, if anything the blue checks I followed found it embarassing. But maybe I wasn't in the same circles, the conversation about "what people on twitter think" is always very biased to what specific twitter bubble you are in anyway.
Conservatives didn't think that it was a mark of prestige, more a mark of the ingroup and having Correct Opinions.
It was both made fun of and respected, as both an "make fun of an Authority" and a "Use an authority to strengthen an argument". But often there was groups of bluechecks you'd reference, and bluechecks (celebs, random politicians that nobody actually cares about, etc.) that were significantly more likely to be made fun of and not referenced.
(So I think they're overstating it, but it was definitely used as a sign of respect)
Everyone seems to have forgotten that in 2017 pre-Musk, Twitter already changed blue checks so that they no longer mean "verified", and that someone with the wrong politics couldn't get one. We don't want to give a blue check to Nazis, would we?
That was a clear use of blue checks to help the left. It just gets memory-holed in order to bash Musk.
That wasn't how it was used.
It was just a "This person is who they say they are".
The people getting blue checks also overlapped with "people who have status". President Obama gets a Blue check. President Gavin Jones of Jones auto repair doesn't.
A blue-haired culture warrior nobody was likely to have it while her opponents weren't, which is what people generally mean.
OK, but that's the equivalent of being in a political argument and then one person has a library card and the other doesn't.
It started out that way, but it changed. To that original aspect, it also added an aspect of "we don't disapprove of this person or their views", which traded off against the first aspect.
This is a lie. People had their blue checks removed for being "far right" https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/16/twitter-removes-verified-blue-badge-from-far-right-accounts.html
What is the lie?
Twitter refused to verify/removed verification from some accounts that it felt violated its policies.
That doesn't mean that the Blue Check meant status.
I don't really think that being able to find a few prominent left-wing people who believe a certain thing is really indicative of what the *median* left wing person thinks. Left-wing thought is a crowd sourced phenomenon.
The thing that seems most relevant to me is - if you're on the left and engaging in cancellation behavior, how likely is it that you will encounter pushback from fellow left wing people? If the answer is "very low," then it doesn't really matter what Barack Obama thinks about it. "Diversity of tactics" means leftists care a lot more about not defending their enemies and not policing their friends than they care about not having their movement become synonymous with unhinged anti-social behaviors.
This was my perception as well - and iirc Obama didn't really go to war against cancel culture, he instead merely offered some criticism of it several years past its peak. It wasn't exactly an outspoken stance and many people today might not even remember it as one of his opinions.
We weren't arguing about the median. We're talking about the existence of many people willing to call out their own side. (Even if *fractionally* small.)
I first learned of the Home Depot thing from conservative sources who were saying "yo this is bullshit." Their audiences were like less-intelligent versions of the people at the top of this post: just conservatives who really wanted to make their enemies eat dirt.
So I learned both:
1. there were a lot of conservatives calling this out
2. they were not even close to the majority, not at all, not remotely
And both those points apply to the left as well. Like, the Harper's Letter is full of people from the left who think "yo, this is bullshit."
Aside from Obama, those examples seem to stick out as dissident minority critics of broader left-wing trends, rather than as true representatives of the left. Steven Pinker has been accused of being far-right and almost gotten cancelled himself several times iirc.
I only tangentially know about Jesse Singal but yeah, the references I see to him online are all "that damn right-wing extremist apologist for the fascists!" type of criticism when he says "hey maybe this thing has two sides to it?"
And it's not the righties saying it 😁
What the heck is "the left" then? This sounds like No True Scotsman, right?
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Letter_on_Justice_and_Open_Debate
It’s not a No True Scotsman, unless liberals and leftists are exactly the same group. For context, Jordan Peterson identifies as a classical liberal, but I’d hardly consider him a leftist.
The people criticizing cancel culture tended to be moderates and defectors from the leftist consensus. This is why they would say things like “the left has gone too far”, statements which placed them in the outgroup relative to a larger cultural trend on the left.
If your definition of a leftist is someone who's on board with cancel culture, then it's not a surprise you can't think of any liberals who oppose cancel culture. OTOH, guys like Nicholas Christakis, Steven Pinker, Glenn Greenwald, Freddie DeBoer, Matt Taibbi, Eric Weinstein, and the like are actually leftists by the normal definitions of (say) 2010.
You're getting there! There are huge differences between leftists and liberals. Just ask a leftist, they will tell you the same!
And you're right - many of those figures might have been considered as on the left 14 years ago. However, they are not mainstream leftist figures today, and they haven't been welcome among the left for quite awhile.
Wait so what exactly is the definition of "the left" that doesn't involve cancel culture?
How about Bernie Sanders?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bernie-sanders.html
"do I feel particularly comfortable that the then-president of the United States could not express his views on Twitter? I don’t feel comfortable about that.
Now, I don’t know what the answer is. Do you want hate speech and conspiracy theories traveling all over this country? No"
Sure looks like soul-searching to me. Now if literally all 153 people that signed the Harper letter count as "liberal but not left" AND one of the most leftist elected Democrats who literally calls himself a socialist is also not on "the left" then... it feels like you've defined it as a truism (e.g. you're only on the left if you are pro-cancellation).
IMO we're going to end up at an impasse here. If you disagree with my take, that's fine. I'm not "defining" the left here, simply saying my perspective that the left seems far more pro-cancel-culture than it's been anti-cancel-culture. There are a few on the left who oppose cancel culture but they are very much the marginalized, minority view.
One piece of evidence in favor of that view are all the statements that you keep citing. For example, the question asked of Bernie Sanders was "Do you think there is truth to the critique that liberals have become too censorious and too willing to use their cultural and corporate and political power to censor or suppress ideas and products that offend them?"
If Bernie Sanders agrees with the view that "liberals have become too censorious", wouldn't that suggest that perhaps... liberals had become too censorious? I don't think you can pull a Catch-22 here and say that Bernie Sanders agreeing with this statement somehow invalidates it because he's left-leaning.
The Harper letter makes a similar point - it says that "censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture" and that "it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought". Do these sound like the words of people who believe cancel culture is a minority view among the left?
Furthermore, the Harper letter encountered severe pushback from the left. Almost the entirety of the "Reactions" listed on Wikipedia are negative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Letter_on_Justice_and_Open_Debate
In addition to the original cancel culture the letter was reacting to, and in addition to all the pushback it received, there was even a counter-letter published by leftist journalists and academics in defense of cancel culture, and it received (slightly) more signatories: https://web.archive.org/web/20200711012218/https://theobjective.substack.com/p/a-more-specific-letter-on-justice
They aren’t true representatives because they are outcasts.
Pinker wrote The Blank Slate a long time ago.
I would add Jonathan Chait. His 2015 essay against political correctness set off a firestorm. He’s consistently come under attack since then, with bad faith critics calling him a shill for charter schools because his wife is an advocate for charter schools.
"This seems completely false to me - "anti-cancel-culture liberal" is a whole industry."
Why do you recognize "anti cancel-culture liberal" as a distinct group from liberals in general and not "pro-cancel liberals"? That anti-cancel culture liberals are ostracized from mainstream liberalism suggests at the very least that pro-cancel liberals are close to the liberal establishment enough that they can define their opponents on this issue as an outgroup.
