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.
1. I realize it doesn't address neighbors' concerns, but you can build domiciles that are virtually indestructible.
2. "More often" is doing a lot of work here. You're just guessing.
3. Because you're the kind of person who calls the severely mentally ill "basically rabid," the costs you dump on society are probably massive, whether those costs are financial or not.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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."
140 Communist Party members were arrested and 93 were convicted on trumped up charges. I suppose a handful may have been guilty. I don't know if this was the extent of the prosecutions during the era.
6,000 were arrested during an earlier Red hysteria in 1919-1920.
>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're right that no one cancelled by the Left in the West gets the Salman Rushdie treatment
Salman Rushdie got the Salman Rushdie Treatment by the hands of Islamists, not the Right.
The 2 factions overlap insofar as both are religious and hate LGBT and/or atheists and/or abortion, but anything else is where they disagree, and disagree pretty violently too.
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.
Everywhere does have a "Left"-"Right spectrum - quotes to acknowledge the uselessness of the terms - but:
(1) In Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and rest of the worst of Middle Eastern dictatorships, the "spectrum" is more like "a crushing Islamist/military-junta/royal majority controls all of society, everyone else tries to keep their head down and a few mavericks manage to use the internet to make fun of the hegemon and post obscenities about them, hopefully without getting the Khashoggi treatment" [1]. There is no balance or symmetry, as there (more or less) is in European or more generally Western landscapes.
(2) I'm not a defender of the American and/or European Right, not by a long shot, the pro-Israel faction in particular are a bunch of pathetic spineless maggots, and absolutely nothing of value would have been lost if Trump's shooter had been a better marksman. I'm just of the general principles that if you want to blame somebody, you have to blame them for the things that are very strongly and characteristically theirs. The Islamist "Right" is so far down the list of """Things That Look And Act Like The Western Right""" that you might as well use Stalin and Mao to denounce the modern American left.
But yes, Rushdie was a very left-field (hehe) reference. Maybe he shouldn't have been brought up at all.
<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.
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.
Just popping in to add that Salt Lake City is the least religious community in Utah. Yeah, the Big Temple is here with the main church offices, but this is still the place rapscallion Utahns huddle defensively together. Downtown has lots of liquor stores and strip clubs.
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 haven't heard the word agnostic in YEARS. It was a VERY common self-descriptor in the 90s. It seems like most agnostics have rebranded themselves as chilled out atheists. At least where I live in the Western USA.
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.
"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."
I suggest we repeal all truancy laws and give voters little or no control over their children's school's curriculum. Parents who disliked the curriculum could than pull their kids out of school.
I very much dislike public schools and the parents who make them worse. Kids are probably better off meandering aimlessly or playing video games than getting their brains melted in Kid Jail.
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
Keep in mind that video games have been shown to be mentally beneficial. More research needs to be done but at the very least, gaming has neutral valence and compulsive gaming is a symptom of dysfunction, not a cause.
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.
---
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 probably has modest expectations for changing any MAGA's mind, but he might be able to reach a few, this was an interesting writing exercise, and this post doubles as a generalized polemic against getting revenge.
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.
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.
> their idiosyncratic demand for a Right of Return to Israel despite never being Israeli citizens
As opposed to any random Jewish rando who has never been to the Middle East in the past 2000 years, which according to Israeli immigration policies is **checks notes** a red-blooded Israeli with Right of Return.
> Israel gets far more attention in the West than other parts of the world outside the US and Europe
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.
> most of the general criticisms are untenable and ethically inconsistent.
Ah yes, the famously ethically-inconsistent and untenable "Colonialism is bad and killing 40K people in less than a year seems kinda sus", endorsed only by racist antisemitic monsters with a raging hard on for hate
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?
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 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.
It's kinda of a very tired pedantic gotcha though.
Person 1: The only thing that we can't do right now is drive 30 kilos to this far fancy place just to eat
Person 2: So I challenge you to go to India to have your meal there
Person 1: ....
Person 2: Ha !!! So there are **other** things that we can't do, not just one
What's the interesting argument here except that the person you responded to used the very standard English convention of using intensifiers like "Only" to say something that isn't literally true in the strictest sense but true in every other sense?
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.
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.
In Germany, Belgium and Switzerland, abortion on demand (AOD) is banned after 12 weeks. the great majority of European states ban AOD after 10-20 weeks. Britain and the Netherlands are outliers at 24 weeks.
In 25+ US states, there is no hard and fast upper limit for AOD. Pro-choice activists are working tirelessly to return us to the status quo immediately post-Roe: no hard and fast upper limit for AOD in any state. Any implementation of European style limits is treated as a grave threat to womens' rights.
To be sure, abortion after 24 weeks is quite rare here. Still, comparisons between European and American abortion laws are more complex than you may have realized.
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.
But that's just circular. The thing that gets you cancelled is "Not bootlicking everything Israel does". There is nothing inherently right-wing about this and there is a metric shit-ton of leftist critiques of Israel and indeed the entire historical Zionist project.
If you define everything that gets you cancelled to be "right-wing" then yes by definition "right-wing" is the only cancellable thing in existence, but that's not what "right-wing" means.
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.
McCarthy was probably damaged in every way you can imagine. I know the ACX ethos says it's rewarding for people with contradictory politics to discuss politics civilly, but we have fundamental disagreements on historical facts. That kind of nips any ideological compromise right in the bud. (Or political compromise if you prefer).
"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!)
Whelp, I disagree when it comes to my beloved United States. I'm a European style social democrat heavily influenced by Marx. I'm saving us a pointless back and forth by taxonomizing myself. We tend to be so coy and vague about our political tendencies here that we waste an enormous amount of time arguing about the leaves when our true disagreement is about the roots. We're so divergent beneath the superficially homogenizing sheen of civility; that we can't even separate satirical comments from sincere ones.
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).
Chapo Trap House is the biggest Marxist podcast. While they never specifically condemned rioters or looters, they. heaped scorn on the 1619 project, the bestselling book White Fragility and implicit bias training. (also known as diversity training, or basically anti-white workplace struggle sessions). They are harshly dismissive of any diagnosis of America's ills that centers race.
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
Since we're on thw topic, it's pretty heinous how we treat people acquitted of sex crimes and domestic abuse. While some acquittals are clearly a case of getting off on a technicality (Cosby), we definitely need to respect acquittals more.
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".
You don't see the hundred million Americans talking about their perfectly normal and reasonable work place because that's boring. American work places aren't extreme, internet discourse is extreme, and Americans rule the internet.
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.
"Either let the employee and employer agree on these perks voluntarily" - which means the employer dictates the terms in practice. Inequality of bargaining power exists.
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.
Do you think people who want to "watch someone, anyone hang" are open about this? Or even know their own true desire for random mayhem? No one is the villain of their own story. I can't read your mind, so I can't accuse you of being deluded about your own motivations! But on the other hand, I don't think YOU can read your (subconscious) mind. Might want to hedge your bets on revenge, just in case you're internally compromised. (I need to hedge my bets, too).
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.
I'm NOT SO SURE. There's a (weakening) norm against unapologetically getting revenge. I think that we are quite tolerant of revenge as long as it is carefully framed as not-revenge.
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.
Hatred is cruelty. If to no one else, then to yourself. No this isn't pithy nonsense. Anger takes energy and focus to maintain; effort best spent elsewhere.
> 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.
This is one of the best things I've read in 25 years of reading comments sections and web forums. I'm too physically exhausted now to laugh but I'm grinning from ear to ear.
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.
Actually, I absolutely reject Karl Popper's so-called paradox of tolerance. I found Popper's framing repulsive when I learned about it as a teen. Twenty years later, my political philosophy has transformed, but I STILL abhor Popper's logic.
There is no paradox of tolerance. Tolerance is honorable and I believe in "death before dishonor." No man lives forever and no system lasts forever. When it is impossible to maintain the system without adopting the vicious ways of our foes, than we have reached the natural and acceptable endpoint for that system. Life can suck. Don't make it worse by losing your soul.
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.
(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.
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 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.)
There were definitely, and pretty much always are, conflicting views. People fought about all of this stuff, pretty openly. I remember some body quit after the drone footage ("Maven") controversy and cited a sense of hostility towards people who served in the US military. Discussions around China always prompted some degree of pushback from Chinese employees who took their government's position (by which note I do not mean "all Chinese employees"). I remember a heated meeting about Google sponsoring CPAC, which a lot of people objected to, but also that some conservative employees attended the meeting and voiced support for it. Generally speaking people felt pretty empowered to express their views and Google wasn't a literal monoculture, although in most cases it was pretty skewed more left-wing than the general population.
Although if I'm being totally honest I don't remember any body giving a heated defense of Damore specifically. I do remember a close colleague commenting that in some sense he had a point, in that it was clearly really hard for people to express that specific position without getting a lot of shit.
Hey don't be slandering Vader! ;) He never force-choked for bad news, just for blaspheming the Force or stupid screw-ups. Still a waste of personnel though.
Captain Needa basically gave up too easily. The bad news he delivered was his own failure. Instead of brainstorming possibilities he jumped straight to falling on his sword. Noble of him to take the rap, but if I was Vader I would've said the following:
"Have you any theories as to how they escaped?"
"No my Lord, the ship is too small for a cloaking device, and they didn't jump into hyperspace. Plus if they were to either cloak or jump they would've done it long before now."
"Okay, so my next question is: WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?!! You wasted time and shuttle fuel just to come tell me you can't think outside the box?? If they didn't disappear, then they are STILL IN THE AREA. so get back to your ship and FIND THEM. Check your sensors, send TIE fighters out to patrol, just DO SOMETHING!"
"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."
Huh? Harris dropped out months before it even looked plausible that Biden might be nominated.
She was floated as a VP pick early on, and the clean exit was helped by the backchanneling. It was also not hard in December 2019 to believe that Biden was going to win. Buttigieg was the only plausible competitor at that point.
Her clean exit from the race? She left in December, before any primaries had happened. She was going nowhere. How messy could it have been? I believe December 2019 is also before Biden made his pledge to nominate a Black woman specifically.
Since you remember the race very differently from me (in terms of who was a plausible competitor), I think I am more inclined to believe Matt Yglesias's account, which I can't find but which has it that there was indeed pressure in 2020 not to cast doubt on the wisdom of Biden's choice of Harris.
Happy to read any accounts that disagree if you can find them! You will along your way find many articles criticizing the choice on the grounds that she ran a bad campaign.
He made the pledge because he had picked Kamala, this isn't 6-D chess.
But *why* did he pick Kamala is the question being asked. What did she bring? What was worth making the bargain about?
There are now new articles popping up about her problems retaining staff, very like the articles from 2021 about her problems in first year of being VP. Allegations ranging from she's a bully to every place she's been in charge, the work environment has been chaotic and with a lot of turnover of staff, so she hasn't anyone experienced or long-term.
These aren't new questions, so the query remains: is she indeed 'the most capable' or not? If not, why picked *except* as a DEI hire, which is why nobody would dare speak out against it back in 2020, as Scott claims?
Just as an aside, while I'm not thrilled with choosing political leaders based on identity (skin color, sex, sexual preference, etc.), it seems like a pretty different phenomenon than affirmative action in other places.
Politics is very often organized along identity lines. I wish it weren't, but it is. Harris is very likely to choose a white man as her running mate for those reasons, and that guy will be an identity politics pick in the same way she was. Similarly, Biden was Obama's VP, and I'm pretty sure part of Obama's calculation was that a relatively young and inexperienced black guy would be easier to swallow, paired with an old white guy who'd been hanging around in Washington for many decades.
You choose a running mate to help you win the election, and identity characteristics are relevant for that in ways they will never be relevant for how well you write code or fill cavities or design airplanes or whatever.
He pledged to select a woman, color unspecified, during the debate with Bernie in March
He was most likely to pick Klobuchar, but then George Floyd happened and Klobuchar had a bad record of prosecuting police misconduct when she was County Attorney in Minneapolis. She publicly took her name out of contention.
Dropping out likely didn't have anything to do with it (you're in a stronger position, not weaker, for running a strong campaign (which she didn't do)).
How much of that was really "make the bargain: drop out, you get to be VP" and how much was "she dropped out because her campaign was tanking"? That is the question being asked - that she only got the VP gig not even as a consolation prize, but that Biden had said he was going to pick a woman VP.
Picking a black woman instead of a white woman would be extra credit points, and there wasn't a lot of choices for selection there, so Kamala got the call. If she got the call because "black woman, that'll do!" then the questions about her capability are relevant. Just as relevant if the impetus for asking her to drop out was "yeah she's streaking ahead, she'll be the nominee, but this racist sexist country will never elect a woman of colour so for the sake of the nation we'll ask her to drop out and make her VP instead as a reward for her patriotism".
If "they wouldn't elect a woman of colour" was a consideration four years ago, why isn't it now?
I’ve seen this debate play out on right wing Twitter.
I broadly agree with Scott here. Cancellation sucks, no one should do it, we need very strong norms against it. Random Home Depot employees are not a legitimate target for character assassination.
That said, expressing support for political violence is going very far! In most previous eras, long before 2015, if you said something like “John Hinkley was an American hero, I’m upset that he didn’t succeed” in a public space, you could expect a visit from the FBI!
Left bubbles have lost touch with reality and they don’t realise how fucked up it is to wish death on their main political opponent. (The same is true about the pro Palestine rallies, by the way, which tolerate a level of anti-Semitism that would never be condoned if it were directed against Blacks or the LGBTQ community.)
Meanwhile the environment in left dominated spaces is such that college professors have been cancelled for saying there are two genders, or NYT editors fired for giving a platform to a conservative writer. This is a dramatic departure from the ACLU going to courts to demand rights for freedom of expression for literal Nazis, which is how the left thought of free speech 40 years ago.
So, I’m torn. I think where I come down is that I’m against random people who are just trying to hold down a job getting RT’d and cancelled by LibsOfTikTok, almost regardless of how odious their position, but I’m OK with public figures or people in positions of authority being held responsible for speech that literally incites violence. I’m OK with Tenacious D having to cancel their tour. 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.
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").
There are definitely some MAGA extremists and Jan 6 was definitely a national embarrassment. And there have been plots to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer and kill Nancy Pelosi by some of the less hinged members of the Red Tribe.
That said I do feel that the left has taken this way further, particularly in academia, education and the media. There have been cases of people getting fired (!) for saying very normal things that most people agree with. That creates an atmosphere of fear and is not hospitable to right-wingers or even to centre-left liberals who value free speech nd freedom of enquiry higher than social justice.
Now you're conflating two things, where you argue that political violence is worse on the right (possibly true, but the support for the Trump would-be assassin was alarming.)
I'm not arguing that point, though. I'm saying cancel culture is way worse on the left. That's what we were originally talking about.
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?
Well the point of free speech is precisely that you defend the rights of people you hate to say things you despise.
Incitement of violence is certainly alarming though. I think we have to recognise what brought us to this point - the absence of this culture of free speech you refer to, particularly in academia and media, to the point where people are so intolerant of opposing points of view that they will literally say “speech is violence” - and then turn around and argue that actual violence should be tolerated and encouraged.
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...
In some alternative universe, someone took a shot at Biden instead. And in that universe, undoubtedly there's some right-wing dorks who joked about how it's a shame the bullet missed. And in that universe, some of those people got fired. And in that universe, somebody somewhere probably called that "cancel culture" and complained about it.
But it wouldn't be a *central* example of cancel culture. If "cancel culture" just meant that you could lose your job for wishing death on opposing politicians, then few people would be outraged about cancel culture.
The equivalent of getting cancelled for saying that trans-women shouldn't be allowed in womens' restrooms isn't getting cancelled for saying that someone should be murdered, it's getting cancelled for saying that trans-women _should_ be allowed in womens' restrooms.
Isn't there laws or law proposals in some states to make it illegal for trans women to be in womens' restrooms? Are the politicians proposing those laws getting cancelled in any meaningul way? Note that I'm not from the US, I'm genuinely asking.
Liberals don't have the power to cancel conservatives. You would only be cancelled if you believe certain things and surround yourself or are employed by the blue tribe.
Or any neutral company in a panic because their social media team is reporting massive negative public opinion because Jack in accounting posted something mildly positive about Ben Shapiro. Or any company with a Blackrock investment. Or any company in a Blue Tribe dominated field, or reliant on vendor in Blue Tribe dominated fields. Or a Blue Tribe company.
There is not allot of neutral, hr departments, black rock, etc. means there will be an affect where it matters most; on the balance sheet of the fortune 500 and that place you spend 8 hours a day with little control over your time.
What about Harald Uhlig? Economics is part of academia, but usually tolerates people on the right. But the Federal Reserve dropped ties with him after he criticized BLM on twitter. I don't know his politics, but that utility worker that someone complained about making an "OK" sign while his vehicle was stopped at a red light was canceled by a liberal despite not being part of that liberal space.
My understanding is that the typical academic economist is a moderate Democrat, it's just that the rest of academia tends to be more left leaning. But he does still seem to be a counterexample to the claim that the left only cancels their own, as I haven't seen any indication that he was on the left.
Yeah, good thing no conservatives ever work anywhere except conservative companies. And good thing every progressive company has a conservative doppleganger with a few positions in the same field of expertise open at all times just in case someone slips through the cracks
Politicians are immune from cancellation (for most values of that poorly-defined word). They can't lose their job except by being voted out, and if a politician is voted out for having opinions that differ from his constituents' then that's not really cancellation that's just... how it's supposed to work.
Maybe it's different in the US, but here in the UK, where party discipline is generally somewhat tighter, there have been cases where parties were pressured into deselecting candidates by concentrated negative coverage of something the candidate had said or done.
As you may know, party discipline in our two major parties is so lax that they aren't even parties in the same way you have parties. Best to think of them as something between parties and bcoalitions. Correct me if I'm wrong, readers, but I think we have no direct analogue to deselection.
I kind of think it's stretching to call a politician being voted out as "cancelling" given that their job description involves "periodically be put before the mob to see if you're fired."
But maybe Scott McRory who went from popular in Charlotte to a trans-hating monster.
No, politicians are in the small set of people whom it is entirely sensible and right to remove from their jobs because of their political ideas and actions.
Right, and this also points to a tactical argument against the right-wing engaging in cancel culture. The right may be able to get people fired for wishing Trump had been killed, but those people aren't convincing anyone to become left-wing anyway. The left-wing counterparts of the important right-wing arguments that get suppressed—that cops kill black people left and right just for being black, that outcome differences between demographic groups are a result of discrimination, that trans people should be treated as the gender of their choice—remain thoroughly mainstream, and the right won't make them cancellable anytime soon. And if the right won so thoroughly that it could cancel people for these left-wing arguments, it wouldn't be needed; this is a general argument against censorship, that it can only be wielded by the side that has the upper hand anyway. Meanwhile, by cancelling people for saying extreme stuff that won't convince anyone who doesn't already agree, it loses some moral high ground without any political benefit.
There's an easy compromise here: be magnanimous with the general public, and only cancel public figures who have a documented history of gleefully cancelling others for petty reasons. That way, genuinely censorious people get their comeuppance (but no worse than precisely the thing they inflicted on others) while the general public is spared another round of cancel culture.
OK, I really gotta object to this Postcards from Barsoom guy saying "Those few left-wing voices in the early teens who championed classical liberal principles of freedom of expression were summarily cancelled themselves, and are largely on our side now."
No, the principled liberals have not joined your side, they have stayed principled liberals and not joined a clearly illiberal movement, any more than they joined the leftists/SJers previously. I'll grant that plenty of people *did* join you, but those were obviously people who were thinking about people rather than ideas, y'know? The sort of socially-influenced person who says "well since these guys were wrong, their opponents must be right!" Scratch such people and you won't find much coherent principle at all, mostly social reasoning instead. A person who's actually thinking should be entirely capable of being against multiple things at once, you know.
Really I must repeat that as always I think Scott, and many of the people he discusses, are making a mistake by using a one-dimensional political spectrum rather than a tripolar model as I've discussed in the past or as Nate Silver has discussed here: https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-liberalism-and-leftism-are-increasingly
...but of course the idea of the one-dimensional political spectrum is still influential, and it does influence people to do stupid things like e.g. join the traditionalists/authoritarians because the leftists/SJers are being stupid. No! Stop looking at who's wrong and joining the "other" side, as if there were only two sides and one of them has to be the right one! In fact there can be many sides and they are entirely capable of all being wrong simultaneously! Just figure out what's right without thinking about the people involved and go with that!
...sorry, that turned into a bit of a rant, but like, no dude, people joining a traditionalist or authoritarian movement are not in fact principled liberals.
(And yes I am aware that leftism and social justice have difference between them but they are similar enough that for my purposes here they can be grouped; I regard them together as one approximate "pole" in the three-pole way I'm thinking about things, which, checking Nate Silver's article, I see, so does he.)
Well, the American political system just isn't equipped to provide for tripolar options, so most people end up picking a binary side. That's also related to negative partisanship. Most people aren't that thrilled about their side, but they really hate and fear the opposing one.
Thanks for objecting. I unresembled that remark so hard myself that I could no longer take him seriously.
IIRC John Carter is not from the USA and doesn't live here, although he allegedly did for a time. It's quite something to see people hop on this foreign windbag's jock, delighting in his prejudicial subversion of American values like free expression.
Did you change your voting/donation patterns? If not, how is anything that you just said meaningful or relevant? "Man, I really object to the tactics of this political coalition but I will still support its local representatives whenever I have a choice" is valueless and meaninless. Ditto to you, Geoduck.
And yeah, this goes for folks on the right who object to Trump but are ready to pull the lever for him anyway for tactical or strategic culture war reasons.
If it doesn't change your vote or your dollar, it doesn't matter. All else is wind and electrons. This is the fundamental failure of the past 20 years or so.
EDIT: Hell, I'll settle for "Left social circles whose members expressed approval/satisfaction at cancellations".
I generally have always voted third party, which is admittedly pointless. But I'm also in Texas, which is very much not a swing state. Without meaningful political representation, except by accident, I have historically done things like put a lot of time and money into the ACLU.
I no longer support the ACLU, and feel somewhat burned and suspicious. But I am interested in supporting FIRE, who I think are demonstrably non-partisan and involve several former ACLU heavyweights from "back in my day".
Some may attach any connotations they want to this position, but I deny that it constitutes any sort of rightward shift on my part. I hope that answers your question.
I think that's a fair response, and kudos for stopping support of the ACLU now that they're busy filing amicus briefs in opposition to their traditional civil libertarian positions. I withdraw my veiled accusation in your case, while emphasizing that it is a more general complaint of both sides "moderates" in the culture war.
A little more willingness to have enemies to the left/right would go a long goddamn way here, and I find it very telling that the response from the majority of the commentariat here is to make arguments for why the other side totally deserves it/is worse.
"I'm now no longer a supporter of a noted Lefty institution, itself supported by the majority of the Left, but this isn't a Rightward shift."
I dunno, man. Post about your issues with the ACLU on a heavily Left-oriented subreddit, and then on a conservative one. I bet you get very different responses. If we are not to take this as a shift on your part — "I've stayed the same" — then okay, fine, but if the culture moves around you such that the Left has moved away and the Right has moved closer, is that — practically speaking — much different?
Not that it really matters, I guess. I just see a lot of this and feel like it's one of the reasons for "your side's" (mine also, once, long ago) deterioration: unwillingness to do anything to oppose it, even rhetorically.
FWIW, I stopped donating to the ACLU a few years ago, when I saw enough evidence that they had largely abandoned their free-speech-over-all-else commitment for a different set of ideas.
I agree it should change your voting/donation patterns, but it *does* matter even if you don't.
Most people let their political social web (and by extension their political party) massively influence their opinions. For some good reasons (a politician has considered more information than many people), but also very many bad ones.
Maintaining this mental distinction of "I'm merely voting left/right, but these are my views, it is just that one of the left/right are best representing them despite their sheer inadequacy."
If you don't have many people like this who have specific beliefs and don't trivially shift them around, then you're far more able to have extreme political shifts — aka the effects of polarization. It also makes so there's more room for shifting the beliefs of a party, if someone actually has notably distinct beliefs.
I consider the past 20 years as being primarily due to polarization and people not being prepared mentally (or mature enough) for internet level connectivity, which increases polarization and makes social effects a lot stronger because you can hear about news instantly and get everyone's opinion on it. (And then bubbles, etc.)
Maintaining a bastion of distinction in your own mind between "my values" and "the party I'm voting with" is useful for general societal sanity, even if we're currently stuck with a terrible system.
> OK, I really gotta object to this Postcards from Barsoom guy saying "Those few left-wing voices in the early teens who championed classical liberal principles of freedom of expression were summarily cancelled themselves, and are largely on our side now."
if you were given names would you go "not a true liberal"?
I completely agree about the tripolar model, and the rest of it too. Thank you for stating all this so clearly. :-)
> And yes I am aware that leftism and social justice have difference between them
I've generally started referring to the "economic-left" and the "identity-left", but those are pretty crude terms. I tend to think of the identity-left as using the practical techniques of Marxist movements, but abandoning the economic and historical theory in favor of pure coalitional politics.
I'm curious about your thoughts, if you feel like sharing?
„The median victim of cancel culture is some center-left college professor who sent out an email saying that he supports BLM but questions some of their tactics.” This is exactly right. The right wing likes to scream about cancel culture but no right winger ever seems to actually get cancelled. They just don’t get invited to the cool people’s parties anymore. Boo hoo. Did Bari Weiss get „cancelled”? She seems to be higher profile than ever despite how much the left hates her. Is Hanania cancelled? Sailer seems to be doing better than ever. Look at Louis C.K. He may have lost access to the hip crowd, but he’s still performing and still making more money at comedy than most left wing comedians will ever see.
Actually, Candace Owens lost her job! A victim of cancel culture. (She got fired by Ben Shapiro)
Or Tucker Carlson getting fired by Fox. Or Bill O'Reilly getting fired by Fox. Or Glenn Beck getting fired by Fox. The point is, if you're a pundit that lost your job, you got cancelled.
My gestalt is that the current “left” is more cancelly than the current right. And I agree that cancelling generally has traction as a “same side” phenomenon like Scott says (cuz how effective would a righty be at cancelling Maddow; or a lefty taking a run at Carlson). But it’s because the left is the more enthusiastic participant that the median victim would be someone left of Center.
But it’s also a minority scenario where someone actually loses their job etc. Most examples are far more transactional. I think whereas lefties eating their own is probably not something that stirs righties so much, the campus environment is what brings it more into focus even for normies. When invited speakers aren’t allowed to do their thing due to perceived wrongthink (on university grounds which is generally a left-coded arena these days), that’s something many/most would find generally distasteful. And it’s the many examples of “minor” cancellation that I think registers after a while, rather than the headline events that are few and far between.
I think the reason why academic cancellation tends to loom large in people's minds is because, even if you aren't on the left, you generally need a degree in order to get any sort of remunerative or statusful job, and so you can't avoid spending a few years of your life in academia. This gives large numbers of people a personal interest in what goes on there that they don't have regarding most other left-wing spaces.
It is kind of funny to see how little this stuff matters in the real world. A few years ago, I saw a white male LPN complain about how his black female relief was always "running on CP time". He got a dirty look, but no discipline.
Cancel culture means, as far as I can tell, being "cancelled" for behavior or opinions that were acceptable until very recently, and that self-imposed judges of morality have suddenly decided are now outside the bounds of what is socially acceptable. Molyneux and Taylor are certainly subject to censorship, but since their opinions were not allowed real visibility in mainstream media in the Reagan 1980s or Bush 2000s either I have a hard time seeing them as "cancelled". They were never really allowed in public in the first place, social media accidentally offered them a small window of additional freedom that then got shut down. True, Louis wasn't a right winger, but he was cancelled by the left, and the right likes to make him a martyr as far as I can tell. Sailer is able to reach a far larger audience now than he was able to reach in the late 20th century when he was still writing for "respectable" right wing outlets like the National Review. Yes he gets harassed, but is he "cancelled"? Seems like the 2020s have been the best of times for him. Over and over again the right seems to get outraged not because they are literally forced into silence, the way a critic of Putin or Orban might be, but because people from elite colleges call them deplorable for their views and refuse to respect them.
"literally forced into silence, the way a critic of Putin or Orban might be"
I know Orban quarrels with NGOs, has he "literally forced into silence" any particular individual? I know he's banned certain foreigners like Richard Spencer, but that hasn't exactly silenced him.
I think having to ruin your regular career and make your living in the right-wing griftosphere is actual and not fictional cancellation, akin to being ostracized from your polis and having no choice but to work for the Persians
No enemies to the Left, no friends to the Right. Of course they massacre their own side; it's why they are getting more and more extreme. Also, Bari Weiss is a unique case of a well-spoken, attractive, charismatic woman getting fired from the NYT and cast out of polite society for not being a Red Guard at the exact moment a network of people who had been cast out already was developing.
In that there was and is a group of Republicans who support the Democratic policy platform, and only run as Republicans as either containment or because the Dem brand is locally poisonous and/or the R side is wide open, sure.
Tl;dr: cancel culture mostly doesn't affect big-name political opinion journalists, bloggers who can make a living from their political writing, but rather it puts a thumb on the scale at not-inherently-political institutions, which near-invariably become progressive in practice when certain political questions (especially id pol: race, gender, sexual orientation) do come up.
There's the problem that what counts as "crazy" or "aggressive" vs. "standard" opinions is contentious and ever-changing.
Ten years ago, for example, "quietly transing your own kids" would have been regarded as crazy, and many people (largely, but not exclusively, on the right) still regard it as such. So what looks like a justified cancelling for a crazy opinion to one person looks like an unjustified cancelling for a standard opinion to another.
I deliberately have not followed the Home Depot story because I don't need outrage fodder (there's more than enough of that to go around).
I wholeheartedly agree that getting a low-level employee fired for a stupid remark on her private account is wrong.
But (isn't there always a 'but'?)
I go into this with old-fashioned values and principles which I have been told over and over again, by both sides (or however many sides there are) are dumb and stupid and ineffective and nobody thinks like that anymore. This is the modern world for modern audiences.
Honour? Personal dignity? A slew of other values I picked up from reading Sir Walter Scott at too early an age? Nobody cares about that stuffy old shit anymore.
So. I trust Scott, because he's been up the sharp end on this and he's never done this kind of "your views are abhorrent to all right-thinking people, I cast you forth into the wilderness, shame, shame!" treatment of us on here. He's been remarkably tolerant. That's why I know he's put his money where his mouth is.