On the other hand, aside from LibsofTikTok and a bunch of random internet people, how many 'pro-cancel conservatives' are there, at least as far as cancelling random members of the public? Could it be that the media plays up a very small segment of the right because it helps the left politically (the same way that they play up a random statement from Obama to make him sound like Haidt and Pinker in order to inflate the size of the anti-cancel culture left when it's convenient.)
The reason to discuss anti cancel-culture liberals is because being anti cancel-culture is their defining (current) belief (the New Athiests were not composed of all athiest liberals, only the few that made being against religion a core part of their identity). Most liberals are neither anti cancel-culture nor pro cancel-culture but instead focused on other issues and going along with the general liberal consensus.
Yet they don't seem to be common from my standpoint. The most people who are against cancel culture (that I tend to see because I follow them) are because they're in the Rationalist-sphere, which has leanings towards being against such — and even then, there's a decent amount of jumping on the bandwagon. This has strengthened over the past years, where positions on topics that are potentially arguable are assumed as at minimum good reasons to notably dislike that person, even if they don't participate in areas like cancel culture.
Zizek is definitely what I'd consider non-mainstream left.
Yes, I agree that the left has done consideration of the problems with cancel culture, but I do not think it has filtered out to as many people. The right has had the specter of cancel culture (etc.) in their minds for >five years, the left has had their height of power with some side-thinkers actually questioning this.
(Has Obama even talked about it recently?)
Of course, there's the risk that they've had it for far too long. I know some people on the right who've grown more and more paranoid because they consider that the left will take a mile when given an inch. Consider how much social change — much of it good, though flawed implementations in various ways — has occurred in just the last fifteen years, and for your older people this becomes even more of a worry.
(I also think the right just doesn't have the cultural pull in the same way, they're less social-oriented than the left, though you can still do great harm without that, but it limits the cancerousness.)
Also, well, yourself.
I hadn't heard of Obama being part of that.
He doesn't spend a lot of capital on it but you can easily google Obama cancel culture speech youtube
I suspect Zizek would have being called a liberal.
To echo Echo Tracer, lots of prominent progressives and Democrats have strongly criticized cancellation. Jonathan Chait is one; Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog; Adolph Reed.
This is the first time my brain is actively noticing that Jonathan Chait and Jonathan Haidt are two different people. Are they both anti-cancel-culture liberals or am I still conflating them?
They are, yes. I know Chait's politics better than I know Haidt's—Chait's very much a ra-ra Democrat (as am I)—but he's also been vocal about the harms of cancel culture from the left.
Haidt gets accused of being a religious Republican by Twitter loons but he’s actually a liberal left of centre.
I too took years to notice this. (Also, fun fact, there are two different Sam Bowmans)
And a Dave Friedman.
And completely irrelevantly but I'm still amazed: Hunter Renfrow and Hunter Renfroe are two different athletes. One is baseball, the other football.
RPG designer Steve Jackson (British) is a different designer than Steve Jackson (American). This is further complicated by how Steve Jackson (B) created the Fighting Fantasy books, but Steve Jackson (A) has also written for them, both of them as "Steve Jackson".
It's minor, but there's Quentin Crisp the memoirist and Quentin S. Crisp the horror writer.
The vancouver canucks have (or at least had, as of 2022) two guys named Elias Petterson. Same team.
Dave Friedman actually has a web page distinguishing all the Dave Friedmans.
That's interesting: you get rhyming names confused, while I get alliterative names confused because I'm a lazy whole word reader who doesn't pay much attention to the latter part of words or phrases.
I remember finding out that Taylor Series and Fourier series had different names, becuase my brain can't tell Taylor and Fourier apart. The idea that you only mix up names in explicable ways amazes me
(To clarify, I was for years under the impression that people referred to these two obviously different concepts with the same name. Both names have the same scansion and lots of glide consonants in the back half, so my brain's hash function collided them)
On this topic, the more common confusion is between Taylor series and Maclaurin series (which just a special case around 0).
That's one of the cases that GPT4 got _right_:
https://chatgpt.com/share/1f6ad5cd-307c-42a9-a087-3745d6740910
I get words with the same number of letters mixed up. I'm visual with words, I'll often see them spelled out in my head when using speaking or listening to them. And things with the same number of letters look similar.
> Both names have the same scansion
"Taylor" is two syllables; "Fourier" is three?
Depends how you pronounce it, I guess, but most people pronounce Fourier with two syllables. Something like foor-yay, and not foo-ri-er.
>But it must be noted that at least on the "Right" there has been a concerted moral soul-searching on the issue, whereas I've never seen that on the Left, which gleefully dove headlong into a ruthlessly sadistic revelry of life-destroying cancellation.
No, there was plenty of soul-searching in the early teens. The thing is, the people doing the soul-searching were ejected and formed the Grey Tribe, so they mostly don't count as "Left" anymore.
You might have a very skewed (maybe internet/twitter/news-based) understanding of what liberal peoples' views are.
I don't know whether you mean "liberal" in the real sense or the degenerate US sense.
I do know that a lot of real liberals (including me) were in coalition with proto-SJ up until it started turning into a witch-hunt, did indeed object to it in online spaces that were becoming SJ-coded, were mostly ejected from those spaces, and swapped over to supporting the conservative coalition.
> degenerate US sense
I like this phrasing. :-)
I am referring to the real US sense, not the degenerate sense which you might erroneously get from living in a filter bubble. The degenerate sense you're talking about certainly exists, but it's a mistake to think that it's somehow representative among people without actually going and getting some data. Otherwise you fail to account for the significant bias that's caused by those people both making a lot more noise and being talked about and amplified a lot more than everyone else.
Of course maybe it's me in the filter bubble. But as a general rule, if one person says "all the people act in this one way" and another person says "no, they act in many different ways", the latter person is always right.
(Anecdotally I knew lots of liberals in the proto-SJ world of 2010ish, a few who stuck with it or doubled down after it got toxic, just a few people who "switched sides" like you say you did, and then the remaining 95% just hung out believing the reasonable things they always believed but not being particularly vocal about it, for lack of a productive reason to do so.)
This seems the case to me as well - there were a handful of leftists who opposed cancel culture, but they were mostly dissident voices, and many might be better categorized as moderate classical liberals (such as Steven Pinker), not leftists or progressives.
Who's been doing the soul-searching on the right?
That’s a very good question.
Can you elaborate on the right-wing soul searching? If it's "Christian fundamentalism and McCarthyism were wrong, please don't do the same to conservatives" or "I stand with the moderate leftists who got cancelled for not being leftist enough", it's still ambiguous if those are motivated by genuine support for liberal values or by support of the conservative side of the culture war. Are there many conservatives who oppose uncivil/illiberal treatment of leftists by right-wingers in their own country as a matter of principle?
It seems likely that the right had enough cultural power in the 2000s to start an organised mass attempt to find and destroy at least a fair number of people who'd displayed slight reservations about the War on Terror or who had made pro-gay or pro-atheist comments in the wrong way. But aside from like 5 really blatant and famous cases right after 9/11 they didn't even really try.