The people on my side/the right/conservatives/not that lot calling for the heads of their enemies on a platter? Never let it be said that I've not held my share of grudges and revenge fantasies, so I understand - but I still condemn the attitude.
The people on the other side/the left/liberals to progressives/that lot? I don't trust a single one of them one freakin' inch. If Kamala/Gavin/Generic Democrat wins the election, they will be right back out there looking for heads on spikes.
Both sides are "it's not wrong when we do it" and both sides *are* wrong about that, but unhappily I'm now long past the point of expecting any graciousness from anyone.
Example:
"At the risk of getting cancelled myself, it kind of seems like Democrats now wish they’d put a little more of thought into picking a popular/electable VP in 2020 instead of the most diversity-box-ticking person they could find on short notice."
Just before I came on here to read this post, I was browsing the online news headlines. And an Irish newspaper is printing an opinion piece (filler) from an American journalist on "The Washington Post" about "If Democrats dare to dump Harris, they will face a deservedly bitter backlash".
(At first I thought it was a home-grown journalist because the name is Irish, but she's not).
I'm not going to pay out a subscription just to read this, but I think we can all imagine what it says. Why the hell is an Irish paper printing American racial politics crap? Well, aren't we all The Modern Audience now? This is the Right Kind of Views that the Right Kind of People hold.
(There's an equally stupid filler piece about Kamala probably won't be tracing any Irish roots, but at least that has *some* shred of relevance to Ireland, given that we suck up as hard as a Nilfisk industrial vacuum cleaner to whomever is the American president because of our economy and needing a powerful ally).
And that's just one example of why I don't trust "the left" (that ill-defined term) because the 'right-thinking' people are just champing at the bit to get or hold on to power and be able to wield the daggers.
While I agree that *too few* people think of honor and dignity in Walter-Scott-esque terms these days, do not give in to despair. There are still some of us.
As a leftist person who’s long been against cancellation for reasons similar to what you describe, it helps to remind myself that my concepts of “the left” and “the right” from online discourse are both nonhuman mobs / monsterous figments of the internet, and it’s not principled or realistic to project them onto any individual person I talk to. My litmus test now for whether a political writer is worth hearing is if they stand up for the dignity & humanity of all people. Even if I agree with someone politically, I try to regard them with serious skepticism if they make any calls to cancel / gulag / paint a group of people with a broad brush.
That's interesting — this is like maybe the second time in the past five years I didn't read a SA post, and in fact felt a little disgusted.
I predicted, a few years ago, that Scott would fall like all the rest and eventually post the same milquetoast garbage many other people like him ended up posting. So far, I've been wrong. I hope I continue to be.
>Ideally these commitments would have legal force, letting students/stockholders sue for violations.
In keeping with the theme of the post, I think this is likely to lead to similar downstream problems as the civil rights stuff one paragraph above. The problem where these sorts of rules lead to collective insanity is because youve removed discretion from the local decisionmakers.
1. I've always thought "Cancel Culture" interpreted as a demand rather than a name- e.g., abandon symbolic representation- would be a great name for an Anarcho-primitivist movement.
2. I agree there has been quite a lot of cancelling from the left generally, but there's a saying in equity law "He who comes to equity must come with clean hands". For the right to represent themselves as the injured party, now just seizing the weapon of their persecutor, it might help their case if they hadn't already cancelled a bunch of people in recent memory (e.g. Kaepernick,) Especially when we factor in the friendly fire element, I'm not even wholly convinced that more rightists have been cancelled by leftists than leftists have been cancelled by rightists. There's a lot of, e.g., teachers being fired by school boards. It's not as flashy as a left-wing show trial and Twitter cancellation, but when it comes to getting people in trouble, it can be just as effective. When I've bought this up up to rightists a lot of them have responded with some variant of 'ah well that doesn't count because of course it was untenable for so and so to keep their position'. I can't say I find that especially persuasive.
3. Scott points to polls, but even among the politically active and influential parts of the left, it's simply not true there is no opposition to cancellation. You can find endless leftists on Twitter lamenting this or that ordinary person- or even celebrity- getting screwed over. The view that cancelling in general is bad even when it's something I REALLY don't like is rare everywhere but I see little evidence it is rarer on the left than the right.
4. Maybe this is undermining my own case, but arguably the attack on the Akahnatenists worked out pretty well for the religious traditionalists- Egyptian monotheism was annihilated for over a thousand years.
5. Re: Don't go mad with power till you have power. I can say that the one thing that actually positively makes me want to cancel someone is if they've cancelled someone themselves recently. Starting a barrage of cancellations against leftists will attract counterfire and in many cases it will be effective. Everyone always thinks their enemies are vicious, yet everyone's enemies, almost always, are not yet being as vicious as they could be.
>There's a lot of, e.g., teachers being fired by school boards.
I think theres a good case that political opinions really are relevent to the job here, since socializing children is a big part of the effect/purpose of school.
Teachers are public servants, and the entire point of school boards is to provide the public with a mechanism to oversee the operation of those public servants.
School boards firing teachers is a sign that the system is working correctly.
One of the ironic parts is that basically *the original* case of cancel culture, long before Justine Sacco, was Stacy Snyder, a student teacher who was cancelled due to a MySpace photo captioned "drunken pirate".
Regarding point 2, is there a resource that lists teachers that have been fired by school boards for their views? Maybe an organization that helps them, a la FIRE, or maybe FIRE itself? I'm interested in lending them a hand.
Teachers in the classroom don't have the same speech rights as someone out on the street with a soapbox and some leaflets. The teacher is (a) acting as their employer's agent, on their employer's time, and (b) is likely a recipient of government money, which comes with an awful lot of strings and conditions.
I agree with this, but think those considerations need to be balanced against the value of teachers having a reasonable degree of freedom to say things that are unpopular, even by community standards, which ought to escalate as kids get older (and will never be absolute).
Feels like a motte and bailey here, one of the first things new teachers learn is to be very careful on social media and/or delete their accounts, which to me does not plausibly have a relevant educational justification.
I'm probably not important enough on the right to count as an objector, but I loathe LibsofTikTok even more than usual for that behavior, and have been tweeting in opposition to this since it began. As someone who has been pseudonymous for twelve years, I find any form of doxxing or cancel culture pretty repellent, regardless of the political side. Quite a few others have been as well, most more notable than me (Reason magazine come to mind), mostly on Twitter.
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.
Yeah, it was weird how that happened. I have been online for nearly 30 years and never used my real name. But my earlier incarnations were more loosely protected. Now I make sure Google doesn't connect my id and real name, gender, location etc.
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.
>I hate this because I’ve fought with these people on the Left, and they sound exactly the same.
Yeah, no. This is "creationists say that evolutionists are closed-minded, and evolutionists say that creationists are closed-minded" stuff. Just because two sides say things that are grammatically similar doesn't mean they're equally valid. It's something you have to look at at the object level--they may sound the same, but are they equally correct?
(And if your answer is "well, everyone thinks they're right, so you have to have standards based on what people think about themselves", I again point to creationists and evolutionists saying similar things. We don't want to teach creation and evolution equally because both sides think they're right and so any standard has to apply to both sides equally. We need to *figure out* who's right and treat them unequally based on that.)
And they don't sound the same anyway. The right is saying "we used to have free speech, until the left started cancelling". Notice how Scott's quote isn't the same at all! In his quote, the left is going on about how the right has done evil things. But the left is *not*, *not*, saying "we used to have free speech, until the right stopped that". In fact, in the quote, the left isn't expressing admiration for free speech at all, let alone complaining that because of the other side, such a thing is no longer possible. That's massively different from what the right is saying.
Yeah "free speech" is now right coded as a value. That's awful for the left, and is probably the main reason I personally switched my voting allegiance.
But to be fair to Scott, it's true that if you cherry pick the worst norm-breakers on either side, you can come up with a laundry list of bad stuff that right-wingers have done too. That's why it's not fruitful as a method of argumentation.
If Apple already has Windows PCs available for employee lending through IT, and I, an Apple shareholder but non–Apple employee, advocate against Windows PCs being available to employees on the grounds that their garden is insufficiently walled and that's immoral to expose employees to, I think you could make a colorable argument that I'm trying to ban Windows PCs from Apple's IT library.
What's said in school is government-endorsed speech, so banning controversial works from school is no different than banning government employees from conducting political speech while they're on the taxpayer's dime.
And you can thank the left and the first amendment for that, ironically enough, as it was the left that forced a separation of religion and school. Nobody major argues that banning religious proselytizing from schools violates free speech.
I think it's a stretch to say "no different" - actively broadcasting political speech during your workday as, say, a teacher is different than "having a book available that someone could borrow in the school library". One is speech to a captive audience that has little choice but to witness it.
The book doesn't just magically appear in the school library. Someone has to make the purchasing decisions as to what books to put on the shelves, and that person has a bias.
It would be one thing if school administrators were paragons of neutrality, but they're not. If the school administration doesn't reflect the voters, the voters are well within their rights to use their elected representatives to rectify the problem, and allowing no controversy is ironically less disruptive on schools than allowing all controversy.
At this more broad level of argumentation, I would suggest that schools have responsibilities other than merely teaching - or stocking books that present - the majority viewpoint.
The books in question have porn in them. They are personal accounts of sexual encounters, with illustrations. DeSantis held a press conference about removing them and ambushed the media with pictures of the books and they had to cut the video feeds because of content restrictions.
I choose to interpret that charitably as saying that some or the majority of the books being banned have obscene materials in them, in the legal sense, and we're likely to disagree on the percent, but that ignores recent history.
"Beginning in 2021, a range of individuals and groups sought to remove from schools books focused on issues of race or the history of slavery and racism, mirroring a campaign ... restricting discussion of these and other concepts in school classrooms and curricula."
"Complaints about diversity and inclusion efforts have accompanied calls to remove books with protagonists of color, and numerous banned books have been targeted for simply featuring LGBTQ+ characters. Nonfiction histories of civil rights movements and biographies of people of color have been swept up in these campaigns. For example, many volumes in the popular Who Was? chapter book series and several biographies of Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor were banned in Central York School District in Pennsylvania. That ban also impacted hundreds of books with protagonists of color, including the Caldecott Honor–winning A Big Mooncake for Little Star."
"As the school year progressed, those demanding book removals increasingly turned their attention to books that depict LGBTQ+ individuals or touch on LGBTQ+ identities, as well as books they claimed featured “sexual” content, including titles on sexual and reproductive health and sex education. These trends were already identified in PEN America’s first edition of Banned in the USA (April 2022) report; however, from April to June, there was an acute focus on these topics."
"From April to June 2022, a third of all book bans recorded in the Index feature LGBTQ+ identities (92 bans). Over the same short period, nearly two thirds of all banned books in the Index touch on topics related to sexual content, such as teen pregnancy, sexual assault, abortion, sexual health, and puberty (161 bans).
"These subject areas have long been the targets of censorship and been controversial from the perspective of age appropriateness, with standards and approaches varying from community to community about what is seen as the right age level for such material, as well as the degree to which these topics should be addressed in school as opposed to in the home. ... While debate on these issues recurs, wholesale bans on books deny young people the opportunity to learn, to get answers to pressing questions, and to obtain crucial information."
If you're still reading: That's two thirds of books banned that feature topics related to sexual content, and one third that doesn't and is banned for other reasons. Of the ones related, I'm sure many look like porn, especially when viewed out of context, though it's hard to teach about, aay, puberty or sex ed without explaining the changes people will go through.
We're talking about efforts that can be tied to the political right, not every effort to ban a book.
But as for the link itself, Pen defends Gender Queer as a book about LGTBQIA+ individuals. IIRC, that's got an illustrated section about a blowjob. So right off the bat, their categorization isn't credible, and an excellent example of why people just want a blanket ban on LGBTQIA+ material, because, on close inspection, we keep finding porn in them.
Which of these efforts mentioned above can't be tied to the political right? It is my impression that all or nearly all book banning efforts in America can be.
And have you read Gender Queer? I have. It's remarkable. And yes, graphic and uncomfortable. It has that blowjob scene, true. (I'd argue that it's not porn in that it wasn't there for salacious or prurient purposes.) And a disturbing panel with the narrator metaphorically impaled on a spike during a gynaecology visit. I would definitely not show the book to children.
Happily, it wasn't marketed to children.
"The book was marketed to adults and older teens, and [author Maia] Kobabe has stated that their intended audience was 16-plus."
Also Kobabe: "I originally wrote it for my parents and then for older teens who were already asking these questions about themselves."
It's funny you mention PEN America because they canceled a panel featuring Russian writers because it would offend their presence would offend Ukrainians. They don't actually stand for free expression as they claim to.
There's a little sleight of hand going on when it comes to attempts to "ban books". It's only possible to object to a book that is put in the library in the first place. This means that lists of banned books depend on the political bent of the librarians deciding what to stock in the library. If a library won't stock an anti-trans or other right-coded book in the first place, you won't see any leftists trying to ban it. It's already not there, they don't have to.
You're going to see most book challenges come from the right, if the left can get all they want through the librarians without using challenges.
Is it your contention that public libraries, of the sort that more than 50% of all book challenges in the US are to, do not carry right-coded books? Or that public library book challenges are coming from both leftists and rightists, while schools only carry left-coded books and thus are only challenged by right-leaners?
Not sure if the content restrictions you're talking about are ones set by the media outlets or third party platforms (e.g. Youtube). If it's the latter then pretty much everyone on the left or right thinks they're very unreasonable restrictions (e.g. people having to use euphemisms like "unalive).
A lot of those efforts are bad, but public libraries are not significant vectors for ideas in the internet age. The ongoing campaign to make them into high-visibility moral cause is pretty cringe.
The efforts to make them into a high-visibility cause by those who want to remove books from them, or by those trying to prevent that. I'm trying to figure out if you're saying it's bad and also cringe to make a moral cause of banning books or to care enough to bring visibility to book bans and oppose them. (If you're saying a third thing, please clarify.)
I'm saying a third thing: book bans are terrible and deserve to be opposed. But public libraries are no longer a significant part of most American's lives and the labored attempt to magnify their importance is saccharine and embarrassing.
The actual problem is that there's a universal tendency by the party in power to make government a moral authority, which drills down into all parts of government (like schools and libraries). Society means getting along with people with different moral beliefs and values. Using the power of the government to force moral values weakens society.
We should be concerned when someone with government power uses that power to proselytize their moral code to the public, especially when those individuals aren't elected. In a more trustworthy society, we'd have methods in place to monitor and ensure that those with government power don't abuse that authority. At the moment, that random public pressure is the only way to do that seems problematic, but it's not the root problem.
>"The actual problem is that there's a universal tendency by the party in power to make government a moral authority, which drills down into all parts of government (like schools and libraries)."
Glib but earnest response: that's (part of) why neither of those institutions (along with many others) should be government-run.
Any power in the hands of politicians & bureaucrats will be abused at times, so giving them any more than is absolutely necessary inevitably worsens that problem.
"that's (part of) why neither of those institutions (along with many others) should be government-run."
From a theoretical perspective, I agree. The problem is how to get there from here, when the intermediate steps seem to involve a lot of angry unemployable uneducated that are on welfare and willing to vote for anyone that promises them more government benefits. But that's another discussion.
More importantly, for anyone motivated to seek ideas and information out, there are no barriers to finding them, except perhaps the sheer amount of material.
school libraries have finite space, so by definition the vast majority of books ever written will be "banned" from them while readily available at book stores/Amazon/everywhere else.
I don't think this rates at 1/100th of the importance that seems to get placed on it.
... and parents and pressure groups, rather than development experts, educators, or librarians, should be the ones deciding what goes in those collections?
Ignoring that more than 50% of the ban requests are from public libraries, not school ones (see link to google sheet and ALA above), "people can still purchase the books" doesn't seem like a great reason not to be concerned about efforts to remove them from public and school libraries on ideological grounds. "I don't want my children having easy access to books I don't want them reading" is a lot more privately implementable and morally defensible than, "I don't want your children to have easy access to books I don't want my children reading," even if we do scope this discussion to just school libraries.
yes actually the taxpayers should have a say in what goes into the taxpayer funded things.
Also given the track record of "development experts" and "educators" on things like phonics I'm not sure they should be afforded the deference you are giving them
Thank you for sharing your stance. I'm not familiar with your "phonics" reference. We disagree on whether to trust experts and probably on what the goal of these book challenges is. Hopefully we can find common ground about information access being important, especially to a wide range of viewpoints.
Meta-comment on the comments: In all seriousness, this thread on book-banning in public libraries and (especially) public schools is really interesting. Even a generation or two ago, libraries were hardly a major source of obscene, subversive, counter-cultural, etc. information for kids, notwithstanding the occasional (and usually convenient and fishy) anecdote from an intellectual adult. Now, as others have pointed out, the books on the library are much less important than the internet (which can be accessed at a lot of libraries). I doubt most of the objecting parents really believe their kids are likely to change genders or “turn gay” or hate America as an incorrigibly and systemically racist nation simply by stumbling on some books in the library. (Of course, the most controversial books get signal-boosted and sometimes put on literal tables in prominent places by the attempts to ban them – an irony that probably deserves more comment.) The book disputes are hot and high-profile primarily because they are skirmishes in a cultural proxy war waged by adults against other adults. That’s not to say that the opposition to these books doesn’t involve concerns about children. It’s remarkable how many girls (“at birth”) of my kids’ generation have decided that they’re non-binary and/or gay and/or (less likely) want to fully transition. The reasons for this phenomenon are core aspects of the heated debates. Is it because the kids found and read a few books in the library? Surely not, but there is something in the cultural air that peripherally affects school and public libraries. Some parents are worried about this and are looking for obvious if not-exactly-central battles to fight. Of course, some parents take their kids to Drag Queen Story Hour.
Hey Moral Particle, Thanks for the meta-commentary. Sidestepping the library issue for a moment, I do have a couple points about your aside (which don't contradict it, but do propose a plausible reason for the phenomenon you mention some parents being worried about.
'It’s remarkable how many girls (“at birth”) of my kids’ generation have decided that they’re non-binary and/or gay and/or (less likely) want to fully transition. Is it because the kids found and read a few books in the library? Surely not, but there is something in the cultural air that peripherally affects school and public libraries.'
Point one: I can't speak to the trans experience, but people don't 'decide' their sexuality so much as realize who they're attracted to.
Point two: It seems at least plausible that the thing in the cultural air could be that, with increased social awareness of gender nonconformity, your kids' generation a) has the vocabulary to describe what they're going through, b) has less (though still some) taboo around articulating what they're going through, and thus c) is more open about sharing their experience. This could result in gender-nonconformists being more visible and less closeted, even if they're not a larger proportion of the population than they used to be.
That’s a reasonable and (I think) mainstream interpretation. Putting aside gender identity to focus on sexuality, there’s an interesting and vigorous debate between Bryan Caplan (betonit Substack) and Sungjoo Yoon (Napoleonic Substack) about some of these issues. I don’t find the genetic analyses on either side particularly compelling, and I don’t know how you could rigorously determine what a baseline percentage of “true” or “natural” level of sexuality is or test whether (1) some communities in the contemporary U.S. culture engage in persistent “hyper-public celebration of gayness” and (2) whether such celebrations result or even could result in anyone’s “decision” to be “gay” or “queer” as opposed to a “discovery” that one is fundamentally “gay” or “queer.” Could there be some instances of one and some of the other? The suggestion is usually met with scorn and even calls for cancellation (we’re back on the cancel-culture topic, hurrah!). Doesn’t such a retrograde attitude lead to the horrible and ineffective “Pray Away the Gay” camps? Not necessarily. Nobody doubts that numerous gay people historically repressed their sexuality and pretended to be straight for social reasons. To suggest that some – maybe just a few, maybe concentrated in certain generally young age groups – might repress their sexuality and pretend to be queer for social reasons doesn’t seem so outlandish or even offensive. In any case, it’s not at all clear that it’s a reason for concern, even if one understands how socially and/or religiously conservative parents might believe otherwise.
There are many, many communities online with thousands of people claiming to be teenagers or young adults who "thought" they were trans for this very reason. Unfortunately, the topic is too politicized for good statistics to be available, last I checked; but if you look at e.g. the Reddit "de-transitioning" sub, it's fairly evident that these people are mostly what they claim to be (check out the post histories) and that the proposed influence on young people today is at least happening /sometimes/.
The thread only reinforced my belief that the left can't be given a single cm. Look at how many times people had to press Aaron to say what he obviously wants. It's obvious he was so indirect about it because he knows it looks bad to say that he wants books with illustrated sections on blowjobs to be in children's libraries.
>it wasn't marketed to children.
>I do trust school librarians to choose appropriate books for the collections
>Hypothetically, I'd want those who know much more than me about child development to provide access to it to those for whom it's appropriate
And of course, he phrases it this way because he knows the credentialed midwits who fill the ranks of library administrations all lean his way and so he's technically telling the truth, except he only cares about the outcome. He wouldn't feel the same way if most of the experts wanted to keep books with illustrations of blowjobs out of their libraries.
Never agree with a leftist policy, no matter how reasonable it seems, no matter how many safeguards they put in to satisfy you, no matter how many panels of experts they promise will keep things reasonable.
> But the left is *not*, *not*, saying "we used to have free speech, until the right stopped that".
I'll say it, you guys did McCarthyism, kept gay people in the closet, and you got the Dixie Chicks canceled for correctly opposing the Iraq War. This is just the chickens coming home to roost. You're mad the shoe's on the other foot now.
> If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught you
> that. It obviously hasn’t, so try a different strategy.
This confuses two different positions: "Cancel culture doesn't exist, but if it did it would be a good thing" and "Cancel culture is really bad, but one-sided cancel culture is even worse". Obviously not all conservatives, but at least half of those you quoted learned very well that cancel culture is bad, they just view the alternative as worse and explain it quite clearly.
On the other hand, have you seen a single progressive admitting that they realize now that cancel culture is bad, and proposing a truce? If not, then clearly there's more work to be done.
> The hidden decision here is whether to treat people as collectives or individuals.
Nope. The point is that canceling a Home Depot cashier is supposed to send a shiver down the spine of a whole lot of onlookers. That's all, this is not a retribution, this is terrorism, in the purest meaning of the word.
*When* we will see random progressives saying things like "this can happen to me, I don't like it, how about a truce?" we will have to discuss the issues of collective action and all that. Until then the beatings must continue.
> Jefferson and Madison wrote the First Amendment to defuse the entire conflict from above, and
> everybody remembers them, and it actually made a long-term difference.
They came from a culture that learned that Cancel Culture was bad at the hands of the British and crossed the ocean to escape it. The same was true of most of their audience. I've seen claims that the entire "classical liberalism" thing was the result of Catholics massacring Protestants and vice versa until both sides got really fed up with the constant bloodbath.
The problem with your proposals is that they put the cart before the horse, you can't solve the cancel culture when half of the country *enjoys* the cancel culture. You don't have a plan for convincing them that cancel culture is bad actually, and while they are unconvinced they will simply not do any of the things you might come up with.
Hurting the people who hurt us until at least some of them realize that not hurting each other is preferable is a plan. It's not guaranteed to work, but the alternative is guaranteed to not work.
> half of the country *enjoys* the cancel culture. You don't have a plan for convincing them that cancel culture is bad actually, and while they are unconvinced they will simply not do any of the things you might come up with.
> On the other hand, have you seen a single progressive admitting that they realize now that cancel culture is bad, and proposing a truce? If not, then clearly there's more work to be done.
Couldn't you also make the inference that what you're doing isn't working?
> They came from a culture that learned that Cancel Culture was bad at the hands of the British and crossed the ocean to escape it.
I don't think that's an accurate summary. Puritans went over to have a church purified of Catholicism, Virginians went over to make money...
> Couldn't you also make the inference that what you're doing isn't working?
It only got a chance to maybe produce some results literally after Trump got shot.
I want to clarify in no uncertain terms and without mincing words: in my opinion this should be understood as terrorism, plain and simple. Not as a rightful retribution, not as a punishment for evil deeds, not as a collective punishment in particular, but something that chills the enemy's blood: "I can be next".
That woman was canceled for an AIDS joke in 2015, that was when cancel culture reached full speed. Since before then Scott and other people, myself included, wrote thoughtful missives to the left explaining why cancel culture is bad. This produced zero results, objectively. As in, we got a bunch of people on our side, but the people who really enjoy the righteous high from canceling weren't swayed a bit. A more militant version, "canceling is bad and we will cancel them until they get it," would have worked even better on our new allies--and would have *some* chance of working on our enemies. And we've been only trying it in earnest for a week.
I disagree about it just being since Trump was shot. People on the right have been trying to cancel people on the left as well for a while (Al Franken was a notable example years ago, though it was easy for the Dems to remove him as they could also replace him). They became more successful after Elon bought twitter.
> This produced zero results, objectively. As in, we got a bunch of people on our side
Getting a bunch of people on your side doesn't sound like zero results. People have been listing off anti-woke liberals, and that seems like an accomplishment. There are organizations like FIRE & Heterodox Academy which aren't dedicated to the political right, but are to the cause of free expression against the cancellers, and I think that counts for something.
I think that it's the first time everyone agrees that it's The Cancel Culture (on the right) and not isolated incidents. A public person getting canceled is different from a random Home Depot employee.
> Getting a bunch of people on your side doesn't sound like zero results.
Yes, but is it enough? Are we winning the hearts and minds of cancel culture enjoyers?
I mean, if *I* were to argue against my position, I'd point out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omagh_bombing for example, which basically ended the Troubles as far as I understand. But arguing as myself, I'd point out that we are not so lucky to have cultural terrorism supported by a minority of the population, with the active part scoring an extremely foolish self-goal. Like, the implied course of action is to do nothing except whine and hope that at some point some truly atrocious canceling will happen and then everyone be like, oh well, that definitely went too far, let's condemn it. I don't see it happening because I have not seen anything like that happening in the past decade of cancel culture dominance. The oppressors are happy to oppress and show no remorse.
>On the other hand, have you seen a single progressive admitting that they realize now that cancel culture is bad, and proposing a truce? If not, then clearly there's more work to be done.
I've seen about as many as right-wingers admitting that the right does in fact cancel people. (Which is to say, a small but significant number on both sides, because both sides are not monoliths.)
> I've seen about as many as right-wingers admitting that the right does in fact cancel people.
Literally every single thing Scott quoted in the beginning of the post admitted that the right cancels people. The only thing that can be discussed about it is which ones are gleefully screaming "it's our turn" and which expressed the idea that I tried to clarify in my comment, that a one-sided application of cancel culture rules will never result in the left getting fed up with cancel culture.
How many people on the left are getting fed up with it? Freddie DeBoer, and only because a lot of it is in fact friendly fire? I'm sorry but I don't trust the enemy to fundamentally reject cancel culture because of friendly fire, I'd only expect them to get somewhat better at not doing friendly fire.
Again, look, I don't claim to have a foolproof solution, just a solution that *might* work if we are so lucky. I observe the absolute absence of anything resembling a solution from the high road side.
No, I believe that the only way to establish a cultural norm against terrorism is to terrorize the terrorists, until they decide that maybe it's not worth it.
Well, maybe not the only way, I'm all ears for practical counterproposals.
Make firing for political views (probably _particularly_ for mainstream political views, say those that 25% or more of the population holds) illegal? Particularly when expressed at any time other than work hours?
I feel that the discussion happens on two separate levels. Proposals like yours rely on an assumption that we have the political power to pull social engineering tricks like that. We don't. If we did, the problem would have solved itself. I'm asking for realistic solutions to gaining the necessary political power, to getting a significant fraction of the left to stand up against cancel culture.
If they did there would be no need to codify anti-cancel culture into law in the first place, it will just disappear. No corporation would fire an employee for a risque twitter joke if it were socially disapproved. But we are not in that world, so I'm asking how do we get there? Continue to whine or hurt them back?
>Proposals like yours rely on an assumption that we have the political power to pull social engineering tricks like that. We don't.
Well, Trump has 60/40 odds of being the next POTUS. Depending on what happens to the Senate and House, might there be the political power to do it?
>to getting a significant fraction of the left to stand up against cancel culture.
That is an alternative path. I don't know which is more realistic. The center-left stood by and just _let_ the Woke take control of most of media, most of education, HR departments... I don't _see_ them pushing back against the Woke, except maybe e.g. Bill Maher... Maybe try to publicize the "friendly fire" cases and try to built a revulsion against cancelling? It seems like trying to shame the Woke, and the Woke seem impervious to shame, self-righteous even when proclaiming utter nonsense.
I lean towards trying to use law to disarm them, if at all possible.
In lieu of an upvote button, I just want to say you've perfectly put into words exactly what I was feeling about all this. I'm aware comments like this are low value, but I always appreciate it when I get them myself so I'm paying it forward.
> "Politicians should dismantle the government apparatus propping up cancel culture. Certainly the sorts of things mentioned in the Twitter Files count here [..]"
what kinds of things are you talking about? Because from what I understand, the Twitter Files didn't really show much at all, and the summary on Wikipedia says it contained a lot of "false assertions". Sure, it also says that the Twitter files showed that Twitter allowed a U.S. military middle east influence campaign but that has nothing to do with cancel culture.
They showed that the Biden government exerted pressure on Twitter to censor speech it didn't want spread on the platform eg suggestions the Covid vaccine was not safe, the 2020 election was stolen, etc. It presumably did this on other platforms as well, but Elon Musk didn't buy other platforms and expose censorship, so we don't know for sure the extent of it.
But how did they "exert pressure", beyond just talking with Twitter? I wouldn't call it a "government apparatus propping up cancel culture", I would say there are Twitter processes "propping up cancel culture" (e.g. moderating, removing misinformation).
The problem is who gets to be the arbiter that defines misinformation? If I am very left wing, I think "misinformation" is saying "trans-women are not women." If I am very right wing, I think "misinformation" is saying "some historical records cast doubt on the existence of Jesus." I want to live in a society where both of those people can express their opinions, even if others disagree.
I'm just saying that removing misinformation wasn't forced by the government but decided by Twitter. If the government could force Twitter to remove misinformation before Elon bought it then they could do it after too. But Twitter now does a lot less moderation and removes a lot less misinformation so if someones dislike how Twitter was before then they should blame previous Twitter leadership/moderators and not the government.
Yeah, Elon definitely told the would-be censors exactly where they could shove it. Good for him.
The point is that the government has no legal right to actively censor speech - that's in the First Amendment. So all they can do is this dubious "pressure" campaigns with private companies. But you're right that if an Elon Musk is in charge, and is willing to take some hits to his reputation and bank account, he can absolutely be a champion for free speech.
I feel like that's too black-and-white. Yes, the government hasn't been literally forcing Twitter to do things in such a way that Twitter was powerless to say no. At the same time, I think it's naive to suggest that getting a message saying "Hello, good citizen, we're the government and we want you to do X" won't exert a lot of pressure on the recipient to do as asked.
Messages were likely more along the lines of "Hello, fellow Good Person On The Right Side Of History, it's come to our attention that you haven't brought deplorables sufficiently under control, which seems bad. By the way, you know that we have cool parties that nobody would want to miss!"
I don't think the government even needed to *imply* a threat, because Twitter was on their side. Twitter wants to be known as the place where you can hear the latest news as it happens, not the place where unhinged conspiracy theories circulate freely. So if the government goes to them and says "You have some unhinged conspiracy theories about COVID-19 gaining traction," Twitter's natural reaction will be "yeah, that's not a great look for us, we'll clean that up" rather than "how dare you suggest we censor our users."
Twitter was never a neutral champion of free speech, before or after Elon took power. They want the speech that appeals to normies who will click on ads.
(Edit: Also, given that this is the pandemic we're talking about, probably some people on Twitter's Trust and Safety team was afraid that spreading misinformation about Covid could literally get people killed. Like, that's not strictly a business incentive, but it had to have been on people's minds at the time.)
The basic accusation is that the government was using implied threats or bribes (e..g. favorable legislation with respect to the Communications decency Act) to get Twitter to take down stuff, which made it State Action., and a violation of the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court agreed with Pazzaz about this recently, in Murthy v Missouri. If you read the opinion or listen to the oral arguments, you can get a good sense of what conservatives are alleging happened, how the court reasoned about it, and where the current legal line is.
(The line (IANAL) seems to be: the government can tell social media who to censor; they don't have to obey; the government is breaking the law when they try to threaten social media to make them obey. In this case, there's no evidence of such threats being made.)
Many conservatives think the administration made a veiled or implicit threat of unfavorable regulation if the social media companies didn't censor their users. If so, they did a good enough job veiling that they got away with it. Who knows where the truth lies.
Like, if Musk gives a suitcase full of money to a US government employee, that ermployee is in trouble even if it is claimed that no corrupt facor was being given in exchnage.
Giveng the government a valuable favor in th e gform of censorship of stuff the government doesnt like carries a stong implication that some corrupt benefit was being provided in exchnage, even if you cant prove it.
You should listen to the SC oral arguments, there are good points on both sides. The government has to be able to say stuff to people, to argue in support of their interests, without it being automatically assumed to be a threat just because they're the government.
It is absolutely incredible how Wikipedia still has a reputation of neutrality, instead of being known as the hyperpartisans they are. Unless you do know that, and cynically exploiting that reputation to launder your own position.
I wouldn't say that - not only are there plenty of times where articles are used by people to push their own non-political ideas, but half the articles of any decent length - at least the ones not about clear subjects where it's obvious what should go in, like individuals or cities - are just plain poor quality.
This article reminds me of the golden rule of “do unto others”. And as a rule that’s been around for a bit and seemingly stood the test of time, it probably a lesson worth heeding (even after you remove all the religiously nonsense of the source material). So thanks for the reminder.
That’s true. That golden rule probably doesn’t apply to nation-states. And it wouldn’t apply even to individuals when it comes to self-defence. No one would advise just bending over if someone wishes to do you (or your country) physical harm.
But it seems most of cancellation occurs over concepts and ideas, where the fragile in the crowd wish to punish someone for wrongthink or wrongspeak.
As you say, the courts are there to arbitrate “wrongdo “ or actual egregious acts; whereas the things people get cancelled over are too petty for courts to bother with.
I want others to ensure that people who publicly call for the assassination of their political opponents are ostracized from my community. The Golden Rule dictates that I must help others to ostracize people who publicly call for the assassination of their political opponents from their communities.
I haven't sorted my thoughts about this yet, but it strikes me as significant that "coordinating toward a pareto optimum" does actually require coordination. This is feasible within a faction, but between factions it's harder.
If others outside your faction aren't actually willing to parley, (or if there's no central authority with whom to parley; i.e. notice that the culture wars don't have Commanders in Chief who decide the terms/conditions of surrender), then escalation really does seem like the only action that makes sense.
1) We got Kamala because Biden promised to select a black female VP, which massively narrowed the pool of possibilities. (My suspicion, BTW, is that he made this promise as the only palatable way to avoid pressure to select Bernie as his VP)
2) IIRC Biden's dismal approval rating was actually the highest approval rating of any G7 leader before the recent UK election. Post-Covid inflation is everywhere and voters hate it and blame the party in power. Biden/Democrats have actually handled this challenge really well by world standards.
3) You say, as an argument against cancellation, that cancellation generally targets members of one's own camp rather than the other camp. This is true for the left wing, whose tendency to infight is legendary ("People's Front of Judea", more recently Ralph Nader, Jill Stein, "Genocide Joe" re Gaza, etc.). I don't think it's actually true for the right wing (for example, the Christians enthusiastic voted for an adultery who appointed SC justices who overturned Roe v Wade). The very example you are talking about (re assassination attempt) is rightists cancelling a leftist, not a rightist.
"(My suspicion, BTW, is that he made this promise as the only palatable way to avoid pressure to select Bernie as his VP)"
Ooo interesting theory, I like it. How do you reply to the objection though that in modern times its very rare for presidential candidates to choose their major opponent as their vice president?
I think Biden deliberately picked a weak VP, and then undercut her once in office, in an effort to avoid being pushed aside for his VP. It ultimately didn't work.
(My suspicion, BTW, is that he made this promise as the only palatable way to avoid pressure to select Bernie as his VP)
No, it was a sop to win the support of Jim Clyburn and the Congressional Black Caucus, which is what saved Biden's candidacy by throwing their weight behind him in South Carolina and other heavily-black state primaries.
Trump is retruthing that he wants military tribunals held against Liz Cheney. Her and other right wingers who were critical of Trump's election fraud lies were repeatedly subject to harassment and pressure from other Trump supporters to tow the party line. Mike Pence was targeted on Jan 6 by chants calling for his hanging while Trump egged on his supporters by blaming Mike Pence via twitter and in the speech before the march to the Capitol. There's a huge right wingers cancelling right wingers epidemic.
The main thing I got out of this was a terrifying insight into the other side's echo chamber, and how different the "realities" we each live in are.
The mobs of online trolls who were sending death and rape threats to JK Rowling over some questionable tweets definitely exist. And while many people in my social circle dislike Rowling for what she's gone on to say, they don't agree with or participate in the online threats.
More fairly, there have been cases where people have been denied a platform to speak at a university (or worse, lost their job) over their viewpoints. I _do_ know people who, as undergrads, participated in protests against speakers at university. But as Scott says, there's a smooth spectrum between 'cancel culture' (and especially the kind of mob psychology that means it often gets pointed at the wrong targets) and social norms, boycotts, etc. The people who participate in these things are aware of the paradox of tolerance, and think anti-hate-speech laws and customs are important, but generally don't have a coherent philosophy of where to draw the line.
But on the right, there's also been plenty of cancellation, although the "online hate mob" form _might_ be less prevalent? (I'm not sure, I tend to have a better idea of how my own tribe is destroying itself.) There have been protests around the world against drag shows, with the explicit aim of trying to get them cancelled (or banned). The National Trust, a heritage charity here in the UK that looks after old fancy buildings and bits of countryside, has been the subject of a very concerted (but so far unsuccessful, fortunately) cancellation attempt that started in 2020, when they dared to produce a report examining the historical links between their properties and the slave trade.
The authors of the comments Scott has collected seem to think that all Democrats are a threat to democracy by virtue of cancel culture, and if you look at online left-wing rage-bait factories you'll see a pervading view that all Republicans are a threat to democracy because of how Trump broke with all norms in 2020 and refused a graceful transition of power - there was a coordinated attempt to overturn the election results, leading up to the events of January 6, 2021.
Even looking at the comments on this post, many of them argue from a point of view that the Other Side is all the same and all buy into their great evil sin.
If these are the polar opposite worlds we live in, and the level of threat we each perceive from the other side, it's hardly surprising that people are discussing resorting to violence.
So I guess this boils down to another generic comment about how scary polarisation is. In general I agree with all the actual points Scott made.
>There have been protests around the world against drag shows, with the explicit aim of trying to get them cancelled (or banned).
Protesting against X to get X itself banned isn't cancellation. The protesters didn't usually look up the drag show performers, find the ones who had regular employers, and complain to them to get them fired. They were only trying to stop the drag show titself, they were perfectly happy with drag show performers making a living in otherr ways.
The answer is "because someone decided to make it political". Drag queen story hour was intentionally created by activists; it wasn't just drag show performers randomly deciding "i'll get a book from the library and while I'm here, may as well entertain some kids". They have over 50 chapters now.
I don't care at all at this moment about "what the recent historical record shows" or etc , but I'm applauding Scott for appealing to principle. Even most of the practical reasons adduced, like the rhetorical "what could possibly go wrong?", are still matters of principle because they are the considerations that gave rise to liberal prioritization of free expression in the first place. I even hold out a little hope that, because of his (earned) outsized platform, Scott is not just pissing into the ocean here & might have a tiny chance of actually having a positive impact. In general I fear that this chapter of the conversation is going to be just like all the other chapters, endlessly distracting & infuriating until the next installation cuts it fruitlessly short, & the Circle of Life, Revenge, Dialectic, whatever you want to call it, keeps on spinning. I'll just add, with my inconsequential groatsworth, that principle is on the side of _thought_, & revenge is just more same old same old. That doesn't guarantee principle will win! Not short term and not even arc-of-history long term. But it does clarify which side to be on if you want to think, not react.
I am generally very apolitical, but when I read about this stuff, I always think about one specific aspect of it.
For me, the most concerning aspect of this is the mixing up of commercial transactions with ethics/politics. This is something that seems mostly unique to american political life as far as I'm exposed to it - the notion that commercially transacting with someone (buying their products, employing them, consuming media they produce) means financially supporting them, which means any counterparty to such a transaction must wholeheartedly support whatever political/ethical views. I've seen it in other cultures/countries, but less.
In other words, I firmly believe in commercial transactions that are limited in scope enough that they don't include "the good in this world". When I am being hired or hiring someone, I really don't want to think about their ideological positions, and I don't want my employer to think about mine - I have job responsibilities to fill/be filled, and all that should matter is my (or the candidate if I'm hiring) capacity to fill them. The notion that I must also be conscripted to fight someone's political war in this process really concerns me.
Does this "principle" have a name and has anyone discussed it in depth? I feel like I'm dancing around it and throwing examples at it, but IDK if I'm managing to define it right.
I personally refer to it as the "pecunia non olet" principle. It's more directly applicable to SELLING to bad people than buying from them, but I think it generalizes well enough.
Totally irrelevant pedantic comment, but I can't help myself:
The Aten/Amun priesthood vs Jefferson/Madison comparison at the end is appalling how on earth does that make it in, dude? :D
I'm pretty sure the story of Aten/Amun survived in the minds of the priests/nobles of Egyptian civilization for at least 5x the time in which the US has existed. We don't know about it cos you know 1300BC vs 1700AD
They did a good job canceling Akhenaten, since Egyptologists didn't really know of his existence until specific archeological finds in the 19th century. He was removed from compiled king lists and all. But yeah the memory certainly endured for a few generations, it seems to have been a somewhat traumatic episode in Egyptian history.
Besides, ironically, the story of Akhenaten is *now* one of the best-known from Egypt, arguably precisely because of his cancellation of Amun and other gods.
That made me realize that Scott's statement that "nobody remembers" the priests of Amun is straightforwardly false: Tutankhamun was the leader of that faction (at least symbolically) and he's certainly more famous than Jefferson and Madison. Probably more due to his tomb and mask than his actions against Atenism, but still!
A couple of these points are persuasive and worth bearing in mind, namely 5 and 8- we would definitely have to be far more judicious about whom we cancel than the left, and the nature of the "conservative" movement hardly inspires confidence that will happen.
As for the rest I humbly attempt rejoinders from a right-wing perspective.
1. We already knew cancellation was bad and did not need to learn the lesson, but leftists do.
2. I don't know what a Very Smart person would conclude from this, but to a dummy like me it suggests right-wing cancel culture is going to happen anyway and there's no point complaining about it.
3. Ditto.
4. "This isn’t a knock-down argument. Sometimes you’re right when you think your enemies are bad, and they’re wrong when they think you’re bad. I can’t say for sure this isn’t one of those times." Narrator: it was one of those times.
6. That ship has sailed and we are reaping the rewards of an omnicrisis of competence right now which will only escalate and right-wing cancel culture might even remediate that in part by culling the worst diversity hires.
7. This is just the Moral High Ground restated, with the additional claim that the public likes the moral high ground. Clearly false: we had it anyway and Dems kept winning. It's a 50-50 nation.
9. We should absolutely smash the regime's levers of power, and it is more important. But have you considered that right-wing cancel culture could help us get there by purging the most inveterate supporters of the regime?
The claim that "we (i.e., people on the right) already knew cancellation was bad and did not need to learn the lesson" seems hard to believe. What would you call what happened to Colin Kaepernick, for instance? Or, as another commenter here has pointed out, the "Libs of TikTok" account that just got someone fired from Home Depot has done the same to dozens of people over the last few years. All from the right, not the left.
And, a few decades back when it was the right rather than the left that had most of what you might call the soft social power, it's not like they didn't use that to make life unpleasant for their ideological enemies -- e.g., gay people or people in favour of gay rights. It's just that, because they held a lot of institutional power too, they were able to do it by means more effective than organizing mobs from the bottom up. No need to get people to write to X's employer urging that he be fired for, say, "promoting homosexuality", if instead you can have _laws_ saying that "promoting homosexuality" is illegal. (With those words defined extremely broadly, of course.)
It doesn't look to me _at all_ as if the Right is any more on board than the Left with the principle that people shouldn't suffer severe consequences for expressing their political opinions.
I think that if it seems like "cancellation" is Something The Left Does, that's mostly because the _term_ cancellation is Something The Right Uses, and when someone loses their job (or never gets it in the first place) for being too "progressive", or too gay, or not Christian enough, it _doesn't get called cancellation_ because the people who get upset about it use different words.
> No need to get people to write to X's employer urging that he be fired for, say, "promoting homosexuality", if instead you can have _laws_ saying that "promoting homosexuality" is illegal.
I mean, that's kinda *good*, right? Going through defined legal processes, vs. summoning up an angry mob? The formal legal system, vs. lynching? Arguing genteely in a comment section, vs. stalking them and destroying everything they love in life? One is calm, controlled, accountable, even somewhat reversible. The other is none of those things. Imagine that January 6 did somehow result in Trump being President now - would that really be no different than him having run a slightly better campaign and getting more votes?
Given any particular state of the law, it's probably better for going-after-people to be restricted to what can be done through the law.
Given any particular level of desire to go after people, it's probably not better for it to be _possible_ to do it simply by exploiting laws that criminalize the people you want to go after.
(Obviously what one thinks about any of this depends on whether one thinks the people being gone after are bad people whose actions, words, or whatever _ought_ to be illegal.)
If someone wants people who "promote homosexuality" to be unemployable, is it better if they work towards that goal by stirring up mobs to complain to those people's employers, or if they work towards that goal by lobbying the government to make "promoting homosexuality" illegal? I'm honestly not sure, but it seems like essentially the same impulse in both cases, and if they do the second of those things I don't think it entitles them to boast about how much less cancel-y they are than people who, in a similar situation but with less leverage over government power, do the first instead.
At the object level, I agree: that's not my preferred law.
But I'd rather live somewhere where homosexuality was prohibited by law, than somewhere where homosexuality was discouraged by mob action. And I'd rather live somewhere where homosexuality was allowed by law (my favorite of the 4) than somewhere where homophobes were discouraged by mob action. And I think it's probably easier to get to a healthy version of 3 by way of 1 than by way of 4.
I suppose you're right. I'm British, and from here it's perhaps too easy to forget or overlook the blind spots of the American right. They have one about flags/anthems and a massive one concerning cops, neither of which really apply over here. I agree that thing about the football player or whatever he was is good evidence that some on the Right never did realise cancellation was bad. Libs of TikTok is a bad example though, both because all she does is repost videos of what leftists actually say and do when left to their own devices, as public information, and what people do with the knowledge is up to them; and because she postdates wokeness and leftist cultural hegemony and is thus part of the reaction to cancel culture.
I'm in the UK too! But maybe I spend more time being the sort of online that gets me exposure to US culture.
I don't think I understand your argument about LoTT.
"all she does is ...": The predictable result of her doing this is (in some cases) that a bunch of other right-leaning people all try to get the person she's posted video of fired. We know this is a predictable and desired result because she's boasted about it.
Why does it matter exactly what it is she does in order to get that result? You surely can't seriously be claiming that _merely because she doesn't say the words "hey, everyone, please try to get this person fired"_ that can't be an effect she expects, and hopes, her videos will often have?
"she postdates ...": you argued that people on the right always knew cancellation was bad, even before people on the left started doing it. LoTT (so I claim) is evidence that some people on the right _even now_ don't know cancellation is bad. Isn't the fact that she got started after people on the left started doing cancellations _more_ evidence that the Right didn't "already [know] cancellation is bad and did not need to learn the lesson", rather than less?
I think I would claim that "exactly what it is she does" is the crux of the issue, with her as it is with anyone, yes. Merely because she doesn't say the words "hey everyone get this person fired", she isn't participating in cancel culture - you appear to think that's some kind of scholastic evasion, but it seems to me to be straightforwardly what's at issue here. That intentionality would seem to be the definitive characteristic of a cancel mob - writing to venues trying to get events shut down, to employers trying to get employees fired, to publishers trying to get books withdrawn or not published in the first place, etc. There is nothing wrong or unreasonable about simply reposting other people's unedited videos so that they get a wider audience, and I don't think a helpful definition of "cancel culture" could encompass such neutral activity. The reaction to her videos occurs solely because what's revealed in them is so pathological. That's the main contrast I see between standard leftist cancel culture and what might be described as the right-wing response: they are trying to prevent expression and exchange of ideas, whereas we react to it; and the ideas/expressions they attack are usually dangerous to them precisely because they are defensible, even virtuous, or at least not obviously repugnant - at any rate, potentially plausible to reasonable people who might hear them, which is the exact reason those people need to be prevented from hearing them by the cancel mob; whereas what we attack is the worst of the worst and already in plain sight.
Regardless of the above, your last paragraph is eliding various claims made in different contexts. The reason we are having this discussion in the first place is because there is an open question whether right-wingers should adopt the leftist tactic of cancel culture, despite (and unlike the left) knowing it to be wrong. Libs of TikTok, by your estimation, is someone whose answer to that question is yes, we should; that wouldn't prove that she doesn't know cancel culture is wrong, only that she is willing to use the left's weapons against them. If you were to say that she (and anyone else on our side) is more morally culpable than the left because she is doing what she knows to be wrong and they are not, just as a strange man who kills a woman in the woods is more culpable than a brute bear which does, that would be a consistent and compelling argument I can respect to a degree. It's the Moral High Ground argument that the American right, in the Trump era, has collectively answered with "screw off!". I do think we should be willing to sacrifice the moral high ground and use the enemy's weapons and tactics to defeat them for the greater good, but I acknowledge it's an intractable moral problem which risks making us worse than them.
Question: Since a large fraction of the power of cancellation lies in getting people fired, what about laws to limit that power? We already have various protected groups. It is illegal to fire someone because they are in a protected racial minority, for instance. What if expressing a political opinion, particularly on one's own time, particularly a "mainstream" opinion (say one held by 25% or more of the populace) was an illegal cause for firing? Would that pull some fangs from the woke without becoming like them?
It's a good point and I'm theoretically in favour of giving workers protection from all forms of frivolous and non work related dismissal for things short of crimes. But as always the devil will be in the details and we'd have to judge proposals by their specific merits and demerits. I'm also a bit gloomy about the prospects for success of legislating for things culture won't support, though ofc that's no reason not to try it.
Well, maybe you're right and LoTT would be more clearly engaging in cancellation if she'd said something explicit like "Any teacher who utters the words “I came out to my students” should be fired on the spot".
I do agree that it's relevant whether the things that she draws attention to are Objectively Terrible, things that any reasonable person would agree one should get fired for.
Like, e.g., organizing a class of young children to hold a little "pride parade", which so far as I can tell means waving some flags around in the name of the idea that "we are all special and our differences should be celebrated". (https://web.archive.org/web/20220325221031/https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1507480007261646856 which, as per your observation that LoTT simply shows what people are doing rather than calling for anything bad to happen to them, is headlined "Stop sending your kids to government run indoctrination camps"). So pathological!
(For the avoidance of doubt, I _completely agree_ that reasonable people might hold that teachers of small children should not be doing that. But it seems to me to fall right into the "things that people probably should not get fired for, but that a prominent Twit could easily stir up enough of a mob about to get them fired anyway" bucket.)
But, I dunno, maybe you think that having a bunch of small children wave rainbow flags in the name of "Pride" is Objectively Terrible, perhaps because you expect that what she's actually telling them behind closed doors is "you should all be having lots of anal sex" or something. But you might want to consider the possibility that there's more symmetry here than you think: the right finds some things on the left Objectively Terrible ("so pathological", "obviously repugnant", etc.) and tries to cancel _those_, while the left finds a different set of things on the right Objectively Terrible and tries to cancel _those_; that the picture isn't, as you suggest, that everyone agrees that the left's cancelling people for saying/doing reasonable rightish things because they see how reasonable they are and are afraid, while the right's cancelling people for saying/doing obviously-repugnant leftish things because they see how obviously repugnant they are.
Your suggestion that maybe what's going on with LoTT (assuming for the sake of argument my claim that she's engaging in cancellation) is not "the right doesn't know that cancellation is morally bad" but "the right knows perfectly well that cancellation is morally bad, but none the less chooses to do it when fighting liberals" is an interesting one, but I'm puzzled by your making it, for three reasons.
First, suppose you're right; I don't see how there are more grounds for applying this to the right than to the left. That is: it seems just as possible to me that (many cancel-happy folks on) the left do in fact regard cancelling people as morally bad, but think the badness is justified by the benefits it brings.
Second, does it _look_ to you like LoTT and her fans are thinking anything even slightly like "this is a morally bad thing we're doing, but we unfortunately have to keep doing it because the stakes are so high"? It doesn't to me. It looks like they're doing it _gleefully_. (As, often, are their left-wing counterparts.)
Third, suppose you're right about this. Then -- as you concede in your second paragraph -- your position amounts to this: "The left thinks cancellation is morally OK, but the right is better because we know it's morally bad but do it anyway.", and that doesn't obviously put the right in a better light than "It turns out that the left and the right both think cancellation is morally OK".
I tend to take leftists at their word that they see "reasonable rightish" things such as stopping immigration and knowing the difference between men and women as repugnant and pathological (although I don't doubt many of them are insincere about it). But that just proves to me that they are morally deranged. I am not going to accept a pure, relativist moral equivalence between their habits of thought and mine. But I expect you're right that some of them see it that way.
LoTT is not cancelling anyone just by stating that they "should" be fired if she doesn't try to make it happen. That's an obviously unreasonable standard. I often declare what I think should happen; you probably do too. When I say something like "transgender drugs and surgeries should be outlawed and the people who induce children to use them should be treated like child sex offenders!" I'm not participating in cancel culture, because I have no power to make that happen and am not undertaking a process which would lead to it. If LoTT herself had ever rung up a school and said "look, this teacher is gay, you must therefore fire them" - or instructed others to do so - and the school had said "right away, miss!" she would be doing right-wing cancel culture; prove me wrong by all means, but I highly doubt that has ever happened or ever could. And if I am right, then all she is doing in your example is "putting the world to rights" in the way everyone frequently does. The contrast between the way wokes in the publishing trade tried to stop Abigail Shrier's book "Irreversible Damage" being published and succeeded in getting David Starkey rejected by his publisher, or wokes in academia succeeded in getting James Watson (!) fired from his research laboratory or drove Bret Weinstein out of his post, is obvious (just four examples out of countless). Cancel mobs are often physical and openly violent, or at least implicitly violent - just ask Posie Parker or any British Jew. You will rarely if ever find that on the right. The closest I can think of is the people who pray near abortion centres, and are now being arrested and jailed for that in both Britain and America; I'm not sure even that is cancel culture, unless the term includes appeals to divine as well as mundane authorities to cancel things! But let's say it does, as it's arguably the same activity - I still think there is no equivalence between trying to cancel abortionists for killing babies and trying to cancel writers and scientists for stating heterodox opinions. There are quantitative and qualitative differences between leftist cancel culture and what we do currently, and sometimes both are present; this is enough to explain why right-wingers' acceptance of a degree of retaliatory cancellation (to the extent that we have so far) is not symmetrical with theirs as you suggest.
The moral quandary is much more interesting and nuanced. You asked three questions. The second usefully answers the first: it's entirely clear that leftists are gleeful about any inconvenience, humiliation or pain they can inflict on their perceived enemies, up to and including death. The Trump assassination attempt proved that categorically - beyond media talking heads reciting boilerplate off a script, I have not encountered a single leftist anywhere online who regretted it or thought it wrong, only a division between those who think it fake and those who think it admirable. Whereas the fact we are discussing this at all proves it is not so clear cut on the right. I already stated LoTT (and I think we can assume her followers) are people who have considered the question "should we adopt leftist weapons to win the culture war?" and answered "yes", which accounts for the activity you see there. I assume that at some point they will have thought about it. For there to be the equivalence you suggest with the woke cancel mobs, they would have had to just launched into it as an obvious and natural first resort against people who disagree with them. If you look you will find plenty of handwringing about this question in conservative journals and podcasts, and many op-eds stating the answer should be "no". Look at it another way: could you be having this conversation with a leftist? You could not: they would rail against you abusively for trying. It's only because I concede that cancel culture is a morally bad thing that I feel a duty to get into these weeds.
And your third question is framed unfairly to me. My position is not that "the right is BETTER BECAUSE we know it's bad but do it anyway". It's that we risk becoming as bad as the left by using their tactics, but the situation is such that we should consider going down this road anyway because we have ultimately to think of a greater good (beating the left). It's the difference between a human being - a reasoning animal made in the image of God - doing something wicked, and a brute beast performing the same act on instinct. I don't think anyone would argue the human is better BECAUSE they know what they're doing what they know to be wrong! It's that good and evil are choices for us, and not for the animals. (As things develop I am increasingly coming to regard the left as subhuman - or perhaps differently human - much against my ideology and inclinations, and with great apprehension of what this could lead to.)
This latest cancellation started with “Libs of TikTok” who’s been active since 2021 and has gotten a lot of people fired without much pushback from the right, who were very sympathetic when she got doxxed.
She has gotten a lot of money and influence from her activities and seems unconflicted about her behavior.
It would therefore be more accurate to say that cancel culture is SOP for both the right and the left and has been for years, and draw conclusions from there.
Gotten a lot of people fired? I'm skeptical. I don't really follow this person, but I've never heard of such a thing happening. What kind of things did they get fired for, and from where?
If there's anywhere in the U.S. that expressing typical Lefty opinions gets you fired, I'd like to know where.
Oh, sorry, I meant "fired for the same sort of things people get canceled for, but the conservative version". (I don't really care about LoTT enough to Google it, heh -- just thought you might have examples handy since you seemed better-informed about the individual in question!)
Isn't this a "multipolar trap" from Meditations on Moloch? In the competition within your political party for moral goodness, you have to cancel people in order to gain an advantage over the others [because if bad opinions are violence, how can you NOT cancel?]. Not cancelling is like deciding to not take steroids when everyone else is. Then once everyone in America is trapped and can't get out, it will require government regulation to ban cancelling.
I guess this just goes to show that Tit-for-Tat (and even Tit for 2 Tats and Tit for Tat with Occasional Forgiveness) just isn't a good strategy on a mass scale. It works great for individuals & fine enough on a small scale, but worse & worse as the scale grows and more & more people are lined up on each side, with itchy trigger fingers & personal vendettas.
I.e. Tit for Tat works great when there's 2 people, 1 on each side, and them forgiving each other stops the death spiral of "An eye for an eye!".
It works fine, I guess, when there's 20 people, 10 on each side, and all 10 forgiving the 10 on the other side stops the death spiral. Sure, occassionally a single person *won't* forgive, or will just pretend to forgive, and restart the death spiral... but that can be mostly avoided by having the other 9 monitor & discipline the recalcitrant one to *force* them to bury the hatchet.
It doesn't work when there's 200 people, 100 on each side. If only a single person can restart the death spiral... but you have more & more people, each of whom could snap... then you have an exponentially worsening chance of everyone agreeing to forgive, and a exponentially growing (well, sigmoid growing) chance of even just 1 person dooming everyone with their *personal* inability to forgive.
Things only grow worse at 2000 people, 20 000, 200 000, 2 million... Tit for Tat works great at small scales, where most people live their lives, but if they bring it to the big scales, they're just going to get everyone killed. A difference in scale leads to a difference in kind here, one most people don't intuitively grasp until it's too late & they're *already* locked into the death spiral. You just have to forgive more at these bigger scales, and avoid treating the actions of 1 individual as the actions of an entire side, and have a higher threshold for "We should just murder the entire other side", and learn from history that "If we punish them just a bit more, they'll *finally* get scared & submit to us rather than getting angry & fighting back!" didn't work the previous 100 times, and a thousand other things that go into the difference between us & grunting cavemen.
Or as Scott put it,
"People talk about “liberalism” as if it’s just another word for capitalism, or libertarianism, or vague center-left-Democratic Clintonism. Liberalism is none of these things. Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war.
It was forged in the fires of Hell – the horrors of the endless seventeenth century religious wars. For a hundred years, Europe tore itself apart in some of the most brutal ways imaginable – until finally, from the burning wreckage, we drew forth this amazing piece of alien machinery. A machine that, when tuned just right, let people live together peacefully without doing the “kill people for being Protestant” thing. Popular historical strategies for dealing with differences have included: brutally enforced conformity, brutally efficient genocide, and making sure to keep the alien machine tuned *really* **REALLY** carefully.
And when I see someone try to smash this machinery with a sledgehammer, it’s usually followed by an appeal to “but racists!”