They *did*, circa 2007, make strong (and temporarily successful) efforts to do things like push creationism into schools, but these were *much* more "impose our ideology" and much less "hurt the people we hate" vindictiveness.
And also, the US is usually considered the most right-wing Western country, and is also (literally?) the only country with near-absolute freedom of political speech. If the former claim is in fact true, this is a devestating counter-example to the "both sides"ism on ideological tolerance.
Who's been doing the soul-searching on the right?
I saw a fair number of people on the right on Twitter disagreeing with it. Examples: PeachyKeenan, FistedFocault, and RogueWPA. I don't know if anyone has put together a summary of all such comments, though.
I'm glad to hear that. What sort of pushback did they get?
You haven't seen it because you're not in leftist spaces. I have never seen any soul-searching about this topic on the right, I am 100% taking your word for it, because I'm not in rightist spaces.
Freaking Contrapoints and Lindsey Ellis, bulwarks of Breadtube at the time, both made videos against cancel culture. There was always huge internal division over the issue.
They got cancelled for other things. Natalie Wynn got cancelled for having Buck Angel do a cameo on one of her videos, and Lindsay Ellis got cancelled for making a joke on twitter about Raya and the Last Dragon being derivative of Avatar: The Last Airbender. These got rounded up to transphobia and anti-Asian racism, respectively.
Their most famous commentaries on cancellation were made in response to being cancelled, although I think both of them were generally anti-cancellation before that. Especially Ellis, who had vocally defended Wynn when the latter was cancelled.
But Ellis favored cancelling J.K. Rowling, and I've seen it stated that's why she herself was cancelled. She drew in the cancel-culture audience, and was surprised when it next came for her. So I wouldn't define Lindsay Ellis as anti-cancellation.
Does anyone know where she stands on cancel culture now?
True. It'd be more precise to say she's had a relatively high bar for when she thinks cancellation is appropriate. IIRC, her position on Rowling was that Rowling's a major public figure using her fame and income as an author as a platform for political advocacy that Ellis finds highly objectionable, and Rowling has been consistent and unambiguous in her positions over the course of several years.
Truth!
That they're susceptible to such moral soul-searching is a big part of why they never had a chance of winning.
I assume this comment isn't serious and it's a parody of overly self-assured leftists, right?
""gleefully dove headlong into a ruthlessly sadistic revelry of life-destroying cancellation.""
You're only seeing what you want to see.
I frequently see claims that The Democratic Party is a 'Demonic Organization'. Literal demons that the righteous right must fight for the glory of their God. Let's not forget that Republicans ran on a platform that Democrats drink the blood of babies.
I'm not catching a lot of themes that 'The Right' are clutching-their-pearls-in-fits-of-moral-soul-searching.
The correct response to “But we can’t just do nothing!” is often “Sure we can, and it’s probably the best option in this case.”. Those aren’t pleasant circumstances, but you’ve gotta play the cards you’ve been dealt. And play smart so you’re still in the game when you luck into a stronger hand.
Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism
I’m a bit disappointed in that Wikipedia entry, as it misses the subtle dependence on the meaning of “is”. The syllogism
1. We must kill Batman.
2. Batman is Bruce Wayne.
3. Therefore, we must kill Bruce Wayne.
is perfectly valid. In this case “is” means identity (A is A) and in the Politician’s Syllogism it means set membership (A is a letter).
Alternately, we get Bruce Wayne to retire from being Batman and get his sidekick Kamal- I mean Dick Grayson to take over, and then kill Dick Batman. There are still alternatives.
You could probably get rid of 90% of unfair cancel culture stuff related to employment just by requiring Just Cause employment, with a fair procedure for dismissal and the burden of proof on the company to prove it. That's not perfect - some tenured professors still do get pushed out - but it would drastically make it harder for an internet mob to whip up intimidation against someone for saying something and get them fired - and it would actively undermine the rotten norm that employers are expected to police their employees' public views or else be taken as endorsing them.
>This is because you mostly get the critical mass necessary for cancellation in very leftist institutions, and most people in very leftist institutions are leftists<
That's the crux of it, isn't it? As some who is left of center, it kind of seems like conservatives are complaining from a position of strength here - they have the most popular TV news network, dominate a huge swathe of local news stations through Sinclair (which actively pushes conservative talking points), essentially have one of the biggest social media sites in their pocket with Twitter, almost completely dominate FM Talk Radio, and dominate a large swathe of regional businesses that hold real political power at the state and local level in the US (the US "gentry" that historian and podcaster Patrick Wyman has talked about).
Whereas the actual number of people publicly cancelled can be numbered in the . . . dozens, maybe?
I think "dozens" is laughable - I would say thousands to hundreds of thousands depending on how you define. I have a bunch of random personal friends who were cancelled.
Oh this is interesting. The only cases I know of individuals I know personally being cancelled were sexual misconduct and/or domestic abuse cases. Is personal cancellation on other grounds more common in the states?
What you do you mean by "personal cancellation". See Israel Folau for normal cancellation in Australia.
In this context I mean something like individuals of the sort you or I might personally know.
I directly know a woman who was cancelled for texting while driving, running into a man on a bike (who was drunk and coming home from the pub, riding at night with no lights or reflectors, and was all over the road in an area where the speed limit was 100km/h), then got quoted out of context in the papers saying she didn't care (implying that she didn't care about the man, when in context she'd told the police she didn't care whether her insurance would cover the damage to her car and wanted to know whether the man was okay).
It's debatable whether this is a cancellation in the classic political sense, but it had the same internet witch hunt vibe: name sent around cyclist bloggers and social media, random strangers ringing her number to leave death threats, calling her job to get her fired, turning up to her house and throwing refuse on her car, etc.
I know of a couple of other people who've had similar things happen to them, but don't know them personally. I think it's reasonably common to have a bunch of internet strangers dogpile you when you've done something wrong. Whether or not this is cancellation depends on your perspective, I guess, but I'd certainly believe it happens to people who haven't committed an actual crime.
I think the American equivalent would be West Helm Caleb, a poor guy canceled for the crime of sleeping around in his 20s (the cancelation took feminist tones, not prudish ones, but it was never explicitely political, it was just the joy of doing detective work and then ruining the culprit).
IMHO non-political cancelations, based on offlines event, show how insufficient measures like making ideology a protected class or making online posts unjust cause for firing would be. Witch-hunts are an emergent property of village life, and we made the whole world a village. Only strong taboos against ever aiding a witch hunt (doxing, making business decisions based on internet messages, etc) can limit the phenomenon
Who says it's other grounds?
Why would you assume Scott's friends would be less likely to be lied about?
A personal report here:
https://stephenfrug.substack.com/p/my-cancellation
I actually think you may have to define it, because "cancellation" stretches from "Someone was mean! On Twitter." to "The repressive regime was informed of the actions of the blasphemer. On Twitter".
"from "Someone was mean! On Twitter.""
That's as bad faith a use of "cancel" as most uses of "racist" and virtually every use of "transphobic".
Conspiring to materially hurt someone is I think the key element.
How random?
You were in tech circles in the most Leftist place in the country.
This is like saying that you encountered dozens of random people who were attacked for being not sufficiently Catholic... While living in Vatican city.
Were any of your cancelled friends cancelled by the Right?
> You could probably get rid of 90% of unfair cancel culture stuff related to employment just by requiring Just Cause employment, with a fair procedure for dismissal and the burden of proof on the company to prove it.
The cure seems worse than the disease.
Even the worst excesses of cancel culture displayed so far aren't worth getting into a French-style sclerotic labour market for.
Wholeheartedly agree, and this could come back to bite conservative business-owners, who might not be able to fire their own employees even for flagrant behavioral issues. More government regulation is not the answer here.
Oh, this will bite businesses owners no matter their political stripes, if any.
Flagrant behavioural issues would be reasons for firing. Can't fire someone for being gay *or* for not wanting to plaster their workspace in rainbow and pride flags in June.
Someone who goes around insisting everyone plaster their workspace in rainbow and pride flags *or* who pulls down the flags from other people's desks? You get a warning, and if you keep doing it, you get fired.
Americans really do seem to like extremes - either I can be fired in the morning because the employer hasn't had his coffee yet, or I can be sacrificing puppies to Asmodeus at my desk and nobody can do a thing about it. There *is* a middle way!
What people object to is "it's June and the self-appointed Kommissar is going around asking people why they don't have the approved flags on their desk and nobody dares say a word about it, but if I say 'I don't want to do that' I get the boot".
In surveys, Americans typically rate their work satisfaction higher than Europeans do. Perhaps that's a good reason why they are willing to spend more time at work?
What about a German style labour market, then? You seem to be putting forward a false dichotomy...zero workers rights ,and extreme sclerosis aren't the only options.
Who says anything about zero worker rights? Workers should have the same rights as anyone else.
I actually grew up in Germany. The labour market was pretty bad as well, and only started to improve after some tough reforms around 2005.
You might also want to study Greek unemployment rates. After spiking to crazy heights in the wake of the great recession they have since gradually come down, perhaps thanks to all the reforms the IMF etc made them do.
In any case, if you want to make it easy for people to get hired, it helps to make it easy for the people who make these hiring decisions to be able to change their mind, if they made a mistake.
Well, surely we want people not only to *become* employed, but also to *stay* employed.
Here in Germany, there is a transition period of <= 6 months, where both sides can end the employment very swiftly and don't need any particular grounds for it. Afterwards, the employer *does* need to demonstrate just cause for firing (if taken to court, that is). These include inappropriate behavior, chronic unpunctuality, necessity for a general downsizing in the business. This way, the employer has a few months to test how the new employee is doing, while the employee has the safety of knowing that they have a reasonably stable job after that initial period.
Do you have any significant objections to this system? It seems to overcome the objections you've brought forward thus for.
Yes, I have objections to this system. For example, it leads to people getting let-go just at the cusp of six months, in order to avoid the extra cost that come afterwards.
In general, I'm all for helping poor people, but I don't think there's any good reason for putting the burden of that on their (would-be) employers.
So I would also argue against minimum wage laws, or other laws that force the employer to provide perks; eg like employer financed health insurance.
Either let the employee and employer agree on these perks voluntarily, or provide them from general tax payer money for all poor people; employed or not.
(And don't both with perks or protections for rich people. That's just a waste. If you want to throw them a bone, just take the money you would have spend on them, and lower taxes a tad.)
> Well, surely we want people not only to *become* employed, but also to *stay* employed.
No.
I don't care about specific people staying employed. I care about the voluntary-unemployment rate being low, but I don't see any reason to treat currently unemployed people worse than currently employed people. Thus I see no more reason for a law that requires you to hire a specific person, than a law that requires you to keep employing a specific person (just because you are currently employing them).
Nor do I think it's a good reason to force any employer against their will to keep working with someone they don't see as a good fit anymore. (Just like I don't think we should force people to keep living together, if at least one of them wants out.)
I'd rather have an honest firing, than employers using alternate means to get people to quit 'voluntarily'. See the mistreatment of employees of Orange in France for examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_S.A._suicides
<i>Yes, I have objections to this system. For example, it leads to people getting let-go just at the cusp of six months, in order to avoid the extra cost that come afterwards.</i>
Assuming the German system is like the British one in this regard, employers don't incur any extra costs after six months, it's just harder for them to fire the employee.
Plus, chopping and changing employees every six months doesn't really make much sense from a financial perspective. Employees are almost always less valuable in their first few months, because they haven't learnt the ropes yet, they need mentoring or other forms of onboarding that cost the company resources, etc. It's normally much better to have one guy doing a job for three years than to have a succession of six different people.
I think the UK strikes a good balance between the free for all US and the calcified French systems.
Maybe. Though there's lots of other things different between all three countries.
I think Singapore strikes a good balance. It's generally not as calcified as the US, and mostly protects workers' rights by making sure the economy is running well so that there's plenty of competition for workers' services.
(Singapore does a bit of paternalistic 'protecting' of lower income workers, but they wisely drop most, though not all, of those restrictions for people who make enough money.
The idea that people who are paid six figures need government help is a bit ridiculous. But common place in the US or France.)
That's mostly because the enforcement side of it is sclerotic - it takes too long to actually fire someone for cause once they are fired. It doesn't have to be that way.
Most companies in the US already have (at least on paper) a graduated system of discipline designed to encourage employees to get better before escalating to termination. Having Just Cause would just make that enforceable and require the employer to properly follow the steps - what often happens when you hear horror stories about this with unionized workplaces, for example, is that a manager decided to let an inept or bad employee get away with stuff for a long time, and then hastily fired the employee when THEIR manager got on them about it.
It makes a lot of sense for bigger companies to have such systems, and they should be allowed to continue to do so.
I see no good argument for legally requiring companies to have such a system. If you want to run your company badly, you should be allowed to do so. (Or rather, Bob should be allowed to run your company in a way that Alice thinks is bad. Bob might disagree.)
You could argue for some threshold system, where only big companies are legally bound by the restrictions. For that, have a look at how French companies desperately stay at 49 employees instead of growing above 50.
The law in my country, after reforming a French-like system, is that discharging without just cause costs the employer from 6 months to 1 year of wages depending on seniority (time spent in the company, to be clear).
Since litigation is expensive, and more so for the employee, this means a 3 months settlement usually.
Fixed term contracts have also been liberalized, so an employer not willing to commit can just hire for a fixed term and then not renew.
I find it pretty fair: it makes relatively inexpensive to fire a worker with genuine issues without too much paoerwork, but the small cost is probably enough to make an employer think twice on how much they actually value pleasing screeching strangers on the internet
I assume you can't renew extend the fixed term contracts indefinitely without turning them into long term contracts?
(That often leads to a two class labour market with the 'plebs' only getting short term employment and bouncing around, and the worker 'aristocrats' on the gold plated contracts.)
Here in Singapore it's easy to hire and fire, and I don't think anyone wonders about pleasing screeching strangers on the Internet. That might be more of a cultural issue?
Btw, from what I hear in Germany, what happens more often than outright firings is that people will be asked to leave 'voluntarily'.
> Just Cause employment
Proposed cure seems much worse than the disease, in this case. Very few people get cancelled, in an absolute sense; it definitely sucks to have the eye of sauron turn on you but it's not very likely to happen. A lot more people will end up unemployable if it becomes much harder to fire people.