You say we must protect freedom of speech. But would you protect the free speech of *racists*?
You say people shouldn’t get fired for personal opinions that don’t affect their work. But would you let *RACISTS* keep their jobs?
[...]
Ah well. They said a racist thing. Guess we’ve got to kill them."
I suppose you could argue that peace is watered by blood alone. It is very American at least to believe that the Tree of Liberty requires blood sacrifices from time to time, like an Aztec altar to the Gods; not too far from there to imagining the Dove of Peace only being satiated by rivers of blood.
And wasn't that what Turchin theorized was going on in "Secular Cycles" and "Ages of Discord"? https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/12/book-review-secular-cycles/ & https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/02/book-review-ages-of-discord/ -- he theorized that there were generational cycles of "social contagion" of violence, "social exhaustion" of people getting fed up with the violence/"war weariness", and then "social turnover/loss of immunity" as the years pass, people get old & die, and a new generation grows up without any firsthand experience of why war is bad, only the narrative that War is Glorious.
Still, can't we get this done some other way? Or at least in a smaller way? Perhaps we can get ourselves to recoil in horror from violence *without* first having to attempt to outright wipe each other out, a la what happened in the European Wars of Religion. Perhaps we can recoil in horror just as much from just a few deaths, instead of a few million. Do we *really* need to go through the entirety of the European Wars of Religion again? Or can we learn from the last time & only murder each other for a few days before we get the message, not like multiple centuries?
i.e. There was a progression over time from the European Wars of Religion (lasted a few centuries, consumed an entire continent, killed millions in each war & tens of millions overall, explicit goal often was wiping the other side out) to say The Troubles (lasted a few decades, consumed part of a continent, killed thousands, explicit genocide wasn't the goal compared to the relatively more moderate ethnic cleansing); the Protestants & Catholics still had to work things out by murdering each other, like you said, but they didn't need as much murder this time. Why can't we continue the series and need even less murder this time? Turn the other cheek after merely dozens of murders, not thousands or millions? If you've got to kill back to make a point, for God's sake at least try to *minimize* the killing, not *maximize* it.
Which is to say... if the right wing commentators Scott highlighted *have* to be cold & calculated about this, discussing their plan rather than just flying into a blood rage... they should at least try to be cold & calculated in favor of maximizing their side's chance of success (by cultivating good PR, not throwing away the moral high ground, & showing *some* degree of restraint), rather than cold & calculating in favor of losing oneself to blood rage & slaughtering as many as possible. That's just self-defeating, even if they don't *care* about the lives they're taking. It's the same reason the military has rules & Geneva Conventions & the like about this sort of thing, rather than just gassing & nuking everyone & everything in its path. If they can't turn the other cheek, they should at least try to emulate the military.
And I'm saying, "Murder bad, actually." I don't have to have a plan for "complete resolution" to be able to say, "Less murder is better than more murder.", in the same way you don't have to have a complete plan for transgender kids to be able to say, "Transgenderism bad, actually." (or whatever). If people are insane, being able to deal with that insanity one small step at a time is necessary for dealing with it at all. If instead the lunatics could insist "I don't see a complete treatment plan, THEREFORE I should be able to keep doing whatever I want to kids", then the battle is already lost. Lost to the most fanatical, terminally online, "activist" kind of person, rather than ordinary people like you & me.
One advantage of a conflict inside a nation is that we _do_ have a government more powerful than either faction. I'm not thrilled by adding yet more laws. But cancelling gets much of its power by threatening peoples' livelihoods. If firing people for political comments (particularly on their own time, particularly if they are "mainstream" comments - say something 25% of the population agrees with) were illegal, cancelling would be much less of a threat. The legal system could force disarmament, unlike the international case.
Personal nitpick - "eye for an eye" ends in 2 eyes lost, not infinite eyes lost. The first guy took the second's eye, and the second took the first's.
It's also a limit and a requirement for equal measure - the lord who takes a peasant's eye loses his in return, instead of shrugging and giving the peasant a single gold coin or whatever, and the peasant who takes the lord's eye loses in return, instead of the lord killing him and his entire extended family.
Not when group identity politics are in play. "One of them" takes my eye, so I take the eye of "one of them". And the response to that involves taking the eye of person #4, because they're in my group. And so forth.
Just like all those people who try to figure out "when" the Israeli-Palestinian conflict started, and wind up going back to the Sea People invading Egypt or something.
>Just like all those people who try to figure out "when" the Israeli-Palestinian conflict started, and wind up going back to the Sea People invading Egypt or something.
I definitely agree cancellation is bad full stop and agree with Section 9 that we need to create a social environment where cancellation is structurally as nonviable as possible. I don't feel any urge to defend the right wingers wielding what they think is a stick now in their hands because deep down I don't think they are any more principled than the members of the left who wielded the stick previously.
I'd be interested though in hearing how 2024!Scott squares what he just wrote with 2012!Scott who argued quite convincingly here: https://web.archive.org/web/20161019200037/http://squid314.livejournal.com/309196.html that we can see Revenge (such as cancelling left wingers after the left has been doing this to the right) as an act of Charity towards wider society. Now I'm not saying the vengeful modern right believes they are being at all charitable when they go around cancelling random store workers but the mechanism in 2012!Scott's post works just as well regardless of the mental state and beliefs of the person taking the revenge and society benefits just as much either way.
This is why I personally at least, while not supportive of right wing cancellation efforts, am (for the moment at least) content to ignore their volleys towards the left without any consternation in a way that I wouldn't be were the sides reversed.
Small claims court was one of his proposed retaliations, but he also had "and seeing if I could get a newspaper to take up the story and drag this guy's name through the mud as much as possible.", which seems like it maps pretty well to social-media mobbing.
The general thrust of his argument was "doing everything I could to make the manager regret the decision, even if it's net negative to me, because if everyone did that no one would make that decision", so I think the general idea fits.
I agree that he's doing all of those things, but I don't think he's doing them in sequence: if he was unable to win in small claims court, I think he'd still go to the newspaper. In fact, I'd be surprised if he didn't go to the newspaper _before_ his court date since he could do that immediately but might have to wait a bit for court.
Shortly afterwards he writes "My manager would be out an employee and have a court case and an angry mob of newspaper-readers to deal with. ". Note "court case" as opposed to "judgment", suggesting that the newspaper-readers would be angry at the manager _before_ the court case had reached resolution.
In this article court isn't "the formal process I follow to determine whether I have a legitimate grievance", it's "an additional way I can hurt this person I have a grievance against"
"Let's cancel the cancellers" is just a modern version of the "There's no freedom for the enemies of freedom" of the the French Revolution Louis de Saint-Just.
I have to agree with what Scott wrote here from a principled free speech stance. Although I'm not convinced that advocating for political assassination is in the same category of general political disagreements that get most people cancelled. I don't think most conservatives will find this article very compelling, though.
From a game theory stand point, if you expect the other side to defect (use their power to cancel opponents, in this case), you should also defect. With this section,
> "Take a second to sympathize. From the Right’s perspective, the Left has beaten, shamed, and terrorized them for at least a decade. Now, the moment they get some chance to retaliate, their enemies say “Hey, bro, come on, being mean is morally wrong, you’ve got to be immaculately kind and law-abiding now that it’s your turn”, while still obviously holding behind their back the dagger they plan to use as soon as they’re on top again."
If your side decides to turn the other cheek, they just get slapped over and over again. Of course, the obvious objection to this is everyone gets a better outcome if both sides cooperate (agree to stop partisan cancel culture). But how do you convince your side to forsake vengeance when the odds are good they just end up being the chumps when the other side defects? "Just let them stab you in the back, you don't want to be the kind of people who backstab" probably doesn't sound very appealing to the guy with a knife hilt sticking out of his back. I really don't know how to overcome the inertia of vengeance, because the first group to stop getting revenge risks getting screwed over with nothing to show for it.
You might be thinking, then everyone just ends up in a perpetual loop of revenge, and that's how you get Moloch. Yeah, pretty much.
I think all the groups need to feel the misery of Moloch for a while, before an enlightening figure arrives on the scene, somehow stands above the fray, speaking loudly and eloquently with a worldview that will elevate everyone.
When that figure arrives, if he can speak to both sides, the message will be well-received. The alternative should be obviously terrible.
"I really don't know how to overcome the inertia of vengeance, because the first group to stop getting revenge risks getting screwed over with nothing to show for it."
Seems like there are lessons to be learned from non-violent protesters like Jesus, MLK, and Gandhi.
Progressive values are the default in most power centers. You can try to expel the left from those power centers, but it will probably come at the price of your own soul. You can try to tear down those power centers and build new ones, but you'll probably have to make a deal with the devil, and he'll demand your soul, too.
Luckily, there's another way! To paraphrase Orwell:
"If there was hope, it must lie in the [normies], because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of [America], could the force to destroy [cancel culture] ever be generated."
But remember, the culture skews left, so that's the default normie position. To break that stranglehold, you have to expose the hypocrisy of the left, because if there is one thing *everyone* hates, normies included, it's hypocrites.
But you aren't going to expose the hypocrisy of the left by becoming a hypocrite yourself.
No, what you need is a martyr.
Because if there is one thing that *everyone* loves, it's a martyr to a righteous cause.
And yes, that will suck for the martyr(s), at least in the moment, but redemption will come with time. Luckily, the stakes are a lot lower today than they were for Jesus, MLK, and Gandhi. Martyrdom in 21st century America rarely requires actually dying, or even something like jail time. There may be a steep reputational and economic price to pay, but that can be mitigated through supportive social networks of your own.
So there's your blueprint for how to break the perpetual loop of revenge: Step 1) Don't be vengeful; Step 2) Hold yourself to the highest possible standard, so as to put yourself beyond reproach in all the ways that matter; Step 3) Willingly suffer to expose the hypocrisy of cancel culture; Step 4) Take your message to, and win over, the masses; Step 5) Mobilize the masses for change.
I basically agree with this. Interestingly the right sees Donald Trump as their martyr, although he seems to have skipped over steps 1 and 2 and gone straight on to 3, 4 and 5
>Plus or minus a few civil rights laws, cancel culture isn’t implemented at the government level.
And a few sentences later you write:
> Academics should encourage their schools to adopt the Chicago Principles, and businesspeople should encourage their companies to become mission-focused in the style of Coinbase. Ideally these commitments would have legal force, letting students/stockholders sue for violations. Politicians should incentivize the institutions they influence (eg state universities, government contractors) to do this.
If cancel culture isn't implemented at the government level, why would the government level (legal force, sue for violations) be useful in ending it?
Even if it was useful, I wouldn't even grant private companies the right to declare themselves "mission-focused" (i.e. non-political). Picking Coinbase, of all companies, as a company worthy of emulation shows me how much I disagree with this notion.
But even granted all that: declaring the activities of publicly funded institutions as "mission-focused" and therefore outside the political realm is just absurd. What activities should be subject to public scrutiny from within, if not those directly funded by tax money?
Sure, but the crucial difference is that burglary is well-defined as far as the state is concerned. Cancel culture, as Scott writes, is not. That makes it hard, if not impossible, for the state to get a handle on it.
What's wrong is that Coinbase has built its business model around crypto "currency". The crypto ecosystem, from mining to transactions, has considerable environmental externalities, and environmental questions are of course highly political. That makes it all the more important that all of society, including Coinbase employees, may discuss these questions. Not only allowing, but (hypothetically) even legally protecting Coinbase's "mission focus", i.e. ignoring all political questions relating to Coinbase would undermine that fundamental right.
In a more general sense, Coinbase and most other companies only care about politics insofar as it affects their bottom line. Viewed from that angle, "mission focus" is just a euphemism for control over employees who should get to work instead of not working or even interfering with company policy. That seems union-busting-adjacent to me, and since I'm rather in favor of workers' rights, that does not sit well with me at all. And that's also why it seems even more absurd to allow the same for government agencies, with either internal staff or contractors.
TL;DR: Even if legally protecting "mission focus" would have any effect against cancel culture, I find it likely that it would have even worse, unintended consequences on public discourse about company ethics. Coinbase in particular has a lot to answer for because of their business model.
Yes, but not limited to; it applies to every company, no exceptions (or rather, strictly limited, well-defined exceptions). Every business has externalities and opportunity costs on the societal level. That is why I wrote in my original comment that "I wouldn't even grant private companies the right to declare themselves 'mission-focused'". Every business uses resources (e.g. energy, manpower, raw materials), feeds them into some process, and ultimately produces goods and services. Each of these steps must, in principle, be subject to scrutiny and discussion.
I am a follower of the liberal streamer "Destiny". In 2022 he got de-partnered from Twitch because he made insulting remarks about BLM rioters. In 2022 he got permabanned from the platform over drama concerning trans women in sport. In both cases right wing commentators expressed sympathies for his treatment.
Now Destiny has decided to focus aggressively on conservatives. Those conservatives decided pretty much immediately to go after him. He had his Kick account temporarily suspended, and his Twitter account permanently demonetized.
Such is the fate of the center-left commentator. They are caught in the whirlwind of both left and right wing cancel campaigns. center-right figures like Mitt Romney and Liz Chaney are also already on the chopping block.
Destiny is truly the greatest test of one's commitment to freedom of speech, because he's an insufferable and abrasive little manlet who's certain to piss you off at some point, no matter your political beliefs.
That being said, would you say that the stuff that got him banned from Twitch and what got him kicked off Kick are generally equivalent?
Destiny lost his monetization because he openly celebrated that a guy died and wished for more. If you're going to be a public commentator and you don't control your platform, if you celebrate the murder of your political opponents you will end up with no platform.
And look at the difference here: He insulted BLM and rejected claims that transwomen are women, vs. celebrating a murder and wishing for more political terrorism.
This is one of the big problems with Scott claiming there's an equal right-wing cancel culture. The cancellations here involve things like supporting the assassination of your opponent. The cancellations on the other side involve things like saying that there are two genders, or "all lives matter". There's no equality here even if you can define a broad enough category that technically includes both sides.
Can we get the exact words of him celebrating and wishing for more? Whenever a blue-haired BLM activist is killed by sometime who happens to be black, half the right-wing internet decides to clown on them. I don't get worked up about it: everybody thinks it is very funny when woman's face is eaten by leopards. But hand-wringing when other people do it is stupid.
I'd like to agree with Scott but this account of free-speech salvation history is part of the problem. Didn't Jefferson also say the priest is everywhere the enemy of liberty? It follows that society needs to be hyper-vigilant against possible religious back-sliding.
Currently, we don't seem to be at much risk of that unless we have a very big upheaval. The religious elements of the right have been getting weaker politically and weaker in belief over the decades. Just look at the early 1990s-2000s, where the right had quite a bit of power, but was still getting constantly pushed further and further back.
What I'm talking about is more like a founding myth - liberal society began with a purging of the old religion, so it has to be purged again and again ritualistically, regardless of it's actual ascendancy - Adrian Vermeule calls this the liturgy of liberalism. This is the foundation of cancel culture in my opinion.
The religious right in general has had an increased role in the right in the last thirty years. If you look at the 1970s, evangelicals had relatively little political power as an collective. They've ramped up in power over the years, and you can just look at recent Supreme Court decisions to see that they have new power. The Dobbs decision is the most obvious one - an issue that the religious right has focused on for decades and finally got enough power to achieve - but many other cases have also been wins for them. Or look at the recent Ten Commandments law in Louisiana, for something outside of the court system.
Taboo words have always existed in the West. Saying certain words are out of bounds in polite society is not “cancel culture”, and in fact the list of taboo words is a lot fewer than it used to be. For me “cancel culture”, as most people use the term, means punishing people for expressing opinions that were perfectly acceptable in the recent past. In that sense “cancel culture” is a left wing phenomenon because the right wing censorious standards for unacceptable religious heresy, professing Marxist ideology and sexual perversion haven’t become more strict over time, mostly the opposite. Criticizing Israeli behavior might be an exception though, that used to be fairly acceptable in large parts of the right, especially in the oil and gas industries.
> Unless you really lay on the tribal signifiers, it’s hard to find a definition where most Democrats support cancel culture and most Republicans oppose it!
I just looked at one graphic. Does cancellation of famous people make society worse?
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.
> if there are right-wing cancellation squads, they won’t cancel Rachel Maddow or Kamala Harris. They’ll get some WSJ writer who puts too few exclamation points after “MAGA!!!!”
No, because turning on itself is a characteristic of the left. The right is much more pragmatic about that.
In the left, to reuse a quote by Brendan Behan, "the first item on the agenda is the split."
This ignores the real dysfunction at the heart of Republican congressional delegations. The inability to elevate retain a speaker without tremendous acrimony has been a theme for 10 years.
I don't know US politics as well as my own country, where we have multiple small left-wing parties, some new-ish, and only 1 or 2 large, well-organised and centralised right-wing parties. But I suspect that even in the US (which the post is mostly about, of course), this Republican infighting doesn't actually do Republicans much damage, electorally. But some writers have forecasted that the Republican coalition will have to fracture, which would change this assessment.
"Republican In Name Only". I.e. republicans who had reservations about voting for Trump. Although the term predates the orange-man. (although idk what that has to do with the top-comment. is your comment misplaced?)
Thanks, but I knew that. My point is that it's so common an idea that there's a standard and widely-used term for it, so no, the Right is NOT pragmatically against infighting.
This is, to some extent, the exception that proves the rule. "RINO!", functioning as an insult, is equivalent to "Splitter!".
Also, isn't it true that this term is only a few years old? The right/left distinction I am talking about, which I certainly am not the first to see, is a hundred years old.
Hmm, maybe. Or perhaps your own group always looks fractious compared to the monolithic enemy, and given the overwhelming cultural dominance of the Left, that's the perspective one is typically exposed to.
The term is actually much older: Wikipedia says it was used in 1920s, 1950s, and 1980's. But ignoring those, I read that it's been common since the time of Bill Clinton, and I KNOW it's been popular since the Tea Party movement, circa 2010.
> perhaps your own group always looks fractious compared to the monolithic enemy
That's a great point.
The overwhelming cultural dominance of the Left, insofar as it's true, is localised to (parts of?) the US in the last couple of decades - the left's tendency to split is broader and older. The right really was monolithic and dominant for most of the 20th century, in many parts of Europe including where I'm coming from.
I was actually surprised at how long it took for RINOs to be rejected by Republicans. One of the few underlying principles of conservatism is that values aren't universal truths no matter the time or place, but rather developed over time within communities - hence a greater affinity for isolationism and tradition. A lot of of the RINO's main policy positions ran counter to that, eg our values are the universal truth, so we need to export it at the point of a gun. They said "American values" obviously but that was only window dressing.
What you're describing sounds like the neocons. They are in principle a different group than the RINOs. The Republican party has evolved on the issue of foreign intervention, at least nominally after the colossal fuck-up the the neocons, who during their dominance WERE Republicans in good standing, were seen to bear responsibility for.
On reflection you're right, though RINO does seem more like a low on content slur to outcast or discipline members of the American conservative tribe and so it was commonly applied to neocons as they were being pushed out. Not all RINOs are neocons but all neocons are RINOs, or something like that.
There's a real conflict between the conservative/religious factions of the GOP and the more establishment/business factions. And also the libertarian/freedom caucus types, although to a much lesser degree as there aren't that many of them. Romney and McCain were not very popular among the conservative base for example, being from the very moderate wing of the party. When there are only two parties, everyone has to pick one or the other and try to make their position under that umbrella as advantageous as possible. The parties may look like monoliths from the outside, but that very much isn't the case.
This right here is how you know you've found a person not worth listening to. I genuinely tried giving Sean Hanitty a listen at one point in my life and one of his taglines was "behind enemy lines". That's really all I needed to know about him and I tuned out. If those on both nonexistent "sides" would quit giving credence to idiots who label *your fellow countrymen* "the enemy" we wouldn't be in this mess.
I do believe there are genuinely evil people in power. They aren't the kind that win elections. They don't actually care which "party" is in charge as long as the money keeps flowing and people keep dying. They merely use the party systems to manipulate and control us. Know your enemies, and just because someone voted for Trump (one of those people I just talked about who uses these systems to manipulate) does not make him or her your enemy.
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?
If you live in the US and have citizenship in the USA by definition we are not enemies, but brothers and sisters. Brothers have disputes, sell each other out, maybe even kill each other, but enemies we are not and speaking as if we were is detrimental to solving problems.
> 27 “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. 30 Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. 31 Do to others as you would have them do to you.
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 think that's my point. We should not refer to people we are not actively trying to dehumanize as "the enemy". It's wholly unproductive and leads to the turmoil we are witnessing. If we are enemies, the only solution is war, which is barbaric and evil.
If do unto others isn't the golden standard we are trying to achieve what are we doing as a species? Is raw survival really worth getting out of bed in the morning?
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.
Using Scott's own Mistake Theorists vs Conflict Theorists schema:
Hard Mistake Theorist explains to Hard Conflict Theorists why they shouldn't conflict. Mistake Theorists reading nod along vigorously.
Or alternatively: Hard Mistake Theorist shows the irrationality in the justifications Hard Conflict Theorists have written only as a fig leaf for doing what they intend to do anyway.
This article, for example. He wants me to change how I act. At best I would gain but he would gain more. Likelier this would be straightforwardly detrimental to me. So he is a negative.
He is making an argument that cancelling is bad and we should not do it. Do you think cancelling is good? Or do you think that some cancelling is necessary to get us to a state of less cancelling? In either case you should be able to interpret him via "mistake theory" lens rather than assuming he's an enemy.
I think they exist, I don't think they talk like this or would pop their heads in very often, if at all. If you do claim to be one of these people, why go to a place full of people you hate? How is that either fun or productive?
I saw a link to this article in another place, and it was early enough for my comment not to be completely lost, so I took the opportunity. As you can tell, it turned out to be a lively subthread. At double the post age from that, I made an observation that I still was literally the only person here who is in favor of the things Scott appeals us to drop.
I’m on your side, and I don’t think it’s fruitful to divide the world like this. Yes Scott is more left wing than both of us. Nevertheless he appeals to higher principle here, and I believe that’s the right thing to do, regardless of which side you’re on.
Unless you think that appealing to higher principle is just dog whistling for one side or the other, in which case I’m not sure what I could say to convince you otherwise. But perhaps consider that’s how the woke left cancel squad treats centre left liberals who didn’t put enough exclamation points after BLM!!!
Scott is an enemy of cancel culture on both the left and right. He never endorsed cancelling anyone, so he's not a hypocrite selectively asking mercy from his enemies.
I never called him a hypocrite, I called him an enemy. He might be against the use of this weapon by both sides, that doesn't make him an ally or a neutral.
So you can achieve a more complete and lasting hegemony over your enemy by nesting the good parts of his inferior civilization within your super civilization.
The battle lines are set in stone, they are etched on skin in tattoo ink and with birthmarks, there is no untapped pool of neutrals to make into allies. My only hope is that more on my side see that the only narrow path with any chances of averting defeat lies in the only one area where the enemy doesn't yet have an overwhelming advantage.
Simply false. People like JK Rowling are up for grabs. People are constantly dying and dropping off the electoral register and being replaced by 18 year olds.
Nope, Rowling isn't and never was. She is 99% onboard with the woke, it's funny how quickly people forget all her statements about sexualities and skin colors.
Scott, I agree with the main point of this, although I think it's a lost cause given Republicans' consistent willingness to use whatever cancellation power they have to its fullest extent. However, I'm curious how your views here align with your 2020 and 2022 ballot guides, where you indicated that refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and denying election results were disqualifying factors for candidates.
Given this article's focus on left-wing excesses and things like the Twitter files revealing troubling collusion between government agencies and media, I think it's important to clarify your current stance. Do you still consider actions like election denial uniquely disqualifying? You listed various instances of collusion between liberal elites and the Biden administration. It would be helpful to understand if you see Trump as just another flawed Republican candidate, or if his post-2020 actions represent a unique threat to democracy beyond the "soft power" concerns you raised.
This article suggests there's a left-leaning problem of soft power erosion of democracy that the right shouldn't replicate. Yet you don't mention the very real, hard power attempt to subvert democracy on the right - something you acknowledged in 2020 and 2022. Clearly, hard power over actual election outcomes is more critical than soft power over media narratives. To be specific: do you expect Trump would try to hold power if he lost the next election, with some chance of success? Do you think there's a significant risk he'd make the US far less democratic in a second term, Orbán-style? I believe it's crucial to address these hard power concerns alongside the soft power issues you've detailed.
I agree that the “Right”, whatever it is, shouldn’t cancel as hard as the “Left” does.
But there are things that should be cancellable even while decrying cancel culture, and celebrating or calling for violence against specific individuals or groups is the main one.
This is the hidden asymmetry in the recent cancellation of ordinary workers wishing Trump had been killed: ordinary people cancelled a few years ago for innocent things didn’t celebrate or call for violence.
The ordinary people being cancelled now made the unprincipled sheeplike mistake of following a mob and being punished when the winds shifted and suddenly it was no longer OK to celebrate violence in the direction the media matrix they were embedded in had previously been demonstrating by example that it was OK to celebrate violence.
That unprincipled sheeplike mistake may be very forgivable, but it’s not innocent in the way people who weren’t calling for or celebrating violence were innocent.
The framing: “getting a prole fired …” interests me.
I see the left and right both love the word prole.
Does anyone imagine that Lord Fancypants came down from the manor to get the ruffian fired? Because someone uttered the tedious “punchline” uttered by thousands, no doubt? Because someone who could say a thing like that is the sort of person who could do something much more serious, like lay out poison in the wood where the fox coverts are?
It’s all proles, all the way down - if we’re going to use the word, because you like it so much.
A fair point. The act of trying to get someone fired is a bit Karen-esque, class aside - libsoftiktok may not be lord fancypants but is aspiring to a degree of social control. If there's evidence of the home depot lady being a massive troll, I'd like to see it, otherwise a single comment in poor taste seems harmless. I'm not altogether against cancel culture - there are some journalists I'd like to see fired. "Prole" in this context is a call for some people to be marked out as civilians. Seems fair.
'There is no serious argument that conservatives refrain from “cancel culture.” Conservatives attempt to cancel liberal professors[1] all the time. Conservatives decry disinvitation even as they indulge in it[2]. The meretricious Turning Point USA, which constantly bemoans cancel culture[3], maintains a enemies list of too-liberal professors[4]. Conservative luminaries accuse opponents of legislation of wanting to groom minors for abuse[5]. Our former President constantly complained about cancel culture and just as constantly demanded that people get fired for speech he didn’t like[6]. Don’t get me started on Colin Kaepernick or Liz Cheney.'
* Who Yarvin dismisses as "claming to be some kind of legal scholar" in the linked article
3/4. It's a list of people who cannot be trusted, there's no call to action
5. The bill required parents be notified of significant health or welfare changes to their children, banning "secret" gender transitions, banned pornographic material in schools, and barred sexual education before grade 3. If you make the school an individual, who is helping the child "transition", giving them porn, talking to them about sex, and keeping it all a secret from the child's parents, "groomer" is the MOST polite word one could describe that adult with.
6. It's Trump. He's got the philosophical consistency of half-dried dough. This isn't new.
Fair. I was quoting Ken as an objection to this article's premise that canceling is a thing that exclusively the left does which the right is a victim of, which I think is inaccurate.
> this article's premise that canceling is a thing that exclusively the left does which the right is a victim of,
Did you stop reading the article in the middle of the headline or something? Libs Of TikTok is going nuts going after randos. Scott talked about friendly fire.
Also Ken has suffered extreme internet poisoning. This is him the day of Trump's shooting https://x.com/baseballcrank/status/1812558203437351132 Josh Barro somehow went radio silent for several days after the shooting.
Jesus, how do you go from "respected Free Speech attorney" to "think tanks who disagree with me are a legitimate target of terrorist violence" in 8 years? TDS really is a hell of a drug.
Scott has always been fiercely critical of illiberal 'liberals', and taking that kind of stance inevitably attracts some people who (rather than sharing your principles) are just happy that you're hitting their enemies.
He also engaged with and (with significant qualifications and reservations) helped to promote the neoreactionaries back when they were very obscure, and he's surely retained some readers who were reactionaries or reactionary-adjacent then and are Trump supporters now.
And 'Trump supporter' is no longer a niche category; the exact number will obviously depend on how we define it, but it certainly includes many millions of people.
>And 'Trump supporter' is no longer a niche category; the exact number will obviously depend on how we define it, but it certainly includes many millions of people.
Yup! And a lot of those are "supporting" him for Lesser Evil...
I wonder how many voters grimace as they pull the lever or mark the ballot...
- Roughly 33% of the 5,786 readers who answered the "Political Affiliation" question described themselves as either libertarian, conservative, neo-reactionary, or alt-right, all of whom would have a significant proportion of Trump supporters.
- Of the Americans registered for a party, there was a roughly 4:1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans - but there were as many readers not registered for a party as there were readers registered for the Democrat party, and some fraction of them will likely be Trump supporters as well.
- More people described themselves as having become significantly further right than significantly further left over the last ten years (albeit those two options combined summed for only 33% of the total).
- The question "How would you describe your opinion of Donald Trump" had 71.8% "very unfavorable" to 0.7% "very favorable". Excluding the 7.6% "neutral" responses, there is a 21:1 ratio between negative and positive opinions of Donald Trump.
So, it depends on what you mean by "Trump supporter". If you mean someone with a personally very positive view of Donald Trump, then the survey results indicate that such people are in a tiny minority here. But if you mean Americans who might plausibly judge that more of their political and social goals would be achieved by electing Trump / Vance than Harris / ?, regardless of their personal opinions of the candidates, then the number seems to be still a minority but very much non-negligible.
Because in the "approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches" who inhabit this lair, most of us are witches of one sort or another, even the principled civil libertarians? You don't have to be stupid to be accused of witchcraft; it might even make you more of a target.
As for Trump, there's a lot of differing views about him here; it's sort of an all-natural whole-grain community, not the highly processed homogenized social food product that tends to be found elsewhere.
I was your standard college leftie when I discovered Slate Star Codex (except when it came to affirmative action). The more SSC comments I read, the more right wing I became. The SSC comments was the first place I saw that right wingers were able to engage with the left without social pressure, and I noticed that their arguments were usually better with clearer and more reasonable first principles. Before SSC, I thought leftists were smarter. After SSC, I realized that leftists are the midwits in the midwit meme.
I didn't know "Trump supporter" and "radical" were synonymous to you. Though I'd say I'm closer to "would rather vote Trump than Democrat" than "Trump supporter", as similar as the two are in practice. But maybe you're right, since I'd vote for a lot worse than Trump over most leftists in the West.