Unemployment isn't appreciably higher in, say, Australia.
Very unlikely the effect is "a lot" more people.
One needs to go a lot further than just comparing the unemployment rate between countries to make any kind of reasonable conclusion here.
To start with, there’s also the workforce participation rate, but also of course any number of contextual differences that would need to be controlled for.
https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/worker-protections-against-cancel
> complaining from a position of strength here
Broadly, the individual ones you mention are the *only* significant right-controlled entity in a field of left-wing entities, which are only large because there's nowhere else for half the country to go. The others are backwaters that the right retreated to because all the higher-prestige areas were controlled by the left (or, historically, the center-left).
For instance, local news was so cheap to buy up because the left and center had moved on to cable news. Now "local" is effectively low-budget cable, but with perhaps a little better ground game.
"Liberals invent a fictional entity called “The Right”, which is full of all of the most racist and fascist things that NYT was ever able to produce an out-of-context quote showing one Claremont guy saying, then believe that any action is justified against “The Right” because it’s an ontological threat against democracy, then rile up a mob against a Google guy who sends the wrong memo.
Likewise, conservatives invent a fictional entity called “The Left”, which is full of all the most horrible woke things that FOX was ever able to find one Gender Studies professor saying"
Oh come on. I'm the enemy. I'm a legitimate target of cancellation. In any normie right wing space, people would look in horror at what I write (GOP staffers and Tech Right donors of course are a different story and I write directly for them). If I get cancelled for it, well, I'd do the same thing if I were you. But the most awful things your people write are literally taught in all the schools, colleges, etc. And were someone to mention them in a normie-lib environment, people would at most bat an eye. Even in a Right-wing environment, most aren't really offended by them.
Now once again, I'm a combatant in this game. I fully understand why someone might go after me. But the normie-cons your people have gone after... they weren't in the game. Lefties crossed the line between normal political warfare and crimes against humanity, and they kept it going for a decade. I oppose any transition to cancelling normies by the right, but don't give me this bullshit.
"Your people"? Are you under the impression that Scott is a "leftie"? Scott was publicly doxed by the NYT and his politics are probably closest to libertarian.
Scott's politics have shifted and he's pretty much on the left now.
Yes, he was publically doxed. But he doesn't seem to have learned anything from the leopards eating his face. If he had read Metz's article and said "Maybe we should stop accusing people of racism..." But no.
I'm confused by this comment. Do you think Scott is a proponent of accusing people of racism? That... runs counter to pretty much everything he's ever posted.
Scott has been against accusing people of racism since forever. See for example: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
That post seems to me to contain rather little "accusing people of racism". (It's mostly arguing that talk about "racism" is often confused and confusing and best avoided, and that many things commonly attributed to "racism" are actually best understood as having other less horrible-sounding motives, no?) Would you like to be more specific?
[EDITED to add:] Duh, I misread Ash's comment; disregard the above.
>That post seems to me to contain rather little "accusing people of racism"
That's... the point. He's against accusing people of racism.
Ooooops. I completely misread you: I didn't notice the word "against". Duh. My apologies.
Scott's no longer saying things like that. And even when he was willing to do that in the abstract, he wouldn't use concrete examples.
What are you talking about? He wrote a whole post against accusing Donald Trump of racism, specifically: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
Note that this post is A) 8 years old, B) he took it down and, after realizing that was counterproductive, has left it up but with a huge disclaimer, and as Jiro notes he no longer says such things about Trump in particular or American conservatives in general.
I don't know if his positions have shifted, so much that he's not directly writing against left-wing insanity as much. Maybe he got that out of his system, or maybe he prefers a different tactic now.
Yeah my sense is he's pretty consistently fallen under "liberal-as-opposed-to-leftist." If Jiro or anyone else claims his politics have shifted they'd do well to point out a specific policy where they think his position has changed.
Afaik, Scott hates any govt regulation except zoning and immigration. But he also wants a form of (minimally distortionary) welfare.
That sounds a lot like a 2000s "compassionate conservative" tbh
I think Scott deserves full credit for being anti-woke and pro-free speech (although he's greatly dialed down his condemnation of the left on those issues, which disturbs me, but since he's also dialed down his condemnation of the right I don't really hold it against him). But on many issues (abortion, trans issues) he is solidly on the left, sometimes far past even the leftist norm (e.g. embryo selection). I think it's important not to falsely shift the Overton Window by ignoring this.
I would have said embryo selection leaned *right*-wing, insofar as it's (a benign form of) one of the left's great bogeymen, eugenicism. The current religious, abortion-debate streak in the American political divide admittedly complicates this, but I can far more easily imagine a future where the right shifts to openly supporting embryo selection than the left.
Eh it’s more like “classic progressive”, if you want to go back to the origin of eugenics.
Really, it’s transhumanism, which is a Gray Tribe value.
Trying to assign ideas outside a very narrow range to the left or right is just going to lead you off a cliff. Embryo selection isn't an issue that really distinguishes right and left, though to some extent it may distinguish religious Catholics and Evangelicals from everyone else.
Embryo selection is an interesting look where certain 'principles' and the left-right spectrum completely fall apart. Ie, comparing attitudes on selective abortion to embryo selection generates some weird opinions.
Per Scott's own statement that most cancelling is done by leftists to those not left enough, isn't the NYT dox evidence of him being a moderate leftist?
I got a chuckle out of this one, but in seriousness, I think a libertarian is exactly the kind of not-left-enough heretic that Progressive cancellation would target. Holds some left beliefs (trans rights, abortion, etc), but also some intolerable heresies (anti-woke, IQ discourse, anti-big-government, etc). Narcissism of small differences.
Jokes aside, I don't think Scott could fairly be described as a leftist, and certainly not a partisan one. But he does live in the bay area, and I don't think anyone can live in that blue tribe bubble and not be affected to some degree.
He did say that grey tribe drives from blue tribe. And I'd bet that at some point, moving forward from close friends to distant friends, a majority of his friends would be poly and/or queer and/or trans (I have been in such a position myself, and I've never lived in SF). I suspect that he does not fully subscribe to some of the more extreme positions that advocates for those things take, but that he's learned his lesson about leaked emails and hyperstitious cascades, and is keeping those differences verbal and in confidence with close friends.
I'd look more toward EA and its culture of, well, ahimsa. Taking that as a starting point, adding a lack of visceral opposition to poly/queer/trans stuff, and it's possible to generate a lot of blue tribe positions from first principles.
Scott has been the "Leftie against cancel culture" for decades. Long before people like Matt Taibbi or Freddie Deboer made it their whole schtick.
I think Scott has long considered himself to be left of center, even if he also disagrees with a whole lot of the left and has libertarian leanings.
I recall Kevin Carson, Sheldon Richman, Roderick Long & Charles "Radgeek" Johnson using it to describe themselves.
This comment won't weigh in on cancel culture, but I'm curious about the "old psychoanalyst’s trick".
> if somebody ruminates too much over some decision, it’s to distract from some other decision they’re trying not to notice.