EDIT: Also, related to my first response, have you ever considered that SA's audience has an atypical number of Trump supporters because it is mostly smart people (rather than "even though")?
Sorry if I offended you. Just curious what made you switch sides.
I do think that smarter conservatives gravitate to forums like Substack. In general people here are smarter than average, more education usually means more left-wing.
No worries, I wasn't offended. It was more curiosity about your use of the word radical. That feeling is now extending to how you went breathlessly from "smarter than average" to "more education". Remember, my answer was that there was a contrast between my time in post-secondary educational institutions (full of midwits, even most of the profs) to my time spent lurking SSC (full of smart people).
SSC was a place where the smartest leftists interacted with the smartest conservatives, and the conservatives usually came out on top, at least from my perspective.
Re the comments about neoreactionaries, it was less them that swayed me than posters like David Friedman. In any case I think you might get a better idea if you read the comment sections under some SSC posts. Maybe you'll even undergo the same transformation.
Were you reading SSC ~10 years ago? Although Scott never fully agreed with the neoreactionaries, he went out of his way to publicly engage with them, promote some of the parts of their philosophy that he liked, and grow their audience. (He also applied higher moderation standards to his far-right commenters, which had the predictable effect of making them seem relatively more reasonable as a group.)
11. There's no one to (eventually) negotiate a truce with. Even if you can convince all the offenders that they are (were) in the wrong, you can't credibly promise that you and yours will stop with the cancelling. No one on the other side can do the same. The cancellers on both sides will honestly believe that they can't stop until they've gotten one more good shot.
I'd add another point: to quote Glenn Loury, there is no "free speech". We have rules saying the government can't punish you for your speech. But your friends, neighbors, and bystanders can punish you to the limits of their abilities if you say or do things that are too far beyond the pale. When the Dixie Chicks denounced George W. Bush, the government couldn't punish them, but their fans could stop paying for tickets or buying recordings. When spineless university presidents punished cis white male students for the same conduct they celebrated from "the disadvantaged", the government (mostly) couldn't hold them to account, but donors could. When Donald Trump claimed that a Mexican-American judge couldn't be fair, the government couldn't punish him, but customers and voters could.
The point is, don't be senselessly provocative, because there are (can be) consequences. And don't go overboard with the consequences, because they destroy the community.
I don't know man, to me every single person you screenshotted here seems batshit insane. If your screenshots would be a representative sample of my social media feeds I'd first freak out, and then do a lot of unfollowing. Are you sure these people deserve a response? I mean "cancel culture bad" isn't particularly a new or fresh insight.
Fair point. Many of the ACX posts are held to some "fresh idea" standard though, so I was surprised to see this one, but I agree that a good point is worth repeating.
Philosophically, this is a very good column. Realistically, it's irrelevant. This won't stop until, as the saying goes, we are all blind. We're too far down that road, and there are, IMO, only two future scenarios. One, the country fractures and dissolves. Two, the left takes over and conformance and compliance become legal requirements.
The left has always been much, much more aggressive at what we now call "cancel culture". I experienced it personally, repeatedly, 40 years ago while an undergrad. I experienced it when I lived in a liberal city 30 years ago. I lived with it when I lived in another liberal city 20 years ago. There is a reason for this.
Liberals tend to put relationships before principle. If they don't like you, personally, nothing else matters. Conservatives tend to put principle before relationships. They may not like you, but will still work with you if it is beneficial. (This is not a 100% thing - it's a "more likely than not" hypothesis.)
Both "sides" are now firmly committed to war with each other. I see that only getting worse.
In my lifetime, the right was more censorious in the years following 9/11. At the very least I think that period is an exception to the idea that "the left has always been much, much more aggressive" in this area. I wrote a thing about the parallels: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/conservative-cancel-culture-after-9-11/
The idea that it's just going to get worse and worse seems to disagree with the perception, observed by many on both the left and the right, that there has been a "vibe shift" in American culture: left-wing censoriousness hasn't disappeared by a long shot, but the effects are less widely felt. As one example, Scott's bete noir, the NYT, has reaffirmed a commitment to open debate, scolded (and in some cases fired) those staffers who attempt to bully the paper into certain political stances, responded to protests against its coverage of youth gender medicine by defending that coverage unambiguously, etc. For more you can read Freddie Deboer: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/dreams-that-didnt-come-true
You could be right about the post 9/11 period. I think the current "vibe" is just a brief hiatus. I hope I'm wrong.
Please don't use NYT and "open debate" in the same sentence. They remind me of my time in a rural area of a northeast state where the definition of diversity was "lutheran, methodist, catholic, and baptist".
That fits my hypothesis as politics is the relationship between government and people, and the exercise of power - which is central to relationship based ethics.
Why do you consider politics to be distinguishing between friend and enemy, and why do you think the right is not good at distinguishing between friend and enemy?
I believe that corresponds best to the concept that "cleaves reality at the joints." You are of course free to adopt a definition that is narrower, and so fails to include very closely related phenomena, or broad enough to include much I wouldn't consider useful to categorize as "politics" (à la "_everything_ is political"), but this is mine.
(Also, I figured my saying "No, …" in the context of arguing definition would be understood to be a disagreement of opinion, not of fact.)
In my experience, many on the Right usually refuse out of some foolish principle to retaliate against those who seek to ruin their lives and livelihoods, or worse, ALLY with them against people they generally agree with (and a low bar, would NOT seek to ruin their lives/livelihoods) but are insufficiently decorous.
I think you're being too pessimistic. There's at least two other possible outcomes
1) Trump and the movement he leads resets the culture and the right takes control.
2) The majority of people who aren't really engaged in the culture war get sick of the excesses of the left, and the pendulum swings back in a more tolerant direction.
A vaguely relevant, interesting historical anecdote about the time Bob Dylan said in 1963 that he sympathized with Oswald and everybody understandably lost their minds, but he was not really canceled.
Taking Reason's description of the Pinckney case at face value: isn't it material here that Pinckney's actual tweet -- "To [sic] bad they weren't a better shooter!!!!!" -- does *not* in fact equate to "[...] call[ing] for political violence and the ass*ss*nat*on of Presidents".
How is Raichik's public admonition to Pinckney's employer and its broadcast to all her followers not actionable? Isn't this a clear case of malicious libel?
If you can't see this as a call for the next guy to do a better job, I don't know what to tell you. 'I wish my political enemies were murdered' is about as clear a call for political violence as you can get.
To be clear, you're saying that "Too bad Governor Snagglepuss wasn't killed" and "I wish Governor Snagglepuss was dead" and "Let's kill Governor Snagglepuss" are all equivalent? And that they're all a "call for political violence"?
Because to me, examples 1 and 2 express an opinion and only sentence 3 is an actual incitement to violence.
I can't understand how you think it's legitimate to lump these three sentences together when they're all clearly saying quite different things. Does it not matter what people actually say?
which _both_ expresses a preference that Governor Snagglepuss die _and_ phrases it in terms of "killed", which suggests a violent event (albeit with some ambiguity about intention - one might use the same word if the governor had almost but not quite stepped in front of an 18-wheeler). It is certainly more ambiguous than (3).
I would put "Well, he missed his target, and there it is." as less of a call for another attempt than (1) is, since it "and there it is" doesn't make it clear what the speaker prefers.
I don't think there is a clear line. To make an analogy with another realm where people make ambiguous statements and gestures, I would call (1) flirting with endorsing another assassination attempt.
The mechanism is important. Saying "I hope Trump drops dead of a heart attack" is categorically different than saying "I wish that guy that actually tried to assassinate Trump had succeeded." Celebrating political violence is different commentary than generically wishing ill on opponents.
I have to disagree with Archduke, none of this is actual incitement.
If she only broadcast a paraphrased version, you might have a point, but though I haven't followed the latest news, it was my understanding that LibsOfTikTok typically includes the original post verbatim.
I'm only using the article in Reason as my source for this, and I'm assuming their quote of Pinckney's actual tweet and of Raichik's public admonition are both accurate.
My contention is that Pinckney's tweet falls well short of being 'a call to political violence and the ass*ss*nat*on of Presidents'. Which would make Raichik's characterization false and therefore libelous; and in fact maliciously so.
The US standard for libel is quite high, and while IANAL, I'm fairly sure the distinction between "I wish the political violent actor had succeeded" and "I am advocating for someone else to try again" does not even come close to meeting it.
What LoTT did can be bad without being illegal, just like what Home Depot Lady did can be bad without being punishable by law or mob (by her friends calling her a ghoul: allowable).
I have a rule to suggest: If your enemy breaks a written law, don't stoop to their level, no matter what. If your enemy breaks an unwritten norm, feel free to stoop to their level if it seems strategically productive.
(Most of these things are ratchets; and your side of the ratchet is going to get turned someday. Pick the most advantageous day for it.)
The endpoint of this iterated game is not an infinite hellscape of torturous oppression; it's a caste system with a strict code of etiquette, like most people have lived in for most of history.
Absent shared values, I don’t think you’ll ever have a shared definition of the Overton window.
Absent value realism, and some formal conception that is posed as an attempt to approximate true value - ie a socially constructed map of value - I don’t see how you get explicit shared values.
"This Isn’t Tit For Tat, It’s The Nth Round Of A Historical Dialectic..." Ah, that's what tit-for-tat looks like; you seem to be confusing problem-solving with problem management here. " An agent using this strategy will first cooperate, then subsequently replicate an opponent's previous action. If the opponent previously was cooperative, the agent is cooperative. If not, the agent is not. This is similar to reciprocal altruism in biology." If I eat a delicious shrimp scampi paired with a blue cheese and candied pecan chopped salad I have not solved hunger... Tit for tat is an excellent strategy, though it does, I suppose, suffer in comparison to magic wands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat
Tit for tat has the flaw that a single error in cooperation leads to an endless cycle of retribution, so in a situation where errors are possible, tit for tat with forgiveness (tit for two tats) is superior.
I think this post misses an important argument. Cancellation is a signal to Others about what is and is not acceptable discourse, regardless of the impact on the individual experiencing it.
All of the data show that these signals have been received in many institutional spaces such that conservatives, moderates, and centrists feel very uncomfortable sharing their views or engaging in anything against liberal orthodoxy. Data argue this left 'skew' in acceptable discourse has gotten much worse over the past decade.
Cancellation by the right against the left could be reasonably seen as an attempt to shift this window back and establish at least some kind of left boundary on what is acceptable discourse in public spaces. That doesn't happen without Other People seeing that there can be consequences for expression of far left viewpoints. That there can be manifest consequences for expression of even mild-right viewpoints has already been well-established.
I read this newsletter for some interesting thoughts, some provocative science. I avoid it for the absolutely detached political punditry. For instance, Scott writes:
1) “I think this is part of why the Democratic Party is floundering right now.” And 2) “You, too, can one day have a party this self-sabotaging and incapable of winning elections!”
1) largest single fundraising day in political history. Immediate, unanimous embrace of a single candidate. Anecdotally, massive upsurge in support and enthusiasm. I honestly, sincerely have no idea how you can look at the outcome of Biden’s withdrawal as “floundering.”
2) A Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote in one of the last eight elections. Since 2010, Democrats have outperformed expectations in all subsequent federal election cycles. 2018 and 2022’s “red waves” never happened. The voters of this country have chosen a democrat to lead this country all but one time in the 21st century. I truly have no idea what you’re talking about.
But yes, pat yourself on the head with that "massive upsurge", anecdotally of course, plus the presidential popular vote; in fact, pin a blue ribbon to celebrate the unassailable popular vote lead that happens to mean nothing as far as actual political victories. If you don't see how this is exactly what "floundering" is, I don't know what to say.
In case you're wondering, my political views are on your side; I despise Trump and what GOP has become, which makes having to write this ever more painful.
Prediction markets still have Trump expected to win. Congratulating yourself on winning the popular vote is a distraction from our system having an electoral college, which is what you actually need to win.
I was not congratulating myself on anything. I was refuting two seemingly precise statements. A party changing course and rallying around a new, invigorating is not floundering, and Democrats win tons of elections.
The right embraces this mythology that they are the default winners when it has not been borne out in the 20th or 21st century. This is only true in heavily gerrymandered state elections. Everywhere else, the smart money should generally be on democrats.
1) By "default" I meant something like "presumed to win."
2) I was specifically referring to state legislative elections. But to your point, yes, it does only apply to the House. Re: the presidency, I made my point about that in my OP—they do not, in fact, do alright winning the presidency in the modern era. For governors, that I'll grant you. I think it's telling however that Republican governor's outside of deep red states all tend to be non-culture-warrior, moderate Republicans; not MAGAs. The senate is a whole different beast where you're right, but I think mostly to do with massive rural over-representation, not gerrymandering, per se.
The fundraising total was mostly money being held back from Biden to force him out, and once the announcement was made, that money was then released. Basically, an accidental money bomb, not an organic spike in donations.
Also, the popular vote is bolstered by huge margins in areas with Democrat-controlled governments long-term, which is the exact issue the Electoral College was created to limit the impact of.
Sure. The uncharismatic candidate that slept her way into office and couldn't even survive to Iowa got a flood of first-time contributions in a totally organic way.
Or, you know, the roughly $100m that was being publicly withheld until Joe Biden dropped out was released.
If I were a personnel manager and Party A came to me with data detrimental or unflattering to another employee, Party B, and demanded I fire Party B, the first thing I would do is fire Party A.
I wouldn't want anyone working for me who is a neofascist snitch.
You realize that taking this to its logical conclusion means no bad behavior at work, no matter how awful, can be dealt with, right? What if Party B has been smearing shit on Party A's desk?
Well, C. G. didn't put any bounds on the variables, so yes, for the purpose of my specific example excrement has been applied to the work surface.
The point is that if "the complaining party gets automatically fired" is the default action of the manager, then: a) we can fire the manager and replacing him/her with a painted rock; b) eventually the place will descend into whatever the lowest common denominator prevails among the remaining employees.
It's wrong to analyze this event through the lens of a cycle of escalating violence. I did it myself, before I realized that isn't what's going on.
Left-wing cancel culture is when someone loses their job for violating any norm of the Left, no matter how unpopular and niche. It can be as small as donating years prior to support a popular California ballot measure, or tweeting that men are not women. Or it can be literally violating a norm that the Left just made up (such as the gentleman that got cancelled for making an "OK" sign out his truck window).
Right-wing cancel culture is nonexistent. You can't get cancelled for blaspheming Christ, for example. The man who made a work of art out of statue of Christ in a jar of his own piss received government grants. There is only a small window of power here for celebrating the recent assassination attempt on their political candidate. It will probably last only a few weeks. And it only works because mainstream leftists are willing to support the taboo. It's a good thing they are! This means we are still in a state of politics, and not in a state of war, despite all the rhetoric about Trump being an existential threat to the system.
This taboo against celebrating political assassination is not a partisan thing. It's a load-bearing taboo for our system of government. We depend on political assassinations being rare for our way of life to exist. This taboo absolutely must not erode, or we descend into a system of election by carbomb.
So it's just wrong to model this as tit-for-tat violence. It's 10,000 tits for one tat. And the one tat is a nonpartisan tat that absolutely must hold.
Even then, I feel like very low-level service workers should be below the line of fire. But teachers, media personalities, and celebrities must be made to hold the line or all can be lost.
Well, "punch the Nazi" is pretty mainstream these days, so why should "shoot the Nazi" be out of the question? The only reason that mainstream left is against this so far is because they still have to care about broad popularity, not because it conflicts with any of their principles.
You're overly villainizing the left here. Most Democrats (56%) in a poll by the Cato Institute said it was morally unacceptable to punch a Nazi. For comparison, 20% of Republicans said it was morally acceptable to punch a Nazi. Certainly a sizable difference, but still.
Regarding your remark about the importance of preserving the current system of government, I like that line "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" Perhaps a change would be a good thing.
"They should be beaten into submission by any and all means necessary.
Never stop until WE have the whip hand, to relentlessly and viciously persecute those who have destroyed, defiled, and desecrated our society."
It is axiomatic that in a democracy no one gets the whip hand: you can try to persuade but you do not command except by majority vote, and you give up that power the moment the other side has the majority. Childishly simple and obvious, I know. But the author of the note does not understand it and neither do many on his side or the other side. Anyone, from either side, who for any reason attempts to cancel someone else is doing precisely the same thing as stopping them entering a polling booth. Sadly, the rot is such that many would like the authority to do just that.
Cancel culture is a terrible thing, and so I agree with the general spirit of Scott's argument here.
Still, wishing death upon one's political opponents is also a terrible thing, especially in the immediate aftermath of an assassination attempt (i.e. when such wishes are more likely to come off as deadly serious). I also think the sort of person who supports the assassination of political rivals is probably going to be entirely cool with their politically enemies getting cancelled. You maybe even could consider political assassinations to the be the strongest form of... cancel culture. If you're condemning cancel culture in general, then maybe spare a paragraph or two for condemning calls for political violence? Especially if the core example of cancelling being discussed is one that involves someone wishing death on their main political rival.
I think America could seriously benefit from lowering the heat down some when it comes to politics. Less cancel culture would be helpful there, yes, but so would less tolerance for political violence.
I don't think this Home Depot worker should have lost her job... but honestly, in an ideal world, she would have faced some degree of backlash for her comments, since they're very much not the sort of comments America needs right now.
"Some degree of backlash" is a large part of the issue. If cancellers had a concept of "this person has been punished moderately, and that's enough", the situation would be better. Instead, the theme seems to be we'll punish as much as we can.
Agreed. One caveat: The cancellers may not be _able_ to coordinate, at least for some tactics. In e.g. an email campaign to fire an employee, cancellers may not know of each others emails.
The Peace of Westphalia came into being because all sides realized that the constant conflict was a threat to the survival of the states involved, even in victory.
The Geneva Conventions came into being because all sides realized how much worse than death a lot of modern weapons are.
Free speech and freedom of religion exist because most everyone had been on the receiving end of state prosecution and realized that an armistice is safer than trying to hold the club forever.
The core political advantage Progressives/Socialists/Leftists/Communists have is that, to them, the ends justify the means. They have built societies on mass murder of their own civilians. So, the rules exist only as impediments to their ascension and must be broken when advantageous. But the political advantage the American Right has is greater discipline and long-term thinking. This is becoming a pattern, from weaponizing courts to removing filibusters to cancellation. The Left has the first strike advantage and gains significant ground, but the Right eventually adopts the tactics to greater effect.
“If you feel like compromising with the Right, it’s important to remember what they’ve done" is followed by a list of POLICY ISSUES. It's not "The Right destroyed a guy for criticizing Trump's tax cuts", it's "The Right opposes our policy agenda". Whereas what's the defense of firing back from the Right? "They destroyed people's lives for questioning lockdowns, taking a picture with an Unperson, or making a non-ideologically compliant hand gesture."
You think the RIGHT has greater long-term thinking?! The long march through the institutions that the Left so successfully accomplished is not something the Right can hope to replicate.
There wasn't a pro-America Right during most of the Progressive Era, and I'm talking about today where the Soviet Union is not an active agent with long-term plans.
> The core political advantage Progressives/Socialists/Leftists/Communists have is that, to them, the ends justify the means. They have built societies on mass murder of their own civilians.
I am only half joking when I congratulate you for finding a way in which Hamas actually resembles the left.
Good post. I'll add one more thing. There seems to be a narrative on the right that the left became dominant because they were willing to use the levers of power against their enemies without compunction, and the right was impotent because they were so principled and righteous.
As the kids say these days, that's some potent copium. As someone who is pretty squarely in the middle of the political spectrum (or maybe on a different axis), let me tell you -- the right and the left both suck when they're in power, because people of all stripes almost invariably suck once they get power.
As for how the left gained power -- that's complicated. Some of it is the pendulum swinging, some of it is that they just had better arguments on certain issues (both more logically consistent and more emotionally resonant), part of it was a deliberate, and at times cynical, strategy to rise up through the institutions. But they didn't gain power by canceling their opponents, because cancellation is something that requires already having power. Which is why, as Scott already pointed out, cancel culture has often been used as a form of policing, not as a form of conquest.
I'd be interested in Scott's thoughts on the NRX dimension to this discussion. Somebody like Yarvin would say that the government is fake, the real government is the Cathedral, and the Cathedral functions (partially) by means of cancellation. So there's a huge asymmetry between left cancellation and right cancellation: right cancellation is a disorganized mob trying to escape a Chinese finger trap, while left cancellation is you interacting with the actual government.
It seems possible to me that online conservatives have absorbed the idea that political power in the US consists, fundamentally, of the ability to punish other people's speech. (Something Foucault taught progressives fifty years ago.) Politics is downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of what you're even allowed to say.
Could they just be getting a taste of (what they think is) true power and wanting to exercise it?
the basic argument is that culture-battles determine the overton-window, which determines government-policy.
> The only people who could believe such rubbish are those with incredible safety and freedom, and no sense of history or even how a lot of other humans today live.
the guy has cited more primary historical sources than I'll ever probably read within my lifetime. So this prediction is a dud.
The very name of "cancel culture" may be misleading as to what needs to be fixed. No, I don't like the (non)-argument that "cancel culture just means accountability", but something valuable may be lurking in that general neighborhood. If "cancelling" means:
(a) looking at the past and rethinking which figures merit being held as an example (through monuments, named prizes, etc.),
(b) confronting people with their own statements and actions,
then I hope I agree that, while some 'cancellations' are clearly mistaken, objectionable, wrong, even disgusting, this is all a matter of degree: honestly, pretty much everybody supports *some* of (a) and (b), in some cases, and what we need to talk about is means, extent, what is and what is not reasonable, and so forth. Here it makes sense to fight against *excesses* in (a) or (b), or illegitimate ways to do (a) and (b), or the creation of a social panic.
Now, it may be simpler (and more satisfying) to fight against something that is wrong in all circumstances. In that case, what one needs to fight is toxic aspects of online culture (and general culture) that are particularly noticeable in the worst parts of so-called culture:
- informal fallacies,
- in particular, ad personam arguments, and their elevation to the level of principle ("I won the Internet today, I called a commenter a white male/green hermaphrodite/etc.; or mocked some idiot who had the cheek of making a point in that I posted a meme with the words "well, ackchyually" showing an obese man; also, I interrupted a speaker at DSA repeatedly because she committed the crime of speaking while Asian")
- unethical behavior by journalists or people who pass as journalists (this is very noticeable a thing that happens increasingly across the political spectrum),
- a hatred of nuance and argument,
while keeping an eye for certain well-known social dynamics: mob mentality, the narcissism of small differences (to use Freud's phrase),...
"There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever." https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/29/the-spirit-of-the-first-amendment/
That's compatible with confronting people with their statements to argue against them, but not for getting them fired.
I suppose there is the valid question of what to do with those who do not just present bad arguments, but try to kick the entire board of argument and counter-argument; that is, what to do with people who recur to frequent, disruptive personal attacks, and more generally with those who have personally indulged in and spearheaded the worst excesses of cancel culture, or, just as well, racist edge-lords and the like. *Something* needs to be done to enforce civilized dialogue. Of course this is just the old "shall we be intolerant of intolerance" question.
What to do with bad arguments is to make better arguments, while discounting such bad ones.
EDIT: I misread. But "personal attacks" are a known example of a bad argument, which the ancients knew as "ad hominem". And one can respond to that as being a bad argument.
Bravo! A humane approach to the topic. As an anti canceling progressive, I appreciated the broader historical perspective you took.
I think that the only way we will have a meaningful, durable norm against firing people for off the clock behavior / opinion expression is if there is a law banning it. There are just too many “too good to refuse” opportunities for cancellation otherwise. If after October 7, a junior lawyer at some elite firm had written something pro Hamas on a personal account, and it had gotten out and become public information, the firm would have almost certainly risked losing a lot of business unless that lawyer was immediately fired. Is this cancel culture? It seems to me like it is, but also it seems to me that anti canceling norms will never be strong enough to protect this hypothetical lawyer, and the only thing that would protect him is the law. However most people probably don’t want this kind of conduct protected, which I guess leaves us in the status quo, trying to use norms (and shaming?) to fight cancel culture in general.
>I think that the only way we will have a meaningful, durable norm against firing people for off the clock behavior / opinion expression is if there is a law banning it.
Agreed!
>However most people probably don’t want this kind of conduct protected, which I guess leaves us in the status quo
I have a suggestion for distinguishing what is sufficiently in the mainstream to be actively protected, while still (probably) excluding e.g. calls for assassination (not sure where the Hamas support would fall today).
I suggest that anything that is agreed to by 25% of the population is a sufficiently mainstream view that it be protected. This is set far enough above the "lizardman constant" (typically 4%) to not protect _really_ extreme views (which I hope covers the assassination case), but far enough below 50% so this isn't just ceding all discussion to tyranny of the majority.
Re:
>trying to use norms (and shaming?) to fight cancel culture in general.
To my mind the problem with this is that the Woke are typically self-righteous - and therefore shameless. _Maybe_ highly publicizing cases of "friendly fire" might help push back against them ("See who you just destroyed? Are you proud of yourself for doing that?") but I doubt that it will work.
I think legal protection is both necessary and might even put some backbone in firms that would otherwise cave to X-Twitter mobs. "No, we can't fire <employee> disagreeing on the minimum wage hike. It's _illegal_."
I think the Kamala thing in 2020 should be understood primarily as party unification. Biden did the same thing with Bernie and AOC, and it's very likely he managed to achieve as much as he did by having a party that (apart from Manchin) *acted* almost shockingly unified even though they ideologically weren't.
<i>Modern progressive cancel culture is the successor of the 1950s establishment that would cancel you for being an atheist pinko peacenik. Curtis Yarvin calls cancellation “the Brown Scare”, by analogy to the Red Scare that came before. And Arthur Miller called the Red Scare a “witch hunt”, by analogy to actual witch hunts, the Spanish Inquisition, and the history of burning heretics at the stake. And what was Diocletian’s persecution of the Early Church if not cancel culture?</i>
This idea of "succession" strikes me as historically dubious, at least if it's supposed to imply some kind of causal link between the various examples of cancel culture. When I was growing up in the '90s/early 2000s, it seemed everyone, right and left, agreed that free speech was important, that it was wrong to fire someone for their beliefs, and that it was a good thing we'd moved past historical bouts of intolerance into the free-speaking liberal uplands. Cancel culture arose in the 2010s for a variety of reasons, but it wasn't a reaction to McCarthyism, which had already been discredited decades ago. Cancel culture was/is independent of McCarthyism, just like McCarthyism was independent of the Salem Witch Trials, and so on. No doubt there will be similar phenomena in the future, but they'll likewise come about independently, not as a result of anything conservatives do or don't do in reaction to present-day cancel culture.
Incidentally, I find it ironic that the Spanish Inquisition is being listed as a forerunner of cancel culture, when in fact it was set up to try and make sure people got a proper trial rather than being extra-judicially punished as a result of frivolous heresy accusations. In other words, it was opposed to the 15th-century equivalent of cancel culture.
Um, that last bit is Catholic apologetics; I suppose one could say with equal accuracy that it was Beria's job to make sure that people got a proper trial (with confessions obtained by analogous means). Inquisidor Lucero, who burnt 107 citizens of Cordoba in a single day, might have been surprised at being described as being opposed to cancelling your neighbor.
Lucero was a huge outlier who was forced from office for killing people without reason, so it's misleading to treat him as representative. According to Wikipedia, the Inquisition killed "At least 1303" people between 1540 and 1700, an average of just over 8 a year. Of course, records are often incomplete, so 1303 is very much a lower bound, but even if we assume the real total was several times greater, that still doesn't leave much room for regular hundred-person massacres.
The worst excesses of anything are going to be a bit of an outlier. Lucero didn't act alone, but rather within a structure that enabled him; yes, he was eventually deposed, but finished his days in quiet retirement. Your average victim of the inquisition died tortured and starved in a dungeon, not in an auto-da-fé (of which there were plenty).
Incidentally, the Inquisition killed supposed heretics up to the end of the 18th century. The last person in Spain to be executed for heresy (a school teacher) was hung in 1826 (not technically by the Inquisition, but rather by a direct successor - a "junta de fé").
"When I was growing up in the '90s/early 2000s, it seemed everyone, right and left, agreed that free speech was important, that it was wrong to fire someone for their beliefs, and that it was a good thing we'd moved past historical bouts of intolerance into the free-speaking liberal uplands."
Evidently you missed the whole business surrounding the Iraq War!
I'm not an American, so I kind of did. But as far as I can tell, opposing the Iraq War had ceased to be a cancellable offence by 2015 or whenever the current iteration of cancel culture began, so I still stand by my original assertion that cancel culture arose for independent reasons rather than as a reaction to previous censoriousness.
Whatever the optimal strategy to encourage a general shift away from cancel culture (which is just angry online mobs exploiting what tools they can), I'm skeptical that "restraint" on the part of a fraction of the right (much less ACX readers) would have any bearing on whether that happens, even if it was magically a sizable demographic. The mob is the mob, you can't reason with them and they will do what they're allowed to do, and often what they're not allowed to do.
If anything, such a change coming from the corporate policy and culture side would probably be informed by diminished tensions and/or increased apathy, *or* the sentiment that "ok that's enough now it's gone far enough let's settle down", which would only happen if the left-leaning majority feel just as fatigued. This might not make a dent, but much of the left-leaning public has been sick of this stuff long before.
Even though I don't expect polarization to tone down any time soon, I'm more confident that fading cancel culture would come from diminished tensions, or maybe a neo-luddite shift away from smartphones and news. It's not impossible if being more "offline" became a status/class signal, but in particular, parents are beginning to take the dangers of social media and smartphones seriously and evidence is piling up. Predictors for lower tensions could be a) better household economic outlook / reduced inflation, b) maybe a moderate administration that is tougher on protecting borders and miraculously appeals to a good majority, c) a cultural or policy pushback against the doomscroll and always being online
Imagine the universe in which Trump delivered a speech about how it is his blood that they are calling for, his blood that was spilled*, and he wants that blood to purchase something better than more hatred, and asks Home Depot to reconsider firing the woman - that this kind of thing creates an asymmetry of power between the working classes, who cannot afford to lose their job and thus are effectively silenced politically by these acts, and the elites, who speak with impunity, and who enable and promote these tactics to keep the working classes divided and impotent. Frame it finally about being gracious in victory; we've already won. Claim to be "spending" whatever goodwill he got from the assassination attempt.