So how does the psychoanalyst (or whoever) proceed from "I see you are ruminating too much on decision A" to "The decision you are distracting yourself from noticing is definitely decision B over here and not any of these other decisions your life is awash in."
Good point.
Ask?
Talk to them, get a sense of their life, and notice that the decision they focus on is inconsequential next to this big thing that they don't spend much time consciously thinking of?
My attitude is very simple:
1. If you've ever knowingly participated in a cancel mob, I will do everything I can to see you hunted down, your life destroyed, and everything you personally value destroyed, if you ever in your life say anything even the tiniest bit controversial. Or maybe even if you don't.
2. If you haven't participated in a cancel mob, I will defend to the death your rights and your freedoms.
So if you ever follow the steps in 1 (maybe you already have), would it be just for someone to do everything they can to see you hunted down, etc.? Or is this a Barber Paradox thing where only you could cancel yourself for cancelling yourself?
You're right, there's an implicit exception to 1 for those who were themselves restricting their targets to those who had cancelled others. I should have spelt that out.
If you were in a cancel mob against someone who e.g. disowned their children for being gay, or fired someone or unfriended them for not being Christian, then you're actually in my second category. Even if you did it to 100 people, as long as *every single one of them* had done something like that, you're fine. But if you, even once, tried to cancel an innocent person for their opinion on gay rights or whatever, who had never themselves done that, you're forever my enemy and there's nothing you don't deserve. You should spend the rest of your life in unbearable fear that that one time you were in such a mob will be discovered, and you will lose your job, lose all your friends, and have your whole life destroyed. And spend the rest of your life thinking "if only, oh god if only I had shown, ten years ago, a shred of empathy for someone not exactly like me. And now it's too late."
Damn. I thought you were joking in your first comment.
Why would I be joking? Are you questioning the horrible psychological and material harm these disconcerting and sadistic bullying campaigns have on innocent people who were yesterday just living their lives? Or suggesting the kind of person who will gleefully watch and participate in that suffering should somehow be treated with sympathy?
You were hoping for cancellation for the people you don't like.
For the people who cancel.
I think since you are able to taste, in such exquisite detail, the urge to ruin people's lives, you should be able to feel empathy with others who have also acted on that urge, even if for bad reasons. The similarity in what you want for them and what they want for others suggests you are both reacting to a human urge, rather than them inventing a unique depravity.
I think it's like the difference between wanting to watch a murderer hang, and wanting to watch someone, doesn't matter who, hang. Yes, they're similar on the surface, and maybe a true saint wouldn't have either of those feelings. But they're also a universe apart: one is motivated by *anger* and one by *sadism* (in virtue terms). One has the effect of deterring cruel acts and the other of encouraging them (in consequentialist terms).
On the consequentialist point I'm more inclined to agree with Scott than with you about the most effective way to incentivize people not to be cruel in this way.
It seems pretty clear to me that while "mercy for everyone" is better than "cruelty for everyone" for reducing cruelty, far better again is "carefully targeted cruelty for the deliberately and unjustifiably cruel, mercy for everyone else".
This is just Machievelli's basic point. And the reason for having prisons and police at all. If you go soft on everyone, most people will treat you kindly...and a handful will say "sucker! i can hurt others with no consequences then!"
Those people make up a small fraction of the population but the vast majority of cancel mobs.
There isn't a "doesn't matter who" in this narrative, though. It definitely matters to the cancel mobs who they are cancelling. They're just using different criteria. From their perspective, they are largely motivated by 'anger', too, they don't realise you see it as 'sadism'.
I encourage you not to personally associate with people who you know have participated in cancel mobs if you want to avoid them, but don't ruin their lives. If you had made a horrible mistake once, or if you were wrong about something important, you would still want people to care about you. You would still want a chance at earning a livelihood, or supporting your family if you have one. That's still true even if the mistake is 'participated in a cancel mob'.
Or 'win a knife fight.' You may deserve consequences even if you'd prefer to get away with it.
Yeah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat
Tit for tat doesn't work among huge amorphous groups, and *especially* doesn't work when a substantial number of the cancellers are in fact basically sociopathic and don't care that much if people on their own side get hurt.
what
It seems relevant that I don't agree at all with your classification of what counts as "acceptable" cancellations
Every canceller will explain why their victims' crimes make this a simple matter of turnabout. "I'm just giving them a taste of their own medicine."
Maybe that's making black people uncomfortable, or kicking out a gay son, or violating someone else's safe space. There's no way to draw the line in a principled manner that doesn't allow basically all cancellation, or basically none of it
You sounded like a principled line-drawer, until you gave examples, and reminded me to be skeptical of all such lines
So your attitude isn't as simple as your originally claimed it was.
So you don't even tolerate people to choose who they are friends with. I have ceased being friends with christians given that it's maximally evil devil-worship given the punishment of infinitely long unrelenting intense pain (and still involves much intentional unjust suffering without that) - and you support my life being ruined for it. Just like yahwheh, another instance of the general pattern of those holding the most indignantly righteous attitudes being among the least legitimate to hold it.
This is silly. His enemies already would hunt him down if motivated, he's not breaking a norm
I think there's actually a pretty strong norm against taking revenge.
I'm pretty sure I've heard that "the only people who are against punching Nazis are, themselves, Nazis". But maybe that's "prevenge"?
(The following is not to be taken seriously:)
It sure looks like you want to go easy on some bad people. That might lead to suspicions that you sympathize with the bad people. If you want to prove that you're not one of the bad people, you're going to need to demonstrate your zeal, right here and now, by going after these bad people in a very visible way. Otherwise you're next. Go on. We're watching.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world sit quietly in their own homes with no social media platform.
(Which, kidding aside, would be great if we could get to it.)
The average big internet poster has posted millions of words across thousands of days in drastically different moods, constantly shifting contexts etc. I bet you that 99% of people who post frequently about politics for multiple years, left-wing or right-wing have participated in a call that someone be fired for some political act. It's incredibly common on both the left or right. "blocked. blocked. blocked. youre all blocked. none of you are free of sin". I certainly look more leniently on cancellation attempts when the person in question has been a big canceller in the past, especially the recent past, but you're going to have to set your bar higher than that if you want to have any allies left at all.
I think there's a world of difference between saying on a random day, in the abstract, that someone should be fired or even killed, and *on the day* that everyone else is screaming those things at one person, and while the firing is happening, to enthusiastically join the crowd with "yeah, get them, make them suffer". The latter, *not* the former, is what I mean by "cancel mob".
And also, a hundred times more so to do this *while the target is pleading for understanding, and trying to apologise*. I mean, I'm pretty suspectible to extreme anger (see this thread), but I cannot imagine myself continuing to hold this level of anger against someone who is pleading with me not to hurt them, no matter what they've done. I'd feel horrible, even if I had committed to a principle like the one above and I rationally believed they deserved punishment.
If even I, angry as I am, can say that, then the kind of person who is capable of maintaining gleeful sadism in such circumstances is someone I can barely view as human.
I think, and I am genuinely sad about this, that you may find yourself disappointed by human nature, because I see this constantly from both the left and the right. Not necessarily a majority of the population, but certainly a supermajority of the very politically active population. How many rightists are there, for example, who didn't rejoice in Colin Kaepernick's cancellation and job loss, or join in that ongoing mob effort that went on for months. Almost everyone who was very politically active at the time on the right on on Twitter would have at least one Tweet.