* With some care taken for the family of the fireman who was shot and killed, note. This is a sketch of the idea, there are important details to cover to make this work that I don't mention here.
Hint very slightly at a religious angle, Trump suffering for our sins, and redeeming us. Don't be too explicit, but let people draw their own comparisons; they'll be all-too-willing.
Throw in some lines about this being a Democrat thing, that the Republicans are being infiltrated by antifa agitators looking to tarnish their good name with this obvious left-wing cancellation bullshit, to goad his opponents into criticizing and signal-boosting the speech with fact checks for maximum exposure.
There was a historic opportunity there that his campaign staff seemed to be completely oblivious to, and I think the opportunity passed over the weekend. It'd still work a little bit, but the news cycle has gone on too long, and it won't have the same impact.
I fully agree, it would have reflected well on him and his campaign - and a lot of his opponents would have hated him for it! So it would have ticked a number of boxes.
Watching politics is painful; nobody is very good at either policy -or- campaigning, and I'd think everybody involved would at least be competent at one of these two things.
Yeah, agreed. I guess in a first past the post system, though, you don't have to necessarily be good; you just have to be slightly less bad than the other guy.
I think you also have to remember that you and I are not the intended audience for a lot of the rhetoric from politicians. A lot of them make deliberately contradictory statements designed to appeal to different groups of potential voters. A lot of what they do/say is designed to appeal to each respective party's base, and I suspect both are somewhat dumber than average.
I am old enough to remember the Dixie Chicks. And Freedom frieds. And Ari Fleischer. And being afraid to ask “are there really WMDs though?” And this was at an Ivy League school, not that many years ago.
The Dixie Chicks were "cancelled" for things they said in their public persona as the Dixie Chicks to a paying audience. Nobody followed them, heard them say that they opposed the Iraq war while getting burgers at McDonalds, and based a campaign against them on that.
My point is that we don’t have to go back far (as Scott points out) to a time when conservatives were all for censorship, speech policing, shouting down ideas they didn’t like. In the 90s the republicans were the sanctimonious moralists! Somehow the democrats managed to adopt the unpopular part (sanctimonious moralism) without the popular part (patriotism, religion, traditional values etc)
I think a lot of people do consider "lost your career as a public personality for things you said in that public personality" to be cancel culture. E.g., a speaker getting disinvited from a college for their politics, or a comedian losing work because their jokes crossed a line.
There's a difference between "I, the customer, don't want to listen to that speaker" and "I don't want someone else to be able to listen to that speaker". If a group of people said "that speaker so offends me that I want to stay away from him, and I'll tell all my friends to stay away from him", so the college decided that the speaker wouldn't draw a big audience and wasn't worth inviting, I wouldn't call that cancel culture. College speakers being disinvited are never like that.
> If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught you that.
It did. The person you're responding to believes that. They are arguing that we currently have this bad thing, and in order to get rid of it, there must be symmetry in both sides perceiving it as bad. Your point #2 is, however, a good argument against that. I think Razib Khan gives the best argument in favor of right-wing cancel culture: unilateral surrender of a tactic will not get the other side to abandon it. Unfortunately, each side is too decentralized (bring back the smoke-filled room!) to actually reach anything analogous to an arms-control agreement.
> Likewise, if there are right-wing cancellation squads, they won’t cancel Rachel Maddow or Kamala Harris. They’ll get some WSJ writer who puts too few exclamation points after “MAGA!!!!”
But the actual examples you're pointing to are a Home Depot employee who wanted Trump assassinated, not anyone associated with the right.
Scott, you got so close to the point in (2), and then you spent the rest running away from it in terror. You're right to point out that "cancel culture" has existed in all societies everywhere for all of human history. That's because "cancel culture" is just what culture is. Cultures are fundamentally defined by a shared set of values and norms, which necessarily means that they must exclude those who reject their values or refuse to abide by their norms. There is no "principled anti-cancel-culture position", we've established what kind of woman you are, now we're just haggling over price.
And yet, there was a time when there was no "free speech" norm at all, however hollow it ends up in practice, so the working hypothesis is that the culture isn't entirely static.
The principle of "cancellation" involves the concern over the relationship between a person's speech and the role they are being cancelled from. In this case, it was an employee making a statement at work, to customers, in uniform. This is separate for getting someone fired for something they said in-private out of work.
That having been said I think the correct action in this case would be remedial training for the employee, not termination.
Are you sure you're correct about this? The Reason article says that she was targeted for social media posts, not for talking to customers while in uniform.
I'm so tempted to point out the thousands of ways in which the right has cancelled folks who aren't maximally supportive of Trump, but it's both been explored in detail in the comments and irrelevant. Two wrongs don't make a right and all that.
So instead I'll just point out that I think we're doing...okay on the respecting speech front. Given that we're still legally allowed to proudly fly the battle flag of a rebellion that lost, that municipalities are allowed to incorporate it into their flag, I'd say we're doing better than most on the "respecting speech rights" front. I'm concerned about the direction our commitment to that speech is moving in, but I'm not concerned about impending disaster just because we yelled at some people with bad ideas.
Populist mobs always gonna populist mob. As long as the legal protections hold I'm gonna be hopeful.
I was briefly confused by the opening paragraph -- LibsOfTikTok cancelled someone on the *left*? And then the right got all excited because this was their chance for vengeance? Why were they hunting vengeance after this cancellation but none of the others?
It wasn't until the third reread that I realized that LibsOfTikTok must be a *right-wing* account.
It's even more complicated than that: LibsOfTikTok IS a right-wing account, but one that reposts LEFT-WING content, that those on the right would otherwise not see because of social media siloing.
Cancel culture is the ethos of total war brought to domestic politics. In total war, every participant on the other side, no matter how distantly involved, is a legitimate target on some level because they still function as a component of the larger enemy war machine. Bringing this same ethos to politics results in each voter being seen as a component of the enemy party's war machine, with the same outcome.
History has shown that the only way to end total war is to win completely or lose completely. It's impossible for any side to deescalate because asymmetric deescalation leaves your side vulnerable to the continuing attacks of the other. It is inevitable that this fight will continue, and cancel culture will worsen, for the foreseeable future.
I think this culture war is a bad thing. I think that having the right to free expression makes America a better place. I'm on the political right, because I think my side is more correct than the other side, but it still worries me some times that I may be trapped in a bubble.
Saying that, one of the root causes behind domestic strife has been the ongoing defamation of American patriotism / nationalism by the left. They're not entirely without a point; nationalism taken too far does cause serious issues, and our history is not perfect. But the perfect is enemy of the good. If we put our shared nationality ahead of other identities as something to unite around, it would help deal with a lot of issues.
I think a very small number of people actually think that way (but more than the number of actual Nazis). The problem is that the small number of vocal protesters have an outsize influence on the folks in power.
Most of the people that vote for politicians that push the policies that encourage this have no idea what's actually going on with government, because they get their news from within the NBC-ABC-CBS-CNN bubble. They only have a soundbite level of understanding of major issues, especially controversial ones.
>Modern progressive cancel culture is the successor of the 1950s establishment that would cancel you for being an atheist pinko peacenik.
Dixie Chicks were completely annihilated for questioning Bush. People don't us the word 'canceled' for Gamergate, but each of the 'literally who' targets had their lives smashed and their careers disrupted.
If you want to say this is a pendulum that swings back and forth, you don't have to go back to 1950s to find the last time the right was on top, it's a lot more recent than that.
I actually think there's basically zero pendulum at all, both sides are attacking their cultural enemies by whatever means available at all times with little distinction, and the only ting that changes over time is the large-scale narrative about which side is 'worse' at the moment. Selective attention and motivated confirmation bias dredging up some examples from one side to form a 'pattern', dedicated attempts to dismiss and disavow examples from the other, until it becomes a meme that the broader media starts to run with and reinforce.
>It’s implemented at the level of media, institutions, and popular taste-making, which Democrats hold more firmly than federal government.
The owner of Twitter is 100% behind Trump, and seems to be actively interfering with the platform to aid him. Lots of other billionaires are behind Trump on the promise of continuing tax cuts, and any media they don't own already they can easily choose to buy up if necessary.
Even to the extent this sentiment was true (and not just propaganda) 8 years ago, it's much less true now.
I agree with all that, but there is an important asymmetry that needs to be addressed. The strongest advocates of cancel culture that I know personally are Marxists. This is not a coincidence. There were earlier conflict theorists, like St. Augustine, but Marx took it to a new level, one which sees hate-based violence not as one tool in the toolbox, but as the only indispensable tool.
Marxism is morally on a par with Nazism. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that he copied his approach to propaganda and violence, and his cancel-culture tactics for suppressing the voice of the majority, from the Marxists. Marxism lives on class-based hate; Nazism lives on race-based hate. Both reliably produce mass murder of a nation's own citizens. In the 20th century, more people died because they were targeted by either Marxists or Nazis as class/race enemies, than died in war. I'm pretty sure that Marxists perpetrated more cases of "judicial" murder than all other ideologies in human history combined, far outstripping Christianity, Islam, and Nazism (though perhaps not on a per-capita basis).
I think that Marxists, especially Marxist university professors, were the key vectors for propagating wokeism. I don't know anyone extremely woke who isn't also Marxist, or at least a self-declared "enemy of capitalism".
If we're aiming at an open society, Marxism and Nazism are the two most-obvious edge cases. You can make good arguments that we should outlaw both, and good arguments that we should allow both. But you can't treat them differently. They are equally dangerous and reprehensible. Allowing Marxists to be university professors is ethically the same as allowing Nazis to be university professors.
> Unless you really lay on the tribal signifiers, it’s hard to find a definition where most Democrats support cancel culture and most Republicans oppose it!
I'm confused about what you're trying to say here, given that this statement was immediately preceded by a bunch of screenshots of poll results that seem to contradict it. Did you perhaps mean to say the opposite of what you wrote in this sentence? That for any reasonable definition of cancel culture it's pretty clear most Democrats support it and most Republicans oppose it?
According to those poll results, a clear (though not overwhelming) majority of Democrats seem to support cancel culture, and a clear (though again, not overwhelming) majority of Republicans seem to oppose it (more so than even independents, which I find surprising). This doesn't entirely undermine your larger point, since "a clear majority" of Democrats in favor is not the same as being "monolithically united behind cancel culture". Obviously a pretty significant number of Democrats oppose it even if they're in the minority among others of their party.
How you contend depends on the terrain. In the late 1980s, when I was 15 years old, getting someone fired for a political statement would have been completely beyond the pale. But so would cheering for an assassin.
The world, however, has moved on, and it was not republican voters who were behind it, pushing. These kinds of nuclear tactics are the new normal which Obama's careful study of Saul Alinsky brought us to.
No one wants to live a world characterized by (metaphorical) nuclear exchanges, but nuclear exchanges, once they become part of the universe of discourse, and held off only by deterrence, not decency.
If relying on the decency of the left worked, we never would have gotten this far. The only feasible strategy for walking this back now is precisely what the right is doing... striking back with the same tactics and creating an environment of mutually assured destruction.
When the phenomenon of "cancellation" hurts the left as much as the right, only then will we hear the news talking about how it's a bad idea.
Then they will pretend they were against it all along, and it's an entirely new and horrible thing that the right came up with all on its own. They will attempt to memory-hole all the people they put in prison for defacing pride flags, all the people who lost their jobs for refusing to participate in a medical experiment, who lost advertising sponsorships for wearing a red hat.
You cannot recreate the genteel debating environment of a more civilized age simply by unilaterally pretending that it exists, and attempting to debate the radioactive cannibal zombies roaming the post-apocalyptic wasteland, instead of fighting them off with a sharpened piece of rebar. They'll just eat your brain.
That metaphor may seem... colorful... but anyone who has been paying attention for the past few decades knows that the left's recent ascendancy, and its vicious treatment of its fellow Americans, is precisely due to its realization that it could take advantage of the fact that the right wants to play by Queensbury rules.
But a set of rules can only exist by mutual agreement, and there is no mutual agreement. Unilateral agreement isn't good enough... if it were, we would not be here.
I utterly reject any argument that we are "sinking to their level". We are not.
There is no moral equivalence between an aggressor and a defender, even if they use the same weapons and tactics.
The right remembers this principle when it speaks of the right to bear arms. It understands the principle of a justified response, and of deterrence, and of provocation, and justified use of deadly force.
I am gratified to see that, at long last, some people on the right are starting to understand these same concepts as they relate to psychological, social, and political conflicts.
It is easy to say that the left are "not our enemies". In fact, the left themselves said this for about five hours after attempting to kill our candidate, before going right back to calling us an apocalyptic fascist threat to democracy.
In my book, the enemy is anyone who is trying to hurt you, especially if they salivate gleefully at the prospect.
Do I really need to post dozens of pages of receipts, screenshots of leftists salivating at the idea of hurting anyone who voted republican, wore a red hat, refused to take experimental drugs?
Or can we just agree to pretend that we have memories that are longer than the current MSNBC news cycle?
Both my wives lost their jobs in that "papers, please" moment. Both of them were remote workers who posed no threat of exposing anyone else to illness even if the vaccine had worked instead of randomly causing people to drop dead of heart failure.
I'm not a rich A-list author. I'm a working middle class dude. My parents grew up on farms in Minnesota. That year hurt my family, badly. It set back all of our plans, put our dreams on hold. Specifically, my writing career, such as it is.
The last round of "fire the republicans" delayed my first novel by two years. If we get hit by another, there will be no sequel. I simply won't be able to afford to sit at home and write. I'll have to start taking calls from Indian tech recruitment sweatshops.
I don't have the luxury of turning the other cheek and hoping they don't do that shit again out of the entire hypothetical goodness of their hearts. Maybe if I was wealthy, and could afford luxury belief systems, but I'm not and I can't.
I have to strike back and encourage others to strike back with me, and to make sure it hurts, so they will think twice before trying this again.
Being principled is nice, but it's also easy when you have no skin in the game. None of us are utterly immune to the consequences of politics, but some of us are a lot less immune than others.
Seems like I remember that, back in the 2000s, you'd occasionally hear about someone getting fired for complaining about the Iraq War or saying something nice about terrorists, or whatever. The left would be annoyed at this, and the right would reply: "The First Amendment only prevents the government from regulating speech! Private corporations are allowed to do whatever the hell they want."
I suppose they got what they asked for.
Maybe the next cycle will work out better if everyone remembers that free speech is more than just the specific words of the First Amendment; it's a basic moral principle that we should expect any institution with power to value.
----------------------------
Y'know, it sure would be nice if someone had looked at that business with the Amunites back then and said: "Maybe taking vengeance on your enemies is a bad idea, and you should try to practice forgiving them instead." The last 2000 years sure would've looked different if someone had said something like that, huh?
> Unless you really lay on the tribal signifiers, it’s hard to find a definition where most Democrats support cancel culture and most Republicans oppose it!
Two points here. First, maybe not "most," but the data does show a very significant Democrat-ward bias in favor and Republican-ward bias against. Second, yeah, this doesn't have the support of the Democrat rank-and-file, it's pretty frustrating to see so many people being led around by the nose by leftist extremists because they haven't realized (or can't bring themselves to admit yet) what Ronald Reagan pointed out over 60 years ago: "I didn't leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me."
> 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, then believe that any action is justified against “The Left” because it’s coming for our children, then rile up a mob against a Home Depot woman who makes a bad tweet.
One significant difference here: "The Left" elevates its most horrible elements, while "The Right" marginalizes theirs. You'll be hard-pressed to find mainstream conservatives standing up for people like Alex Jones or Matt Gaetz. Marjorie Taylor-Greene only got elected by moving to a non-competitive district, and her antics got her kicked out of the House Freedom Caucus. When Joseph McCarthy took things too far, he was censured by his fellow Republicans.
Meanwhile, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are practically treated by Democrats as rock stars. And leftist terrorist leader Bill Ayers, whose group engaged in a spree of bombings in the 1970s that caused massive amounts of damage and killed multiple people including a police officer, in any sane reality would have died in prison. In ours, though, he got off scot-free, became a prestigious university professor, and started training the next generation of extreme-left radicals. One of his mentees, who literally began his political career in the terrorist's living room, eventually became a bit of a big deal. You might have heard of him: a guy by the name of Barack Obama.
> But even if you don’t care about those things, remember that cancellation is mostly friendly fire.
Cancellation on the left is mostly friendly fire, because of the leftist institutions bit you (correctly) mentioned above. The reciprocal doesn't seem true, though. The people being targeted by conservatives *aren't* "some WSJ writer who puts too few exclamation points after “MAGA!!!!”"; they're people saying "what a shame that the assassination attempt failed."
It seems like you fail to mention one figure relevant to your argument, no? Widely criticized by his own party in 2016 (and after by people safely out of political office) much like MTG or Matt Gaetz.
>One significant difference here: "The Left" elevates its most horrible elements, while "The Right" marginalizes theirs
xyz
>It seems like you fail to mention one figure relevant to your argument, no?
You thinking of this guy, xyz?
“Trump said he would “stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi“ if reelected president, asking a crowd of supporters, “How’s her husband doing by the way?” and saying a “wall around her house” didn’t do a “good job” of protecting her 82-year-old husband from an intruder who fractured his skull with a hammer during a break-in last year—prompting laughter from the crowd.”
Tucker Carlson has one of the most popular podcasts in the world and has interviewed Alex Jones favorably. You are also forgetting that Trump has threatened state politicians in recorded phone calls that he would turn his supporters against them for not going along with his election fraud lies, and he's retruthing for military tribunals to be held for Liz Cheney. Trump also used to retweet and retruth from Infowars or from organizations like OAN or Newsmax that used Infowars as the source for their election fraud claims.
"Only cancel those who have tried to cancel others" is at the very least a consistent principle that *should* lead to less cancellation in general.
Each side wants to claim that's it's the victim, the underdog, that it deserves sympathy and respect. And in a way, both have been, as the pendulum of power swings back and forth. Neither is blameless.
Personally, I understand the impulse to reciprocation of those on the right. "Historical examples of lefties being cancelled don't hold emotional salience to the modern left, so they must be taught not to deploy indiscriminate weaponry through personal experience" is a sympathetic take.
But in practice, traumatizing people does not actually improve their behavior. We should use self-consistent principles (such as the above "only cancel the canceler") to scope vengeance to those who deserve it, and extend mercy to everyone else.
A.) A person whose cancellation upends their entire life and annihilates whatever chance they had at a comfortable life and retirement
B.) A person who can afford to be canceled
If group B wants to fight it out with cancellation, whatever. Leave group A out of it, because, insofar as politics is what politics is, all you're doing is prohibiting the working classes from participating in the political conversations that are happening.
You can safely ignore group B, and the rest of the argument here remains the same: A-group members on the Left have been cancelling A-group members on the Right for years. Is "descending into an orgy of vengeance" a good idea?
Perhaps this is why, when the Democrats were the party of the working class, they were the party of free speech; and now that the Republicans are the party of the working class, they are the party of free speech.
I know this post is mostly framed in terms of overt political cancelation - that is where people tactically target individuals seen on the opposing side in ways that can be leveraged for larger political advantage. Still, I do want to emphasize the distinction between using cancelation as a larger weapon in the political wars and using cancelation as an attempt to correct the specific perceived injustices, and how they're bound to be connected
For example, the classic example of cancelation for me is a famous (usually a male) comedian/actor/Youtuber/influencer/etc. accused (usually by a woman) of rape or some other form of sexual misconduct. Now there can be a lot of political assumptions behind how people respond to an accusation ("Women don't lie about rape", "She's trying to #MeToo the guy for revenge or clout", all the various debates about what counts as consent or sexual harassment and whether the accusation is true or not, etc), but my point is that most people aren't doing this just to own the righties or whatever. The average person is either trying to seek justice, trying to get information, trying to learn who to avoid for self-preservation, or (sadly) trying to enjoy the thrill of watching a former idol fall. And because of the ease of communicating online and the desire not to associate with people that are sleazy (or, if you're cynical, simply seen as sleazy), cancelation is a very natural response to a problem of accountability that we haven't quite solved. Of course, these individual cancelations - from the serious to the silly - all have a cumulative stifling effect that makes it a larger political weapon beyond any one individual case, which leads to the political debates about the utility of cancelation that we're seeing today.
So, to tie this back to Libs of TikTok, it might be easy to define a norm of not using cancelation as a larger political weapon to broadly own the lefties or righties. And you might even have broad agreement. But you're still going to have the base offense of wishing for the death of a political opponent making people recoil. And I'm not sure how you change that norm of cancelation here unless there's some other mechanism to bring about justice. And that desire for individual justice inevitably creates a weapon with a secondary political utility.
It's pretty damn important not to have a norm against saying things that are plausibly true or many people are thinking privately.
I mean, history is pretty damn contingent and if an assassin had been able to keep the US out of WW1 that would probably have been worth the backlash. I know I'm unsure if I think it would have been better if the assassin hadn't missed. OTOH it's very bad to have presidents assassinated. OTOH sometimes it can actually shock a polity back to some kind of unity not to mention the huge risks of bad presidential choices (tho that cuts both ways).
Has US been the world leader in cancel culture? If so why?
[Edit: Okay I know Akhenaten is not American, but I am referring to the modern manifestation of it, in a form one doesn't see so often in, e.g., Europe.]
Funnily enough, the "religion the right is committed to" (and also many on the so-called "left" -- not everyone is a Marxist atheist, dude) also recognizes that humans are fallible creatures who are all guilty of sins. Christians are directed to TRY to avoid sins, but the fact that they inevitably occur, and the method for achieving forgiveness, is baked into the cake. It's also a sin to engage in activity that encourages others to sin, and wishing for the death of another human being is one hell of a provocation.
You don't stop being a Christian just because you have committed sins, mang.
This is the "No I'm not a Christian, and I have nothing but contempt for your backwards beliefs, so no this argument wouldn't work on me, but maybe if I use it on you, you'll do what I want" meme.
This is subtly different - it’s not mere hypocrisy, it’s more like “when THEY do it, it’s bad. When WE do it, it’s bad but regrettably necessary because THEY need to learn that it is bad, and they didn’t listen when we told them”
(Which might be disingenuous, but not hypocritical)
To be a bit pedantic, I don't think it's true that no one learns anything from being persecuted. It just tends to require extreme persecution (genocides, Jim crow) and even then learning something may not be the most likely outcome. But I do think sometimes when things become horrible enough people get pushed beyond anger.
this reminds me of a line from a recent book review of TLP's "Sadly, Porn", from Scott's recent book review contest.
> The young child only responds to affect, to the emotion you're giving off. He hasn't internalised the sense of others being people, so when you calmly explain why he shouldn't do something, he doesn't get it. He doesn't interpret it as a real punishment. He does get it when you shout at him, but now you're doing it over something arbitrary, like spilling some milk.
> What happens next is the child cries and the parent realises what they've done, and then they turn around and console the child. This is the fatal step.
> What the child has learned from this process is that:
- Your authority is arbitrary
- You can be placated for them to get what they want
- All they need to do is figure out what will placate you.
> A harsh, even abusive parent who merely beats their kids for no reason is sure to give them some kind of pathology, but they won't get the second and third parts so this won't create narcissists. It's this unstable emotional dynamic: at once nurturing then punishing without a predictable underlying logic that could allow them to develop a clear understanding of right and wrong.
ergo, I'm not quite convinced that your claim is universal.
> remember that cancellation is mostly friendly fire
Like the curious case of I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter. Originally a gamer meme against transgendrism, it was used as a writing prompt by a transgender author in a pretty good scifi short story. Only problem is twitter-brained trans activists on Twitter who don't read beyond the title (if that), the author was eventually driven underground.
> there’s apparently still a norm against assassinating politicians
I wonder why, to be honest. It seems to me like this bizarre cargo-culting. Like everybody is suddenly supposed to transform into a Tree-Hugging Hippie saying "EVERYTHING IS,,, LIKE,,, CONNECTED MAN". Are all the people so upset and panicked about wishing death for Trump really deriving this from first principles, would they be equally horrified at (say) wishing death to Putin or the Saudi royal family or some South American president they have never heard of?
If Trump himself said something to the effect of "I can kill anybody I want to with no consequences" and his audience cheered like it was the best orgasm they had in their life, why the sudden and queer insistence on providing the very, bizarrely strong norm of "I will never wish death upon you" to someone who never even had enough brain cells to grasp the dictionary definition of "Norm"? I'm as always perplexed. America has a strong and long tradition of assassinating politicians in other countries that the saga of assassination attempts against Castro is a whole fucking universe of meme lore.
Trump's shooter did nothing wrong except not wielding the weapon accurately enough, and everybody who finds this sentiment so intolerable that it invites summary immediate dismissal is buckling under an immense amount of peer pressure.
Yeah. This. Trump is an avatar of right wing discontent. If he dies by assassination, that discontent might just spill over into widespread political violence. Not good.
If you don’t like Trump, convince his supporters not to vote for him. Don’t try and jail him or kill him. Those who think that would be a good solution really don’t understand MAGA.
If Trump got a heart attack the day before the assassination attempt and died in the hospital, do you really think his supporters would just be chill with it and move on? They would most likely start attacking doctors and nurses because they vote majority Democrat while having 2 or 3 conspiracy theories floating around about how Trump was intentionally targeted by the jab or the medical establishment and this is all the Democrats' fault. Trump has been signal boosting support for political violence to his base nonstop, from the comments of the second amendment people taking care of Hillary, to mocking Paul Pelosi getting attacked, to lying about the 2020 election being stolen and that his supporters needed to fight to get their country back, to retruthing for military tribunals to be held against Liz Cheney... these antics only get worse as he lives and accumulates more support from paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys and radicalizes his supporters to the point where they're chanting to hang Mike Pence.
No, I think their views on things like vaccines or election fraud have been successfully countered by even sitting Republican politicians, but there is still e.g. widespread antivax sentiment among them even though Trump was responsible for Operation Warpspeed and endorsed the covid vaccine. Many Trump supporters are effectively operating at the Alex Jones intellectual level where they remain incorrigible in the face of evidence (Giulliani testifying in court that he lied about election fraud had no effect on the Trump supporters who were convinced the election was stolen). Allowing Trump to continue solidifying this voting block and potentially getting them into parts of the military spells much more disaster for the US than civil unrest following a successful assassination - although granted there is much more volatility in what could happen after a short and destructive event like a successful assassination or heart attack rather than gradual transformation of the US into a military dictatorship. I think the latter is likely to be worse, but if an assassination attempt leads to e.g. civil war that would probably be worse. I also don't think anybody can channel Trump supporters like Trump does, so having him out of the picture would be a great blow to the voting block, although of course the crazies would remain, just less organized.
The ruling elite, for obvious reasons, prefer all killing be restricted to the lower classes, and denounce political assassination out of naked self-interest. Most people who don't benefit from this norm simply echo the positions of those who do.
Good question. I'm annoyed at the conformist rush to condemn Trump's would-have-been-killer not because I disagree in principle that killing people we disagree with is barbaric and no way to build/maintain a society, but because:
(1) Trump in particular is a low-value human that absolutely no one is capable of missing if their life depended on it. He's the archetypical "Unsympathetic Victim" that gets killed by the sympathetic character in shows like CSI and NCIS and the audience forgives and even cheers for the sympathetic character.
(2) Even if somebody were to decide for themselves that killing Trump would have been net bad, they don't have to stumble on their own 2 feet to broadcast this for all the world to see. "Killing is bad" is not a particularly original message, and bending over backwards to broadcast it in this particular case just signals that the broadcaster value Trump's life in particular and not the abstract principle of the sanctity of life.
(3) Trump, in his former official capacity as US president, is an industrial mass-murderer. This is not unique to Trump, but googling "Trump drone strikes", for example, yields this wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._drone_strikes) which shows Trump didn't miss the opportunity to prove himself as the boneless pile of organic trash that he is:
>> In October 2017, Trump abolished the Obama-era approval system in favor of a looser, decentralized approach, which gave the military and CIA officials the discretion to decide to launch drone strikes against targets without White House approval. This policy reduced accountability for drone strikes.
>> On July 1, 2016, President Barack Obama signed an executive order requiring annual accounting of civilian and enemy casualties in U.S. drone strikes outside war zones [...] However [...] President Donald Trump designated large areas in Yemen and Somalia to be "areas of active hostilities," thus exempting them from disclosure. The Trump administration also ignored the 2017 and 2018 deadlines for an annual accounting, and on March 6, 2019, Trump issued an order revoking the requirement.
So he's an extra hard-working piece of shit, beyond even the necessary amount of "Piece of Shitness" that the title of US President would require.
For all of those reasons and possibly more that I'm too lazy to articulate, I think that the rule "Killing is bad unless the target is in the exception list" and adding Trump and Trump-like insects as entries in the exceptions list is basically a good compromise. I think that "Acts like Trump" is a very good and unambiguous exception condition that would almost never harm a good person.
I do recognize that it's pragmatic to pretend sometimes that you're upset by things that you aren't really upset by, I'm just annoyed at the sheer frequency of ordinary non-politician people doing this, in sheer mindless imitation of politicians.
I'm having a hard time reconciling your views in this comment with the strong stance you have taken that the deaths in Gaza are a moral tragedy. Surely from the point of view of Israel it would be justified to think of Hamas as consisting of low-value humans that no one will miss, and that killing Hamas (and whatever civilians get in the way) is net-good.
When we discussed the Gaza situation previously I took you for someone with strong moral principles against war and against killing, even in the face of utilitarian concerns such as the harm Hamas causes to the people living in Gaza and to the world in general. Yet here you posit that it's alright to kill people if you think their death will be good "on net" or if you consider the people you are killing "insects", "unsympathetic victims", or "boneless piles of organic trash". If killing is only bad if your target isn't on the exception list, then why is Israel killing Gazans bad? Clearly they're on Israel's exception list, if they have one.
Fair question. Consistency is what makes and breaks moral positions, and holding people to it is ultimately a sign of respect.
The answer is in something you went over way too quickly:
> and whatever civilians get in the way
This is it; this is the answer that you overlook way too quickly. It's the whole key.
Killing Trump is not bad because it can be done surgically, with 0 casualties other than Trump (who, I argue, isn't a "casualty" at all). This reminds me: I have wrongly said that Trump's shooter did nothing wrong, I retract that. He did one major crime: he murdered an innocent man. That man was "collateral damage", to use the favorite word of Israel's defenders, but I would still have supported trialing the shooter on charges of murder, if he survived.