I am disappointed by human nature. I was jolted by the idea that if you hate cruelty, you end up hating a high proportion of people.
How many rightists? Most that I recall didn't express any opinion on him. I don't think you can find any tweets from me.
At this point, I must mention _Thornhedge_ by Ursula Vernon, a fantasy which includes a non-human who responds to weakness by increasing attacks.
> I bet you that 99% of people who post frequently about politics for multiple years, left-wing or right-wing have participated in a call that someone be fired for some political act
This is one of the most intense typical-mind fallacy pronouncements I've ever seen. The marketplace of rationalizations is strong with this one.
Yup. Most people don't do that. The people who do just aggregate at times to be a big headache.
Scroll through some Twitter account histories of ordinary people (not celebrities) who talk about politics
Yeah, I'd bet I've written more prolifically — unfortunately, mostly in media slightly less lasting than isopropanol — than 99% of the population, and I've never done this that I can recall. I've certainly posted a lot of "boy this person is a fucking moron", but I've never called for a firing.
I take it you're more of a limbo player than a vaulter :D
You must be very busy.
I'm not saying I'm doing these things now, I don't even use Twitter. I'm endorsing a principle that seems missing from Scott's analysis.
This seems extremely, radically disproportionate.
1. How bad does "participation in a cancel mob" have to be for a person to justifiably get their life ruined? Is it enough to tweet "yeah" in response to "let's cancel person X!!!", without doing anything else? What's the lower boundary?
2. If your goal is to discourage people in the future from canceling others, note that a lack of proportionality can be counterproductive. If your lower boundary for what's unacceptable is low, then people who know they'll pass that boundary anyway will not be scared to go arbitrarily far beyond - it doesn't matter then if I just tweet a "yeah", or show up to someone's house with a pitchfork - your punishment will be the same, so why should I care (so the people may justly reason).
3. As others have pointed out, this tactic is unjustly cruel. If my actions have contributed (not even caused) someone to be cyberbullied for 2 days on twitter 5 years ago, that's bad. But do I thereby deserve the punishment of losing job, income, the respect of my loved ones, and generally getting my life ruined (or whatever it is you intend to do to those you wish to harm)? This is so, so far beyond "an eye for an eye", or any other principle of proportionality.
Yeah it's a "look at me, how bad I am." Kind of designed to suck the air out of the room by being over-the-top
You seem to be making the same mistake as those who think that Popper's paradox of tolerance is a license to persecute anyone you want as long as you can contextualize it as a war on intolerance.
The point of the paradox is that liberty has an inverse recursive nature, whose stable solution involves some degree of tolerance on every level that is neither 0% nor 100%. You think that cancelling cancellers is fundamentally more justified than cancelling racists because it's one level more sophisticated than the object level, but it accounts for just one level and loses the recursion. You end up being just another guy who would pester people over a single old problematic tweet, and the morsel of sophistication is cancelled out (heh) by the irony of embodying the behavior you fight against.
Popper's paradox is frequently misunderstood: https://x.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1367869888157646850 It's about people who cannot be dealt with any other way. For people that only respect violence, violence is the only tool to be used on them.
To the people who think this is cruel:
First, I really do mean the second part, which everyone is mostly missing. It's just as important a part of my proposal as the first part. The essential point is that there's a bright clear line (with maybe a small vague area) and if you're on one side you're *absolutely protected* no matter what, and if you're on the other you're absolutely condemned. Surely this is in any many ways much better than a vague "you might be destroyed for anything at all, or you might get away with anything" that is the status quo?
Second, I don't think it's remotely fair to call this cruel in anything like the same sense as cancel culture in general is cruel. I think it's like comparing support for the death penalty to support for collective mass murder of a population (e.g..collective punishment in war). To someone who supports the death penalty, you can disagree, you can say they're sinking to the level of what they hate, you can say it feeds a cycle of violence, and you can say it's based in an ultimately evil instinct of vengeance despite the trappings of justice. But comparing them in any way to an advocate of collective punishment (let alone collective murder) is utterly beyond the pale. The two are not mere differences in degree: they're complete differences in kind.
Third, if you prefer rephrase my proposal as "I'll spend 100% of my effort defending those in the second category, and spare literally zero sympathy for those in the first". The central part of this is nobody, ever, should be cancelled for being on the wrong side or having the wrong opinion while being personally innocent of causing deliberate harm...which is contrary to large parts of the right (see Scott's quotes) and virtually the entirely of the current left.
I don't actually believe you mean the second part because you posted a clarification listing several exceptions to the first part, strongly suggesting the principles you claim to hold are … well, if not non-existent, at least flexible.
Would you cancel an individual who promises to cancel those who refuse to cancel others in the here-and-now?
For brevity, we will call this individual "Ascend's Basilisk."
Liberalism can only function if you are willing to be illiberal specifically towards people who promote and use illiberal means. This is basic, paradox of tolerance stuff. Maybe the OP takes it a bit far, but the basic instinct is not only correct, but necessary. Liberalism died in America specifically because it did not know how to defend itself from illiberalism from the left.
The paradox of tolerance, as it's usually used as an argument, is a misconception, both when it's used by SJWs and when it's used by the anti-cancel-culture right.
It's correct that it's generally justified and often necessary to be intolerant of those who are intolerant of others without a good justification *to a similar extent as they are intolerant*. People who criticize others for bad reasons deserve to be criticized. People who disparage others deserve to be disparaged. A company that refuses to do business with people for bad reasons (i.e. fires them) deserves that we refuse to do business with it (i.e. boycott it). Someone who uses extrajudicial coercion deserves the cops' and prison wardens' coercion. Words deserve words; gunmen deserve the bullet.
But most people using the paradox of tolerance argument are trying to justify a higher level of intolerance against intolerant people than those use themselves. Economic harm or even prosecution for words. Legal force for private business decisions. That's not justified or necessary, or at least not nearly as the paradox of tolerance concept makes it seem.
And only those using illiberal means deserve intolerance; those who merely promote them only deserve counterargument, just like those who support other bad policies. Many if not most policy proposals imply prosecuting those who disobey some proposed law, or exposing them to lawsuits; that doesn't mean that if you disagree with the proposal, you should support prosecuting or fining those who promote it. Target companies that yield to cancel mobs for economic harm instead, in an attempt to reverse their incentives.
Participating in a cancel mob to get someone who has participated in a cancel mob fired is in itself the same level of intolerance against him as he has engaged in himself, but if his employer abides it, then he is subjected to economic harm for mere words; if one doesn't support that, one shouldn't demand it.
Take it up with, 'words get bullets' - Popper.
"Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal. "
I agree most people get this wrong, but honestly I don't understand how.
Unfortunately I can't take it up with Popper considering he's dead, but I disagree with him about this. That would-be tyrants use this as an excuse to suppress dissent is a greater threat than that of tyranny arising because we fail to suppress intolerant words with force. If you oppose cancel culture, you must know how the SJ left loves to invoke the paradox of tolerance argument to justify its actions. That Popper said something doesn't make it unassailable truth; all sorts of smart philosophers have said all sorts of wrong things, sometimes contradicting each other.