In contrast, the fanciful goal of "destroying Hamas" already resulted in something like 2% of Gazans dead, and even if you indulge in the often-insincere concerns about Hamas falsifying the records and mixing civilian with military deaths and so on and so forth, the low end is still 1% of Gazans dead, and as high as 10% or 15% in the future from the effects of starvation, unclean water, destroyed hospitals, and so on. Polio is the latest disease to strike Gaza due to overflowing sewage water, the only one that Israel gave a shit about (but only to vaccinate IDF personnel, naturally) because it's infectious and tenacious.
There is no way in this whole universe that Hamas could have killed 25K innocent people unless they camped in the streets with AK-47s and actively hunted unarmed Gazans. But with the help of Israel, Hamas did. Israel doesn't give a shit because no Gazan is ever innocent in the Israeli mainstream playbook. Hamas doesn't give a shit because the martyrs are playing football with Allah now or something like that. The world is now worse and have less life and more death, all due to the seemingly innocent act of trying to kill murderers.
In summary: Trump (and all politicians who directly or indirectly kill people) are valid targets of assassination because assassination by its very nature is surgical, in fact it's an often-presented alternative to wars like the one in Gaza. But a whole war can't be surgical.
> Yet here you posit that it's alright to kill people if you think their death will be good "on net"
Utilitarianism in matters of death and justice is complex, but I don't think I made that argument at all (which is not the same thing as either agreeing or disagreeing with it), ctrl-F for "on net" yields only your usage of it.
Here's the argument again, presented in maximum clarity and honesty:
(1) I don't like when any living thing dies. [1]
(2) This means we sometimes have to kill living things, as living things paradoxically kill other living things.
(3) But only if killing the killer will not result in other, non-killing living things being killed.
(4) Trump is a living thing that kills other living things, and who can be killed without any other living things being killed, therefore we should try to kill him, or at the very least not express disapproval at those who try to kill him.
(5) Hamas is a collection of living things that kill other living things, but which -
empirically - have proven to be so difficult to kill in a war that a war killed 1% to 1.5% of the innocent population of the place they control with them not killed yet and with no end in sight, and therefore we shouldn't try (yet) to kill Hamas (with war).
I have now said "Killing" and "Kill" so many times that it has a weird taste in my mouth, you know the feeling, but I believe that I have made myself very clear, as clear as I could.
I didn't choose this contradictory universe where life kills and eats and rapes life, but I have to live in it and any beliefs I choose to hold must reflect this universe fundamental nature however minimally. There is an optimal amount of killing and it's not zero, it's a strawman of pacifism to believe that the pacifist opposes any killing whatsoever. Putin, Trump, Egypt's Al-Sisi, Saudi Arabia's Ibn Salman, etc..., are unambiguous, unapologetic, scum, a collective mark of shame on humanity. Killing them without killing anybody else is the highest honor any pacifist could obtain. If you can't kill them, then at least incite killing them. If you can't incite killing them, then cheer when somebody else incites or try to kill them. If nothing else, don't condemn attempts to kill them.
[1] (This is a weird value, if somebody values less suffering, the cessation of all sentient life and the world reverting to lifeless, or at least Peter-Watts-like forms of life is good. But in practice I find myself also reluctant to support killing - even mercifully - sentient, pain-feeling life to decrease their suffering, and I find myself wanting all forms of life to continue. Values are complicated and contradictory, and this is completely okay because the world is complicated and contradictory.)
Regarding point 3, I don't understand the comment "it’s hard to find a definition where most Democrats support cancel culture and most Republicans oppose it." Q23 shows ~68% of Democrats are in favor of deplatforming with 10% opposed, compared to ~28% in favor and ~44% opposed for Republicans. Similarly for Q24. I would say those results pretty clearly indicate Democrats favor cancel culture while republicans oppose it. Q6 and Q20 show Democrats are split on the issue while republicans strongly oppose limits on free speech and artist cancellation.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with the premise, I'm just saying the polling results presented here don't support it.
Scott is pulling a "not really lying" here. What he said is carefully worded. It's literally true that most Republicans don't oppose it. After all, "most" means more than 50% and only 44% oppose it.
And as you've observed, these polls do mean that Democrats favor it and Republicans oppose it, which is what people really want to know. But that's not the way Scott phrased it.
Vengeance implies inflicting a specific, hostile, negative action on a specific group in a specific response. During corona my idealism died, and Im letting a general prosocial habit lapse due to vibes.
I.e. saving a drowning child vs not giving all money for children in africa; isn't evil its just disagreeing with unbounded utilitarianism.
One big question here is "How do we fight the nazis?". I see 3 possible scenarios:
- We always fight the nazis early. Cancel culture will exist because everyone thinks they're fighting the nazis. We modulate a bit on whether we're cancelling a lot or a little, but it'll always be there. The nazis still show up once in a while, but less frequently than if we didn't.
- We never fight the nazis early. Maybe if we were nice to the germans and didn't oppress them too much after WWI we wouldn't get nazism. Nazism comes from the reaction to cancel culture!
- We never fight the nazis early, they still show up. When they start invading Poland with tanks then we can fight them. Before that we get the benefit that most of the time they weren't really nazis and we didn't have to live through cancel culture.
(1) assumes that cancel culture has actually been effective at preventing the rise of the far right this time round and I'm not seeing it: Trump is going to be president, Farage is an MP, RN is at the gates in France. Don't most historians believe something like (2) I.e the treaty of versailles was too punitive? Doing the Marshall plan in the 20s could have saved everyone a lot of bother.
No one listens to the Nazis until the economy is destroyed and society is in chaos, and then the people listen to anyone who can promise a return to normalcy.
I'm posting this for the record. I'm one of the few on this thread who has a moral right to respond to this post, since my husband and I are among the "cancelled." I'll describe below what exactly we went through in 2021-22. But before starting into that, I'll say this: Scott is 100% right. I don't wish our experience on our worst enemies. The whole reason that our co-workers and co-academics were spineless enough to cancel us was that so few of them embraced "the ancient Saxon right to plainly speak one’s mind." The solution isn't to whittle the numbers further. Everyone should have the right -- and the spine to back it up on behalf of other people.
Here's what happened. In 2021 when the mRNA covid shots first rolled out in the US, we were planning to get them. But we were in Canada, which was 3-6 months behind the rest of the world. During the months of waiting, we watched as family & friends in the States (who had all been perfectly fine during Covid itself) got the mRNA and booster, suddenly got sick with mysteriously bad Covid, sometimes even ended up in the hospital, and in one case died on a respirator.
That got us asking questions. We tapped into the emerging research on the mRNA shots. It was all inconsistent in terms of whether the shots were safe or effective, and there were high-profile immunologists saying that mass injections weren't a good idea. Byram Bridle here in Canada, one of the leading mRNA developers, specifically argued there was a risk of "antibody-dependent enhancement," which means that a shot protects a person for a very short time but then dramatically increases the likelihood of a severe case later. Apparently coronaviruses in general have antibody-dependent enhancement tendencies, which is partly why there's never been a successful vaccine for the common cold.
There was other research indicating that the mRNA had cardiac side effects, especially for people <40. In fact, the only demographic where the benefits of the shot outweighed the risks (if I recall correctly) was for people 80+ or otherwise immunocompromised. I can't recall the numbers exactly, but that's what we were reading at the time.
Let me underscore that this was all early research and the studies were contradictory. You'd think that, given how experimental the mRNA shots were, everybody would be talking openly about the pros and cons. You know, let's have a folk moot or Althing in the public square. The more everyone argues, the more everyone points out problems with everyone else, everyone has to modify their views on at least something, and then truth springs up like a flame between them.
That didn't happen. Bridle and the other academics we were following suddenly got kicked out of their labs, suspended, or fired. They got "fact-checked" in the public media and accused of spreading "misinformation" -- without any discussion of the scientific research they were looking at. Then the mandates in Canada came down. Let me emphasize that the mandates came down *in proportion as* questions were emerging about the mRNA risks. It's not like there was a solid consensus and therefore the government decided to enforce something perfectly agreed-upon. The research was the Wild West. But the government was totally Orwellian. Suddenly academics and health care workers who didn't comply got fired. Even social media posts questioning the mRNA got censored and shadow-banned.
Then my husband's school decided to enforce the vax mandate. This wasn't a big, impersonal school. It was a little school with like 5 staff and no classes running in the building. My husband was the only one raising questions about the mRNA. There were weeks of polite but increasingly pressure-driven emails between him and his supervisor. Eventually, management told him they simply had to comply with the mandate. It was either resign or be fired, so my husband resigned.
In desperation, I tried emailing our academic contacts personally to voice our concerns about the mRNA and the human right to medical choice. One tenured prof furiously told me never to contact him again. (He had tenure. I was working as an underpaid contract teacher.) Even one of the more sympathetic profs told me he just wasn't going to talk to me about the shots. Instead, he sent me a link to the Atlantic. (Hey, look! The Atlantic says the shots are safe and effective. So why be so stubborn?)
The job cancellation upended our lives. My husband had a humanities PhD and was working in academic administration because there were no humanities jobs. It was the middle of the pandemic, so most businesses in Canada were either closed or recovering. Any other office-type job *also* required the mRNA. So there was little to fall back on. He very luckily got a job in timber-frame construction in rural Ontario, thanks to a small community of Mennonites who took him to their hearts. We moved on short notice in the middle of winter, and we got the last available apartment in the new town. It didn't have a dishwasher, so I still spend an hour a day doing dishes. (Lol, sometimes the small things annoy you the most!)
The troubles didn't end there. The media barrage was constant. We were alternately stupid vs maliciously misleading, but we were always selfish, anti-science, antisocial superspreaders who were willing and able to kill your Grandma. (For the record, my husband and I never got sick during the entire 2020-2022 period.) We were barred from most restaurants in Canada. We were barred from getting on trains or planes. We were barred from crossing the border to visit family in the US. Polls showed that most Canadians thought we should pay fines. Around 25% thought we should be in jail or concentration camps.
Then the Trucker's Protest came. The government wanted to vax-mandate the truckers (you know, the guys who sit alone literally all day). People finally woke up and donated to the protests. But then came the hacking and doxxing of the donors. The government froze people's bank accounts for donating like $20. We didn't personally know people whose money was frozen, but we did know people who donated and then had to be afraid it would be.
Let me emphasize again that we don't wish this on our worst enemies. I'm not saying this to make anyone feel bad. I'm saying this so people can vicariously see our "lived experience," and thus hopefully refuse to do it to other people ever again.
Honestly, though, the worst part about this whole saga hasn't been what happened to us. It's the dribs and drabs of bad news that keep dropping... from people who got the mRNA. We have an elderly friend with neurological problems that worsened immediately after the vax. An inlaw's elderly family member died. The father of one of my teaching colleagues, as well as my high school principal, died from severe covid after getting the booster. Both were otherwise healthy 50/60-year-olds. One of my students had an uncle in his 30s/40s who suddenly dropped dead while running. Another student, among my best and brightest, got one dose of the mRNA, immediately developed swelling in the feet and legs, and now has rheumatoid arthritis. It cripples her so badly that she can't even do online school work during the flare-ups.
Just to be clear, I'm not blaming anyone in particular for this. I'm not saying "You're an evil person for getting the mRNA or asking other people to." I just want everyone to realize how much better off we'd all be right now if there had been real free speech during 2020-22. What's done is done. It's in God's hands now how to bring good out of it. It's in our hands whether or not to repeat it.
My vote is with Scott's. Whoever is currently up or down, let's stop the cancellations. Scott's ideas at the end of this post look like a great start.
Thank God, he is the Christ. He knows what he's doing, so I can't complain too much. But in the moment, it was quite stressful. Thanks so much for reading. For the longest time we had to be careful who we talked to. It means a lot to finally be heard.
It sounds like you had a really unpleasant experience, but I don't think you were "cancelled."
Refusing vaccination is an action, not just speech, that in certain situations might justify restrictions, like being barred from restaurants, trains, and planes (and sometimes even getting forced to leave the job, depends on the specifics). Not as a punishment or a means of control, but due to straightforward practical considerations. In my opinion, the early days of Covid surely gave rise to such circumstances.
It's probably best not to go into this topic right now, so I'll just say that on the one hand I do agree that some people and policies went overboard, turning everything into a ridiculous signaling game. But on the other hand, I also strongly believe that the early reaction to the epidemic wasn't nearly strong enough, given the magnitude of the potential risks and Knightian uncertainties we faced at that time.
Yes, it's too bad we didn't weld shut the doors of people's homes so they were forced to quarantine. Or build concentration camps to isolate the filthy unvaccinated. China and Australia really made the rest of the world look bad.
No hard feelings, Omar. We heard lots like this as we were in the pressure cooker. You're right that there are two different rights here: free speech and medical autonomy (esp. to refuse experimental medicine). My point is that these rights don't walk apart. People who abandon one under pressure will abandon the other, and in this case, the first led to the second. The reason you think some cancellations may have been OK is that you were told that the mRNA was safe and effective. Imagine how your views would be different if more doctors had been free to publicly say otherwise.
To put this in perspective: A recent book review on ACX was about prion diseases, including Creuzfeldt-Jakob Disease (the human form of mad cow). Countries totally freak out if one of their citizens suddenly gets the disease, and they ban meat supplies from other countries that have a case or two. But the covid injections to date have caused 26 cases of spontaneous CJD. (Covid-19 is thought to have caused around 5, though the cases I've looked at didn't say whether the patient was vaxxed, so the vax might have been the culprit there too.) Both covid & the shots can cause CJD because of the spike protein, which is amplified in the mRNA.
Many of the doctors we were following in 2021 (who got cancelled) were warning about the mRNA spike protein. A few even predicted prion diseases like CJD, since apparently it was well known that experiments with mRNA transfer could have weird and unforeseen effects. That's why many doctors & researchers were voicing concerns about widespread use vs targeted treatments (e.g., for populations over 80). But then they got cancelled, and everyone else shut up for fear of losing their licenses.
This was a minor issue compared to the cardiac problems. Those are now fairly well known. But there again, the doctors who first voiced concerns were sacked, and everyone else fell into line.
Imagine how your views on medical choice would be different if more of those doctors had been free to speak their minds. "The mRNA is experimental, it will take 10 years to see if it's safe or effective, and we don't recommend it for mass injections."
--------
Link to peer-reviewed study of 26 CJD cases attributed to the covid shots:
Good post, but if it's important to figure out what we mean by cancel culture, then those historical examples are a problem. They're terrible!
Surely the deal with cancellation is that it's chattering-class pressure which provokes institutional censure: you get fired, your book contract gets cancelled, etcetera. I guess that _extreme_ institutional censure (you get set on fire) still counts, but only if it's in response to the mob. The institution in these cases is reactive, and bows to the pressure.
Diocletian, Akhenaten and the priests of Amun all had direct control of the relevant institutions, and were all plainly exercising power in pursuit of their own projects. The policies of the first and last probably won plenty of chattering class support, but it's hard to imagine any of these guys really cared.
I guess Socrates kind of counts, it's just that in that case the institution was coextensive with the mob.
All excellent stuff Scott. I'm particularly taken with your section 7 so, in my overwhelmingly-lefty contexts both personal and professional, prepare to be plagiarized without mercy.
But all of this is spot-on. And I am very far from the only lefty lifer who sees things that way now and looks back at the last couple decades with some shame and/or humility.
Sadly there are also lots who do not -- but that tide has been shifting in recent years thankfully. It's a tide not a wind gust, and we're talking about human beings not robots, so this sort of macro-level cultural stuff does not change directions suddenly or quickly.
But it does shift, and that directional arrow did at least flatten out I would say no later than 2021. (2020's public madnesses were a collective spasm or tantrum not a new level-setting.)
"If you think FDR was a "centrist", you might be really far to the left (or getting your views from there)." What you say is a wide spread opinion. But it is historically wrong. At the time, many of FDR signature laws passed with large majorities and support from both parties.
Trying to apply left- or right-coding onto century old politics is absurd. Our race relations would be considered extreme to the left. Our economic policy, with wage controls completely outside the Overton window, would also be so weird.
I'm sure someone pointed this out, but your point about the polls are weakened a bit by the actual percentages there. Say for a moment we remove the neither agree nor disagree responses to focus on the question of what opinions do people have when they have a strong opinion - The majority of Democrats favor the anti-free speech side.
For what it’s worth, I’m advancing this because it seemed like the obvious objection and I would have expected Scott of all people to consider the game theory explanations.
You make a somewhat fair point that these are amorphous blobs, not clearly defined rational actors with clearly segregated iterations.
On the other hand, I think you misunderstand “tit for tat with forgiveness”. You don’t need the other side to “signal” that they will stop defecting - when they do cooperate, you also cooperate. If they always cooperate, you will always cooperate.
“Forgiveness” is just added to occasionally respond to defection with cooperation, in order to break two pure tit-for-tat players out of a defection loop.
Excellent comment, though I would advocate for the right's "tat" to not involve cancelation. Free speech is an absolute good and the left eroded it. Let the right earn goodwill points by scrupulously restoring it. Besides, the rights' ideas are better and so they will preferentially benefit by restoring norms of honest communication and vigorous debate. No, the right should exact retribution by systematically exposing the lies of the left and mercilessly humiliating them for them. "Stand up here and justify BLM now that you no longer have the power to deplatform me by calling me racist. Let's see how well thought-out your ideology is now. Oh, it was all based on innumeracy and implicit anti-white racism? How interesting!"
Agree. My hope for the future is for the intelligent people now to flock to the right wing. The Vivek Ramaswamys, Chris Rufos, JD Vances and Elon Musks of the world can shine a light of truth - if people are ready to listen.
> "Tit for tat with forgiveness" is a similar attempt to escape the death spiral. When the opponent defects, a player employing this strategy will occasionally cooperate on the next move anyway.
>If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught you that. It obviously hasn’t, so try a different strategy.
This proves too much; it could be used against any strategy that involves retaliatory force. "If bombing Nagasaki could teach Japan not to attack you, bombing Pearl Harbor would have taught you not to attack Japan. It obviously hasn’t, so try a different strategy."
This all sounds exactly like calls for "ceasing violence from all sides". Which is all great and nice, in theory, and a complete disaster in practice. First, terrorists attack, then the defense services go after the terrorists, and then the well meaning people cry "cease violence from all sides immediately! oh btw and yes, terrorists are bad, we totally condemn them, but everybody must cease violence right now!" Which is great for terrorists, because they have already done their violence, and they are not going to cease anything, because they don't give a hoot about what the well-meaning people think about them, but the defense against terrorists is now two orders of magnitude harder, because how exactly are you supposed to defend against them without using violence?
And yes, I know all the argument about "other side" and so on - but as there are two sides of violence, there must be two sides to cessation of violence, otherwise it's not peace, it's unconditional surrender and annihilation. If we want cancellations to stop, we need both sides to want to stop it, and especially the side that started it (or, ramped it up several orders of magnitude) should come out and call their own side to stop it. Not to call other side to stop it because "it hurts innocent people" (which they had zero care about when they were doing it), not "both sides", but specifically, unequivocally and only their side must stop it. No ifs, no buts, no coconuts - just don't do it anymore. Then they can have a chance that the other side will believe they are serious about stopping it. Until that happens - and it definitely didn't happen, except maybe in Scott's blog which doesn't seem to be as influential in this matter as I'd personally like - calling the right to stop their revenge for what has been done to them for decades now is not only going to work, it is going to be viewed - and justifiably - as a tactical weapon designed to hurt them even more.
And yes, I know the answer to this would be "but nobody is going to do it, so what, the alternative is eternal war of total destruction?" Well, the thing is the right has been living in the war of total destruction for decades now (look up how many right-wing people - especially openly right-wing, and especially ones that don't have to fight off a torrent cancellation attempts daily - exist in academia, entertainment, major MSM, etc.). Would it be better if it worked both ways? Maybe not, but it certainly would be more fair and just.
> they won’t cancel Rachel Maddow or Kamala Harris. They’ll get some WSJ writer who puts too few exclamation points after “MAGA!!!!”
Sorry, given that people that are being cancelled now are those who explicitly, publicly and gleefully wish a violent death to a person whose guilt is to represent opposing political views, this is not very convincing. So far 100% of the cancellations for insufficient purity and saying the wrong word once and it being taken out of context are coming from the left. Call me when it gets at least to 80%, I won't be holding my breath though.
I think the Kamala thing in 2020 should be understood primarily as party unification. Biden did the same thing with Bernie and AOC, and it's very likely he managed to achieve as much as he did by having a party that (apart from Manchin) *acted* almost shockingly unified even though they ideologically weren't.
I agree. We can talk about qualifications all we want, but it comes down to Which Political Clique with it's 3,000 Political Appointments do we want in power the next four years.
Britain is more nimble because they only have a few hundred appointments.
Agreed. People shouldn't be deplatformed they should be defeated. The reason the woke seek to deplatform is that they are objectively wrong about most things and so can't win a fair debate, which is exactly why they rely so heavily on attacking the other side's character: racist, sexist, transphobic. They have nothing else because their ideas are bad.
If the right wants their victory to have a lasting impact then they need to defeat the ideas instead of banishing the people. Fortunately they can do that because their ideas are better. Don't cancel the woke double-trans intersectional nonbinary lunatic! Put zym front and center and very calmly debate zym. Let the world watch as ze sputters in rage and indignation. Eventually ze'll run out of insults. Then you can say "thank you sir that will be all."
Or maybe, just maybe, it's because the other side is racist, sexist, and transphobic. Eg, they enjoy grabbing them by the pussy, and think any women that isn't pregnant and possibly barefoot is a "childless cat lady" who clearly shouldn't be out here making decisions, or any of the dozens/hundreds of other highly public statements made infront of cameras one could fish out of the memory hole.
You know the saying: not every (R) has a white hood in the closet, but every white hood apriciater is an (R).
lol, right? I have been called an “alt-right white supremacist” for arguing that racism should be defined as discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexuality or religion. Apparently living by the words of Martin Luther King and trying to treat everyone as individuals and being race-blind is bad now, you have to be “anti-racist.” Good God.
As nearly as I can tell, the Woke have overused and broadened "racist" so much that when they call someone "racist", it is effectively equivalent to calling them "human".
I mean, I'm just observing the things you do and say and correctly identifying them, mostly. I know you don't care, because if you cared you would be different.
So the “you” you are using here applies specifically to Wanda? Because I can’t find anything racist, sexist or transphobic in her statements. Or are you smearing her by implication, in that people on the same political side as her sometimes say racist things?
Because I could use that argument too, you know. “You” (left-wingers!) killed tens of millions of Chinese in the Cultural Revolution. How dare you.
Or maybe, just maybe, what you label as racism, sexism, and transphobia is actually the rational apprehension of reality. Maybe blacks are killed more often by police because they commit far more violent crime. Maybe blacks lag in every educational and wealth attainment metric because they have genetically lower IQs and a terrible culture. Maybe transgenders are simply mentally ill people who have been duped by the social contagion of an incoherent philosophy. Maybe women earn less because they work less hard and are underrepresented in high-IQ cohorts because their IQ distribution has a lower variance.
Soon the power of your insulting labels will fade and you will be forced to confront these possibilities in open debate. I hope for your sake that you're ready.
I have, and who knew: conservatives lose any debate where they aren't allowed to mute their interlocutor or scream loud enough nobody can hear anything else.
You'd think people would learn from a couple hundred years of history, but alas.
What exactly are you claiming here? Conservatives have been wrong in every argument they’ve advanced over the past two hundred years?
Do you think Reagan was wrong when he argued with Mondale that high taxes were stifling the economy? Reagan subsequently won the presidency, reduced taxes, and guided America out of the stagflation of the 70s
Do you think Malcolm Muggeridge was wrong when he told the English public that Stalin’s policies were starving millions in the Ukraine, and was lambasted by left wing communists and fellow travellers?
Please elaborate on this “conservatives lose every debate” thesis you have here
Conservatives can be right about events, or specific policies, or facts; but conservative ideology produces a model of the world that can't stand up to interactions with reality.
That's why even if regan managed to spend his way out of stagflation; his reforms long term have lead to the collapse of the middle class and the financialization induced fragility we see today.
This is because his understanding of the way the world was fundamentally flawed, even if he had the facts right.
I’ve heard this idea before from lefties (that the Reagan era reforms are the original sin that caused inequality to increase) and it doesn’t stack up - it conveniently ignores just how bad the economy was in the 70s and how Reagan pulled us out of a recession. Also, much like Trump’s China tariffs, if the reforms were bad, why didn’t the left change them when they got into government? No, the real reason for inequality increasing is corruption in DC and regulatory capture - it’s not the rich, it’s the powerful.
Anyway, you’ve changed your line from “conservatives are literally always wrong” to “conservatives are sometimes right, but their ideology is wrong.” Again, this needs clarification. Which part of conservative ideology? Low taxes, small government, strong military and police, tough on crime? Is the ideology of Nayib Bukele flawed, even though his tough on crime approach in El Salvador has led to 90+% reductions in violent crime and soaring approval ratings?
If by “cancelation” we mean “Twitter mobs get a random nobody fired for a bad Tweet”, then the major issue is that this punishment is a) extremely randomly applied (going viral is usually a matter of chance) and b) almost always disproportionate.
So it’s strictly bad as a means of deterrence and lesson-teaching, even if you believe such speech should be deterred. (The better option is to make punishment near-certain, but also proportionately applied. E.g. Scott’s SSC moderation)
>The fact that your enemies are just as sure as you are should make you less sure.
No. If my enemy is some maniac talking about how I have children locked in my basement or I’m secretly a member of the KKK, their confidence shouldn’t affect my certainty one way or another. I should expect to constantly hear incredibly confident people because the incredibly confident are the ones who speak up most often. This principle only applies if I trust my enemies to be thoughtful and well calibrated, but it’s wrong to expect that to apply in politics.
A few thoughts. Was a time when it was advisable to not say the first thing that pops into your mind, particularly if it's emotionally driven, because it could have repercussions. Believe it or not, "cancel culture" has been around forever, whether it was termed shamed or ostracized. If the internet advises anything it's give it a minute before you say something.
But if you're saying it to get thumbs ups and "likes" from the like-minded in your silo, then take what comes. Acting shocked when you get called on posting something YOU KNOW will provoke a reaction is in and of itself, a performance. If some people stop paying attention to you: it's the price you pay.
As for work, yeah, your personal opinions should be separate, but unless you're running for president or are in a leadership position in a political party, don't think you'll be treated the same.
It's always been that way! And the idea that the 1st amendment give you thee right to say anything without repercussions is nonsense.
I also don't buy that somehow left whining about the right really has any real effect on them, with some exceptions-the entertainment business (it's its own ecosystem). The same is true with right whining about the left. Anymore, they don't exist in the same common sphere.
Lastly, don't discredit or ignore plain old decency. It's actually ok to be a decent person and respectful of others.
To a European observer the problem Scott points to, stems from too weak US employee protection.
If the US had employment protection legislation on par with (many/most) European countries, employers could not fire you just because of one unfortunate tweet. (You might get a warning, but not more.) Neither the woke-brigade nor the MAGA-brigade can get you fired for a single unfortunate tweet or public statement even if they bomb your employer & social media accounts with negative tweets and emails.
Meaning that people on both the left and right in Europe usually dare to say what they really feel, also outside of the privacy of the ballot box.
To conclude, it could make US political discourse more healthy if both the left and the right would see the public benefit of better employment protection.
No because that comes with an even greater cost: you make terrible people unfireable. Of the many reasons that the US economy consistently outperforms those of European nations, one certainly is our use of at-will employment. The workplace is for being productive. If you want to take care of losers, let the government do that.
Employment protection comes in many degrees. You are wrong if you think the only two options are either not being able to fire an employee at all, or being able to fire an employee without having to give any reason besides your arbitrary will.
Our economy is still better than yours and that's in part because we have a less regulated workplace. And we do it with a population that's 13% black. That's like winning a marathon while wearing ankle weights.
Functionally, in a society with lawyers, it’s very hard to implement anything in between “you can be fired at any time for almost any reason” and “firing anyone is a painful and costly process that ensures that no one gets fired for anything short of actual crimes”.
“At will employment” with strong norms against “arbitrary firing” is probably the most efficient, and honestly is the general rule at a lot of places (even without lawyers getting involved, recruiting and training a replacement is expensive). But cancel culture (and pre civil rights, racism culture) cause that norm to break.
Well...lawyers are thick on the ground also in Europe and people get fired all the time. Since labor laws allow employers to fire people for many reasons besides actual crimes. So it depends on what the laws actually states are valid reasons.
(European labor laws are different in this regard - usually labor protection laws are stronger in Southern Europe than in Northern Europe. And so perhaps are US state-specific laws?)
I think your last paragraph is right. Cancel culture, supercharged by social media, has broken the informal norm against arbitrary dismissal. And that is why you need some legislation now, which you did not need (to the same extent) before the advent of social media. Here is the argument: Thanks to the rise of social media since the early 2000s, "cancel culture" is much easier to organize now, and bring hell to employers who do not immediately fire an employee that has made some unfortunate remark on X/twitter (or has been filmed on a mobile phone while making an unfortunate remark in private, that someone then uploads on social media).
...the result is collective irrationality: Employers must fire employees they would like to keep. Employees must live in fear of saying anything controversial, since there is always a risk that some internet mob will use it to destroy their livelihood.
Notice that labor laws do not have to be tweaked much to have a desired effect. Some paragraph to the effect that "employers cannot fire employees for a single remark made on a social media platform, or made public by others on a social media platform", would help. That would give employers a legitimate excuse when the internet mob descends on them: "Eh, we would love to fire that light-skinned female employee of ours that was filmed looking scared when a darker-skinned male approached her in a public park & told him to go away. But unfortunately the law does not allow us to do that".
I have a suggestion for distinguishing what is sufficiently in the mainstream to be actively protected, while still (probably) excluding e.g. calls for assassination (not sure where the Hamas support would fall today).
I suggest that anything that is agreed to by 25% of the population is a sufficiently mainstream view that it be protected. This is set far enough above the "lizardman constant" (typically 4%) to not protect really extreme views (which I hope covers the assassination case), but far enough below 50% so this isn't just ceding all discussion to tyranny of the majority.
...
I think legal protection is both necessary and might even put some backbone in firms that would otherwise cave to X-Twitter mobs. "No, we can't fire <employee> disagreeing on the minimum wage hike. It's _illegal_."