That's fine.
I was pushing back on the implication that I (and by extension, Popper) was operating under a 'misconception' of the Paradox of Tolerance.
Also, it is not clear that you disagree with Popper, you might, but your examples are not very clear.
Popper does not provide a justification for SJ left cancel culture, he is in fact saying that people who engage in cancel culture are the people who can be justifiably canceled. To be clear, the 'intolerant' behavior that Popper thinks justifies being intolerant, is refusing to engage in the marketplace of ideas or trying to subvert it.
He is not talking about 'intolerance' as used in the modern parlance, like racism or other forms of bigotry. He is saying, you can be as racist as you want, as long as you are arguing for your positions in a fair and open exchange of ideas, but the second you start trying to de-platform somebody, we call the cops.
I didn't mean that it was a misconception that the paradox of tolerance was formulated this way, but that it was a misconception that the claim it makes was true, that there was a paradox.
What I especially dislike about the the usual, simple formulation of the concept of the paradox of tolerance is that it's (perhaps unintentionally) misleading. At first it sounds *obvious* that intolerant people don't deserve the tolerance of others. I always felt that something was off about the way the argument is often used, but it took me a while to figure out what was wrong with it—that what's obvious is that intolerant people don't deserve the sort of tolerance they don't extend to others, but it's often used to argue that they deserve a stronger form of intolerance, which doesn't follow. It may or may not be the case that intolerant words deserve a stronger form of intolerance (I say not), but at a minimum it's debatable and depends on the situation, rather that obvious as the simple forms of "we shouldn't tolerate the intolerant" make it sound.
It's also not really clear to me from the quote that Popper would support suppressing cancel culture by law; it seems to me that he's primarily concerned about violent intolerance and advocacy of such.
I recommend the Black Mirror episode "Hated in the Nation" wrt this.
My preference would be to target not those who participate in a cancel mob, but those who yield to them. If a cancel mob threatens to boycott company A unless it fires X, don't try to create a mob to get those who participated in the previous mob fired, but instead try to create a mob to threaten to boycott company A *if* it fires X, until/unless it reinstates him.
This allows us to preserve a principled and consistent stance about free speech, without having to make exceptions, and exceptions to exceptions and so on. It also avoids issues around the fuzzy boundaries of participating in a cancel mob: many "participants" who may ultimately be instrumental in getting X fired may merely criticize X without explicitly calling for him to be fired, some of them may not even actually want him to be fired.
+1
In general, the right solution to cancel culture is for employers, schools, and the like to get the memo that an outrage mob on Twitter is a dumb reason to fire someone, kick them out of school, evict them from their apartment, etc. This will be helped along by pushing back where we can on these actions.
What if someone was like this in the past, regretted it, and from then on tried to fight against it?
What does "ever knowingly participated in a cancel mob" mean?
Jon Ronson participated in the mob going after Justine Sacco, and it took him a while to figure out what was going on and that there was something wrong with it.
I was among DC Dem elites and the decision to pick Kamala gave people zero pause before calling it stupid. The idea that "cancel culture" was in any way causally related to the VP pick is insane and made me downgrade anything written here as factual. Institutional decisions are hard to identify causally but "drop out and you will be VP" is a particularly easy one to identify and the misattribution here is silly.
Also lol at "the wrong memo."
Read the actual memo again. James Damore was not fit to be a hiring manager and Google absolutely made the right choice. If that is a supposedly unjust cancellation, then cancel culture is fine.
A deeply shocking moment for me was reading a Medium article by a scientist versed in gender differences. The first third of the article was pleasantly toned and made comments on how Damore made some accurate and supported claims
Suddenly the tone shifted and she spent the rest of the article talking about him as an enemy of the people. Having supporting facts and matching intentions was totally insufficient
I just read the whole memo, and don't see anything heinous that would require firing the guy?
He wasn't a hiring manager was he? He was an engineer that was asked for feedback on a diversity program.
Facts are the first thing thrown out the window when the cancel mob gets going.
Slight correction, nobody asked him to write that memo, he just decided to.
(As far as I remember, he wasn't personally asked to write it, but the company asked for feedback in general.) EDIT: you wrote you worked at Google, so you probably know better.
I don't have SUPER detailed insider knowledge here, but my general expectation from doing Google stuff is that there was probably a survey sent out after it, like, did you think this was valuable [0-10], any comments, not "write a lengthy essay and share it with the whole company".
I remember reading an article, which is now unfortunately paywalled, which gave me the impression that google employees were *very* politically active in the pre-Damore era. Google's brass encouraged this, because they sincerely believed in "don't be evil". I think each faction had slack channels where they would meme at each other's expense.
this doesn't match your experience? Like, I acknowledge that the article probably exaggerated some bits for rhetorical effect. But it seems like the facts of the story set a certain bar of expectations of how politically active in the Culture Wars the campus was. And in this light, Damore's memo doesn't come off as especially surprising to me.
I read the memo. It featured several good ideas about increasing female staffing, but it committed a Great Heresy and assumed men and women are different, and are not interchangeable.
I was at Google at the time and I didn't think firing him was a good idea, although I do think it's ironic that he had a bunch of complaints about programs to promote race/gender diversity but also suggested we/they needed to work on making things more welcoming to conservatives, which feels like a variation on the theme discussed in this post.
After Damore was fired, how long do you suppose it will be until the next time a Google employee who values his job gives any honest feedback of this kind?
This is the Darth Vader school of management in action--when someone tells you something you don't want to hear, force choke them. That way, nobody will ever disturb your serenity with unwanted information.
Respectfully, this is very disconnected from the reality I experienced at Google at the time. I don't remember the exact order in which these happened, but while I was there there was also:
- A mass protest by employees of Google working with the US military to analyze drone footage, which was subsequently cancelled
- A mass protest by employees of Google building a tracked and censored search engine for China, which was subsequently cancelled
- A multi-city walkout in protest of sexual harassment in the workplace as documented by the NYT
- A campaign to support the unionization of the food service contractors, including a memorable videoconference that management joined and tried to reschedule, only to have the employee organizers tell them to their face they were going to have the meeting anyway, and do so
- A company-wide employee-led meeting to air claims of retaliation against some of the organizers of the above
As the last indicates, management definitely did try to tamp down some of these efforts but the culture at the time was one of considerable agency on the part of the rank-and-file. Perhaps after I left, when there were multiple layoffs for no reason, people stopped ticking their necks out quite so far, but I honestly doubt it and have seen news to the contrary.
Also, I think an honest reading of why Damore was fired was "everybody read his memo and got pissed off and yelled about it until he was fired", NOT that "management" wanted to get rid of him because of their own politics. The memo was EVERYWHERE for a few days and got discussed by every ERG (Employee Resource Group) and produced a ton of very angry messages from the tank-and-file. It was what everybody was talking about in the cafeterias. It probably literally amounted to millions or tends of millions of dollars in lost work.
As I said, I DIDN'T think firing him was a good idea, but I felt very much like that was the minority opinion. (I thought we should host a debate with him. I would have been delighted to rake the other side.)