Excellent comment but IMO the proper solution to this problem is not more regulation but less. Twitter mob cancelations almost always involve marginalized minorities and the reason companies are so quick to respond is because they're scared of discrimination lawsuits. This is all downstream of the legal notion of 'protected class' in civil rights law. When people are no longer able to routinely extract large settlements for nebulous claims of a "hostile workplace" or "disparate treatment" then the power of the Twitter mob will vanish.
Preventing employers from firing people for what they write or say on their own time, not while acting as an official capacity as an employee, would go a long way at pulling cancellation's fangs. That wouldn't prevent firing for incompetence or similar work-related problems. I think that such a law (much though I hate adding a new law) would be worth it.
This is probably the pragmatic if imperfect answer. I would prefer to fix the problem further upstream by rectifying the incentive structure. The power source for all the cancel mob stuff is the legal notion of protected class. Companies fear discrimination lawsuits so they do whatever the mob wants. The right thing to do is to take the legal club away from the unruly mob, though of course that's probably politically impossible.
>The power source for all the cancel mob stuff is the legal notion of protected class.
I agree that that is a large chunk of it, but I think there are others. Consider how, during Covid, both the lab-leak theory and examination of vaccine side effects were treated, not as questions to be discussed, but as near blasphemy. Similar things happen with climate models.
Yeah but 2020 was a moral panic unique in recent history. If the bad parts of civil rights hadn't let progressives slowly coordinate political and legal pressure over 30 years then I don't think 2020 would have ever happened. 'Protected class' gives the Identitarians a pretty big cudgel and my view is that most of the recent political turmoil is 100% downstream of that.
Many Thanks! I think that _most_ of it is indeed downstream of identity politics.
And, yes, 2020-2021 was several different kinds of panics, a moral panic amongst them. Over a million dead makes this understandable. But I still think that the Woke have turned quite a few things into unquestionable dogma. E.g. the climate models still have on the order of +-50% uncertainties (and possibly worse) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77RobHGXR5I . And this gets concealed in "2029 is the final tipping point!" or similar dogma. Some of the medical questions about trans surgery and drugs seem to have turned into a 50:50 mix of dogmatic assertion of uncertain information and identity politics.
> If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught *you* that. It obviously hasn’t, so try a different strategy.
I don't think this makes sense? The argument being made by the people you quoted is that they already know cancellation is wrong, but it is necessary due to an ends justify the means mentality. And that this makes them different from the left, who don't believe that cancellation is wrong at all.
On that note, you present 5 survey questions to demonstrate that the left was not united behind cancel culture. But out of those 5 questions, 2 of them show democrats being strongly in favor of cancel culture, 2 of them show them about 50/50 split, and 1 of them shows them in favor of abstract free speech norms.
Perhaps this could reasonably be evidence that "less than half of Democrats wholeheartedly support cancel culture", but that seems like moving the goalposts. The whole point of cancel culture is that it allows a vocal minority to intimidate everyone else into silence due to lack of common knowledge. All you need is for the majority to be ambivalent at first, and then to be too scared to speak up after it gets going, which is exactly what happened. Sure, maybe ~50% of Democrats answer "cancel culture is a bad thing" on surveys, but the fraction who made any attempt to stop what was happening (even just "refusing to fire someone being cancelled") was vastly smaller.
Bad guys hurt people for reasons like money, evil guys hurt people for fun. Do you posit that ignoring the very small minority of evil people, pretending they don't exist, leads to more accurate thinking than overestimating their population? I'm not arguing, it's an interesting idea, just making sure I heard you right.
A minor point (if that) on VP selection. The idea that it has mostly been based on political prowess or intelltgence or popularity is a fantasy.
Mike Pence, Dan Quayle, John Garner, Alben Barkley, and other such utter mediocrities and in Truman's first term there wasn't even a VP. Some of the comments around President's Biden choice make it appear like Fields Medalists were routinely picked as VP.
Fair, but the likelihood that Biden was choosing not merely a running mate but a successor was much higher than normal. (Most VPs are either a sop to a critical state or party subgroup. Dan Quayle may have been a human shield - “do you really want to shoot me and end up with THAT guy?”)
True, but before Harris it wasn't ever explicitly stated by the presidential candidate that the VP would be chosen based on their skin colour and gender or even because they'd help win important states. At the least, the presidential candidate themselves could say it's because they're experienced or talented or whatever even though no one really believes it.
This is hilarious. I've glanced through what is now most of its way to a thousand comments, and other than me I haven't noticed a single person from those Scott Siskind is supposedly addressing here. And my enthusiasm for hurting the other side in any way, ANY way, will not be dampened by this lame rhetoric.
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.
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.
I apriciate the self felation, but the right has no ideas of merit, no real beliefs that stand up to five minutes of scrutiny. That's why the entire program of the right is populist monkey brain bait and screeching about the left; nothing of substance that engages with reality at any point.
That's why shame is the only weapon that works against the right: if your opponent's main problem is that (((THEY))) put fluoride in the water to make everyone trans/ every human in DC has been murdered twice by illegals/ global warming is a chinese hoax, what do you say to that? What is the response to someone who won't believe their lying eyes?
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?
The mobile version of the title is "Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy..." so I'm somewhat disappointed by this subject matter.
You might want to look into what Jefferson and Madison actually did. I think you've got a somewhat kumbaya version of it.
Your four suggestions for what to do are great, but they remind me of my late brother-in-law, who used to say the key to great bowling is actually really simple: “no open frames”; every turn should be either a strike or a spare!
Also, you kind of gave the game away with “you mostly get the critical mass necessary for cancellation in very leftist institutions, and most people in very leftist institutions are leftists.”
Your point about the poll questions is mostly saved by the huge representation of “no opinion”. If you exclude those as “not voting”, the Democratic balance is much more damning.
You know, shame is an age old way to send the social signal that something is inappropriate. I say publicly calling for murder (or lamenting its failure) is shameful and should in turn be called out publicly. Publicly. Same for rape or torture, etc. Trying to figure out why we wouldn’t call it out. If the Home Depot Lady was a right winger baying for violence against Kamala: publicize and ostracize. This shouldn’t be a political litmus test. If you publicly call for murder you have stepped out of line and need a sharp public correction.
I think it might be reasonable for Home Depot to fire someone who says they believe a presidential nominee and former president should be assassinated, if they say that *in a Home Depot, during their shift, while wearing a Home Depot uniform.* It's insane to suggest an employer doesn't have that right. People can call for assassinations on their own time.
I think we need to create a first amendment tech for this now
My thought is that people who are fired for legal speech should be compensated by 10 weeks pay, funded by a fine on the primary platform where the cancel mob organized
We can't fine the companies themselves except in specially obvious breaches of respect for speech as the incentive would become to start vetting potential hires according to their past speech
From the left, I will continue to apply social pressure as hard as a can wherever I can, so I don't try to cancel people or join mobs. Cancelling doesn't work, shaming does.
Sneering at conservatives works 1000% times better than cancelling, because most conservative ideas are easy to sneer and nobody likes being mocked and sneered at. You can't build up moral force because everyone laughed at your clown shoes.
I wouldn't say this if I thought it would actually convince anyone, but enough people with real clout on the right have no self control and will absolutely fail to hide their power level given the chance.
So: I beg the right, I plead with the right: Please, cancel away. Cancel as hard as you can.
Scott quotes a bunch of nobody substackers as representatives of mainstream right-wing thought, as though they are a counterweight to left-wing "cancellation" at the highest levels of power.
The following simple truths remain:
1. Norms can be enforced by government, else by culture, else they will wither away.
2. "Don't assassinate people" is a very different sort of norm from "Call that man in a dress 'Tina'".
Do people on the right really believe that only *now* do they have the power to cancel people on the left for their left-leaning views?
Wasn't there that woman who was fired for flipping off Trump's motorcade a few years ago? And that Christian professor who was suspended for saying that Christians and Muslims believe in the same g-d? And that professor of public health a few months ago who was suspended for allegedly speaking critically about Lieutenant Governor Patrick's policies in relation to the opioid epidemic, or that journalism professor at the same university whose hiring was derailed due to conservative backlash?
And those are just high profile cases off the top of my head.
I live in small town Texas, near even smaller Texas towns (probably the kind of towns that the song "Try That in a Small Town" was about, and also the kind of towns that propelled that song to #1 of the Billboard Hot 100) and I've felt like the threat of cancel culture from the right has been present in these parts forever.
I certainly am very wary of letting my neighbours learn about any of my more left-leaning religious/political views. One of my friends who's lived here longer than me told me that the first time they invited some of their kids' friends over, the kids' friends' parents came over first (without the kids) to have a conversation with them and told them they were glad to find that they were normal people and not "atheists or pedophiles". This was in the context of why I should join their church, so people will be less likely to suspect me of being an atheist or pedophile.
This person is Chinese (like grew up in China surrounded by very kind and loving people who were nonreligious) so they didn't judge me for being nonreligious, but the very strong implication there was that others would. And I see no reason not to believe him. When I was trying to find a real estate agent to help with the purchase of a house, every single agent, in an attempt to get me to trust them, opened with which church they went to, and how involved they were in church, and how they always took their kids to church;... so yeah, I don't let anyone know I'm nonreligious.
Also, I do think I'm not the only one scared to speak out about left leaning views. My area is actually not actually deep red--more than 25% voted for Biden in 2020, but you sure wouldn't know it if you looked around--nothing but Trump flags everywhere. And you wouldn't hear from those Biden voters at any of the neighbourhood gatherings.
Maybe the Biden voters just don't care as much about politics, but I don't know, I'd expect at least to see the occasional pride flag or something. I think people not wanting to invite trouble has to be part of it. I mean, given the popularity of the song Try That in a Small Town, who would want to try that in a small town?
I haven't read 1004 comments and so apologize if this is redundant, but your point 4 doesn't quite work as stated. The right-wing complaint about the left was specifically about cancellation behavior, whereas your hypothetical left-wing complaint about the right had no specificity to the act of cancellation. There is no parallel.
Also, the Thirty Years War leading to notions of tolerance and pluralism and eventually informing the liberal thought that inspired the founding of the United States is a counterexample to your overall argument. If the Protestants hadn't struck back in kind at the Catholics, I doubt that the eventual understanding of tolerance and pluralism among Catholcis would have ever been accepted. And vice versa.
That sounds good, very 60s liberal, but overlooks the inconvenient fact that Thomas Moore burned a few Protestants in his time...
And the points are not too different - Woke, after all, would like to claim the benefit of law AFTER they have (one way or another) changed law to their view of the world, but until then they'll claim to serve a higher cause.
So I don't know.
I'd like to live in a world where people don't do this sort of thing. But history also seems to suggest that the ONLY way people stop doing this is be being forced to experience the Apocalypse.
Which makes me think that the right behaving this way is, in the grand scheme of things, in the cause of higher humanity, correct.
This won't stop some people doing this as gleeful vengeance. But perhaps the time for the adults to step in and tone it down is, as the first quote stated, after the left have had a strong taste of their own medicine, and no earlier than that.
If we can revert to civility solely by having a few hundred people cancelled, resulting in both sides realizing what's at stake, well that's not great; but it's a whole lot better than what happens when people forget civility and move on to the next steps -- street demonstrations, street fighting, political violence, assassinations, civil war, ...
That sounds good, very 60s liberal, but overlooks the inconvenient fact that Thomas Moore burned a few Protestants in his time...
And the points are not too different - Woke, after all, would like to claim the benefit of law AFTER they have (one way or another) changed law to their view of the world, but until then they'll claim to serve a higher cause.
"If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught you that."
(Seeing people I sympathize with) being on the receiving end of cancellation, did not teach me that cancellation was "bad". I already knew that. What it taught me, is that cancellation is a terrible and powerful weapon that actually works and doesn't magically work only for the good guys, so that it would be a good idea if we had a global norm that says we shoudn't do that.
If we can get the left to believe that same thing, then everybody is in favor of a global norm against cancelling people, and we all win. But every arms control treaty that ever mattered, came about because people on both sides had and were willing to use the sort of arms in question. Absent that, it's just mice voting to bell the cat.
Maybe there's some other way to convince the left that they should support a global norm against cancellation. But the ideas you offer in the last section, are things that I don't see happening and I don't expect to happen in any big way, and they're things I can't really cause to happen even locally. So if I find myself in a position to aim a bit of cancellation at a deserving target on the left, you haven't given me much reason to refrain. Sorry.
"Nobody learns anything useful from being persecuted"
That's a somewhat pithy statement that seems to have passed unexamined. People learn plenty from persecution. Not least of which are tactics to avoid and mitigate said persecution, which I'm sure at least the persecuted consider quite useful. What I'm understanding the thrust of that statement to be is that "there are lots of things you simply can't teach through persecution". Such as it can't reliably teach people what is right and wrong, much like spanking a child doesn't magically teach them a moral framework for how what they did was wrong. Which is fair and by general consensus true, persecution may not teach a moral lesson, but it does still teach people a self-interest lesson that there is a cost in suffering to be paid for certain actions. Much like jail or corporal punishment, I think few of its advocates expect the direct result to be greater internalized moral enlightenment.
But as long as there exist even intangible personal benefits for committing offenses upon other people's liberty and person, then a self-interest based deterrent is wise and likely a net good by encouraging society uplifting behavior in the fraction of the population who are greatly more motivated by self-interest than any moral reasoning or communal duty. To make the ratio of offenses committed to those actually caught and punished a significant deterrent to self-interest, those offenses need to be prosecuted with a vigor inversely proportional to the difficulty of making the punishment stick. That will inevitably lead to what is effectively persecution of those punished more by unfortunate circumstance rather than overall malicious personal agency, but trading a fraction of suffering for a fraction of that fraction should still be a benefit. On an interpersonal level you don't need to be that crude, you can build a holistic picture of someone's behavior and determine if they deserve leniency over any single incident. But you can't scale that up to a societal level where information on people's character is unavailable or easily forged.
It's true of real world interactions that once you experience a certain level of commitment to force you will find it trumps everything but an equal commitment to force by someone else. Violence is one of the fundamental units of human negotiation, because once you're physically incapacitated you have no say in what comes next. It should be understood that many even seemingly non-violent negotiations, especially between strangers, are often just obfuscation of that fact by mutual societal agreement, typically for overall net benefit to all parties.
But once that mutual agreement is broken by one party seeking material gain, then the other party needs to be willing and able to return violence in equal or greater measure so that sitting back down at the negotiating table becomes the materially rational choice. There will always be some number of people with no natural inclination towards peaceful coexistence unless it materially benefits them, so even those who desire a peaceful existence must understand the necessity of demonstrating a communal ability to enact such effective retribution that peace becomes a matter of self-interest even for those for whom it's not a matter of principle. And the more you let them damage you before you find the will to retaliate, the less pragmatically able you are of actually forcing the balance to the point where it is in their best interests to stop. Thus waiting for a perfect solution can instead lead to being stuck with an impossible problem instead, so there is a difficult element that gritting your teeth through a hasty and immediately available solution potentially being the best practice in risk management, that can make any tendency towards perfectionism or passivity a contentious point even between erstwhile peers in their moral goals.
Now really the reluctance to commit self-interested violence not a simple binary, even for the worst offenders motivation needed for the first punch is much more significant than follow-up swings. So if you've already survived the first punch it would be foolish to start trying to negotiate them out of punching you again without establishing some means of physically controlling them, or at least making it more difficult for them to successfully punch you again. And since any single punch can be devastating, you'd also be a fool to punch back once and if they don't retreat entirely to wait for them to punch you again before retaliating further. If your understanding is that it is right and fair that you don't get punched again, and you don't have some power differential that lets you clearly overpower them, then you enact your most effective retribution without reprieve until they either surrender or are physically incapacitated. On a group level, if anyone actively cheers one of their own in-group throwing the first punch at you, then they've likely also already crossed that emotional Rubicon, so you can likewise consider them also unlikely to be stopped by anything but at least the threat of equal or greater preemptive violence towards them, indicating that you intend to wait for each of them to strike first is begging to be crippled before you can fight back.
What is certainly not clear is if in the same sense that sufficiently committed physical force -needs- physical force to contain. For the closest purely internet interactions can get to real world force, which is essentially enacting physical force by proxy through doxing, swatting, or mass defamation with the goal of disenfranchisement. If the other party is committed enough, is the best chance you have to ultimately force them to stop anything other than a response in kind?
I think the error here is in seeing this as "one party" and "the other party." This isn't two individuals in a fight or even two armies. It's a bunch of individuals acting in a disorganized fashion. Yes, people see themselves as belonging to factions, but there's actually no commander, no general who can order anyone to fall back for the good of the whole. It's like trying to do MAD by giving the launch codes to the most fanatical civilians on both sides.
In this particular case, it also seems worth noting that Home Depot Lady wasn't canceled for canceling anybody or doxing or swatting anybody. She was canceled for posting. So in what sense is that fighting fire with fire?
Finally, given that we're talking about political debate, I think you overlook the value of persuading fence-sitters through principled argument and taking the high road. I certainly, as someone from the left, have become more open to centrist and even right-wing figures to the degree I see them engaging in civil argument, and less receptive to people on my side to the degree I see them trying to win through sheer bullying.
I started with the individual level to illustrate the principle more easily, I did expand to society level and highlighted at least one practical trade-off that comes with scaling like that and how a certain number of false-positives could still be a net gain. The entire post was more a thesis on the principle of the matter.
As to the specific example. I haven't seen the exact posts but I believe the Home Depot lady was targeted for saying something along that she wishes the assassin hadn't missed and Trump was dead, and haven't seen anyone dispute that. Shortly after an assassination attempt where social media agitation still hasn't been ruled out as and can reasonably be considered one of the potential motivating factors. She cheered for throwing the first punch so to speak.
In which case, whilst it's not as individually effective as doxing or swatting, that can still be considered trying to enact violence through social media by proxy. Which again leads to the question, how do you motivate her not to do that if any of the readily available appeals to moderation plastered on every mainstream media outlet since the shooting haven't already swayed her? Maybe she didn't truly intend for her words to in some small way encourage the future murder of another person, and she just didn't think through or understand the ultimate consequences of her behavior. In which case she's an unfortunate false positive in the process that teaches people not to do that even accidentally. It's not utopian, but it's still better than what we have currently. As Alex said, incremental improvements, it's a reliable approach.
To political debate, as it's used in terms of winning democratic elections, no thanks. Successful political debate is full of manipulation and rhetoric where cloaking a convenient fallacy is more effective than fixing it. I'm not interested in joining any team with unquestionable dogma and I'm not even convinced of a logically consistent left-right political dichotomy, they are a multitude of individual societal approaches generally arbitrarily bundled together. I'm here to debate the simple principle that vengeance applied correctly can be of societal benefit and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
FWIW, I think you've misconstrued Scott's point qua Trump-serious-but-not-literal. He's just pointing out that given clear evidence Team Red is now jonesing for some sweet cancel culture payback from all the preceding persecution by Team Blue it means we clearly have evidence that Team Red didn't learn "anything" from being persecuted (again, because now Team Red wants to retaliate) so flipping the script in the hopes that that'll teach 'em is not logical.
Re Section 3, the polling data: For every question, with the possible exception of Q27, for Q6, 20, 23, and 24, for _every_ level of agree/disagree, the Republicans support free speech more than Democrats. There is a real asymmetry here. I don't know how to get the Democrats to return to valuing free speech, but they present a real threat to safe exercise of First Amendment rights.
Many Thanks! But the data _also_ answers the question: Is one of the two major parties more protective of free speech than the other? And the data show that the GOP _is_ more protective of free speech.
Actually, to answer a question about the Left, I think the data would have to break down the poll takers into smaller bins. I have seen polls (not on these questions) where poll takers were asked to classify themselves as very conservative/conservative/centrist/liberal/very liberal. It would be interesting to see what the "very liberal" group's answers to these questions would be. Perhaps that would better represent "the Left" (although all of these measurements have problems, not least of which is a one dimensional classification of political preferences).
This is correct, my takeaway was the data establishes sufficient opposition to "cancel culture" among Democrats that tit-for-tat cancellation has a good chance of cancelling someone who themselves opposes cancel culture.
Many Thanks! That is a reasonable conclusion. I don't advocate tit-for-tat cancellation. I would prefer de escalation, which, admittedly is always hard. I _hope_ that it is easier amongst compatriots than internationally. I suggest, as a first step, that anyone being attacked for a view held by more than 25% of the populace (as a rough approximation to "mainstream" or "yes, this _is_ inside the Overton window") be protected legally from firing.
Not a bad idea at all - mind I think we'd all be surprised how much crazy stuff (by any standards) 25% of people believe. UK Employment Tribunal has upheld some conscience rights for workers e.g gender-critical feminists but it's patchy and needs tightening up.
> People joke that “cancel culture began with Socrates”, but I don’t buy it. Seen on Wikipedia:
>> [In 1345 BC], Akhenaten … ordered the defacing of Amun's temples throughout Egypt … Archaeological discoveries at [Amarna] show that many ordinary residents of this city chose to gouge or chisel out all references to the god Amun on even minor personal items that they owned, such as commemorative scarabs or make-up pots, perhaps for fear of being accused of having Amunist sympathies.
> When the Priests of Amun came back into power, they took the low road:
>> This culture shift away from traditional religion was reversed after his death. Akhenaten's monuments were dismantled and hidden, his statues were destroyed, and his name excluded from lists of rulers compiled by later pharaohs.
I don't think this is the analogy you want for this essay. When the priests came back into power, they wiped Akhenaten and his aten off of monuments and out of history, and this was a complete success, no one ever repeated his mistake, and the priests held the reins of power, formal and informal, for more than a thousand years afterwards.
It's easy enough to analyze this as a matter of traditional Egyptian culture having infinitely more popular support among Egyptians than one weirdo's weird heresies. I would call that analysis correct. But the clear lesson is that if you're in control, you can solidify that control by suppressing your rivals. The main practical problem with the perspectives you're rebutting here is that the people who want to go on a suppression campaign don't have enough power to make it stick.
Contra, Scott's point with that anecdote is precisely that it was not a "complete success" in the sense that "no one ever repeated his mistake" because the preceding examples are literally other peoples attempting to create Scott's Unfreedom of Conscience again and again across history down to the present day. It's a meta-civilization problem, which can only be productively addressed through "boring incremental progress, ie the only thing that has ever worked". Lots of people want (most people?) want THEIR priests to hold the reins of power for the next 1000 years. Scott is trying to explore how we work on that problem, including how to define it.
I think you're arguing that the Priests of Amun got back on top of the scoreboard and then ran out the clock suppressing dissent in their particular civilization, and so that constitutes "ever" for all practical purposes. But Scott's concluding stuff is clearly intended to be even broader in scope, n.b. famine and disease, so "ever" here clearly means human experience as we think of it. Plus the Pharaonic Egyptians didn't Stargate out and leave a bunch of empty ruins. The civilizations that came afterward included literal descendants. So the fact that we're having this dialog at all means that the Priests of Amun's support for Unfreedom of Conscience was not a complete success. What am I not understanding?
<i>I think you're arguing that the Priests of Amun got back on top of the scoreboard and then ran out the clock suppressing dissent in their particular civilization, and so that constitutes "ever" for all practical purposes. But Scott's concluding stuff is clearly intended to be even broader in scope, n.b. famine and disease, so "ever" here clearly means human experience as we think of it.</i>
Maybe, but "Will this strategy solve the problem for literally the whole of the rest of human history?" is an absurdly high criterion for success.
My sense of Scott, and his argument in this post, is that "success" is simply the wrong way to think about issues at this level, and is in fact the root of his criticism of cancel culture: those in power think it will "solve the problem", and it never has. Again, Scott: "Unfreedom of conscience, like famine and plague, has haunted us throughout history and will probably continue to do so. Still, I think the very-long-range trend for all three problems is down, and that hard work by good people can push that forward. This will look like boring incremental progress, ie the only thing that has ever worked."
If cancel culture doesn't exist in 10 years, I expect the cause is more likely to be a convergence on the underlying issues than norms protecting free speech. The convergence doesn't have to be very dramatic to get us away from "flight 92" mode.
"I think this is part of why the Democratic Party is floundering right now. At the risk of getting cancelled myself, it kind of seems like Democrats now wish they’d put a little more of thought into picking a popular/electable VP in 2020 instead of the most diversity-box-ticking person they could find on short notice."
?? Maybe the view is different in California where she was AG, but I've seen nothing but enthusiasm from Democrats/lefties in the online spaces I frequent. Also fundraising is apparently through the roof.
If the right would back off on religious stuff, and the left would admit that many problems of the underclass are not caused by discrimination but by self-destructive behavior possibly caused by big government programs and BOTH agreed to be 25% more fiscally rational/responsible I think we would solve 80% of our problems.
I agree with Postcards from Barsoom. The Left hasn't changed their opinion on Cancel Culture: they are simply begging for mercy because they are LOSING the battle they started. It needs to continue until they are either all exterminated, or they agree to a truce.
What would a truce look like? Quite simply, it would involve the Left being willing to sign on to LAWS prohibiting Cancel Culture and treating political opinions as a Protected Class, similar to race, gender, or religion. 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.
People like you Scott, are appeasers, willing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And the reason why you are this way is not because you have bad intentions, or because you're intellectually stupid: it's because you're GULLIBLE and naively believe that your opponents have good intentions even when reality shows otherwise. When you want to see what somebody believes in, don't pay attention to their WORDS, pay attention to their ACTIONS. Until the Left takes ACTION to show that they no longer support Cancel Culture - and is willing to legislate laws to support that principle - then any appeal to empathy from them should be considered nothing more than a delaying tactic until they can get the upper hand.
I loathe Cancel Culture, but it will not go away until there are laws against it. Not social norms: actual LAWS. People like you who have the delusion that social norms are effective are living in a dream world. WAKE UP, SCOTT.
I literally just told you: treat political opinions (ie, anything that somebody posts outside of business hours) as a Protected Class. In other words, if you get fired for posting the James Damore memo on your Facebook page after work, that would be treated exactly the same way as if you were fired for being gay and you could legally sue your employer.
Do you know what a Protected Class is and how the laws apply to it? I'm not being sarcastic: I just want to make sure we have the same level of understanding.
Institutions and culture can easily be destroyed or subverted when you control the levers of government. Look how easily Ron Desantis put a big cut in Disney's revenue, for example. Or look at how easily Putin slapped Russia's oligarchs into compliance.
It's obvious to anymore who's paying attention that the Left is no longer as dominant as they were, and they're losing ground rapidly in the Culture War. They're fighting a defensive battle now and they should negotiate a truce while they can, because the terms of truce (if it is even OFFERED later on) are going to be far harsher as the war drags on.
The GamerGate thing was a huge own goal for "cancel culture"--it successfully stamped out irl public organizing around the GamerGate name but at the cost of semi-permanently pushing a not-small bunch of people into the orbit of the alt-right who weren't even involved with GamerGate before it got "cancelled". The left were the second biggest losers after the gamer community itself, the right wing laughed all the way to the bank.
Friends? Neighbors? Are you kidding? The librarian is anti-freedom. The 911 dispatcher is anti-equality. Your kid’s teacher hates religion. The janitor steals your culture. Did you hear that? The dog walker said she wants Biden dead. The cat sitter wants Trump tortured. Shhh. Listen. The hairdresser wants to turn your son into your daughter and your daughter’s coach won’t let her become your son. And did you see the flag flying outside the rec center? The statue in the square? The guy from HR wants to end pregnancies and the plumber wants to require them. They all look like us and they smile and hug their kids and act like actual people, but you know better. This is what the enemy looks like and they’re everywhere. The stakes. The stakes have never been so high. Which side are you on? It’s one or the other. For us to win everyone else needs to lose. So fight. What are you waiting for stupid?
I'm all for proceduralism, but there's an asymmetry to acknowledge between the right and the left here. Namely: in the long run the left wins, provided society remains in "thrive" mode and not "survive" mode. (And proceduralism is much of what's keeping it in "thrive" mode!) Left-proceduralists are signing up to keep their hands clean while getting most of the changes they want. Right-proceduralists are signing up to show restraint as the things they love get destroyed. Both are honorable but one takes a lot more character.
As a social conservative, I broadly agree with this. I expect that various shades of leftists would disagree that they are getting most of what they want, though at very least on cultural matters, the long-term trend definitely seems to be leftward (economics is more complicated, but the growth of government spending likewise continues).
But even before we get to Left and Right, you make an excellent point that sticking to procedure is less impressive when procedure generally yields results you like, and more impressive when it yields results you dislike.
I recognize the basic pattern, but the future may not resemble the recent past.
1. It's possible that, rather than luxury causing peace, peace causes luxury, which then gradually works against peace. [I'm not a fan of categorising people's dreams as ‘luxury beliefs’, but being genuinely comfortable around difference does require some social graces which not everyone has, and those graces become both an object of jealousy and a stick to beat people with].
2. Diminishing returns - in the 90s, my Conservative evangelical headmaster was genuinely excited about Nelson Mandela getting released from prison and becoming president. We didn't keep in touch, but I imagine he was less enthused by gay rights and less enthused still by trans rights. Maybe it's a seamless garment, or maybe the left really is pushing Jones beyond what he can stomach.
3. I see the current alliance between Islam and the left as somewhat unstable. I don't believe it's inevitable that Islam will become the dominant religion in the UK, it's possible Muslims will absorb the same memes that Christians have absorbed, but there doesn't have to be a majority in order for Islam to grow in influence in schools and so on and the left is NOT going to like that.
>“There’s a sense of betrayal,” said the former Hamtramck mayor Karen Majewski, who is Polish American. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.”
Thanks. I'm not surprised it's fraying at the edges even now - mind I think the alliance will be resilient for the time being. You see that Pridestine flag everywhere and a lot of the gay bars refused to show Eurovsision because Israel were in it.
>a lot of the gay bars refused to show Eurovsision because Israel were in it.
Charming. I wonder if it occurs to them that failing to distinguish between Israeli civilians (in this case the athletes) and the Israeli military mirrors the complaint they claim to have against the IDF. Unless, of course, the claimed complaint about the IDF is really just a cover for antisemitism.
So, the one country in the Middle East where gay bars are a thing, the one country in the region where it's even legal to *be* gay, is the one that is unwelcome in the gay bars of Europe.
IMO right and left are largely arbitrary coalitions, and it has nothing to do with thrive vs survive (if it did, there'd be no Republicans in the modern US). It's not even really a "liberal" vs "conservative" thing. Democrats want to change some things and keep some things the same, while Republicans want to change other things and keep other things the same.
Not sure how serious we're supposed to take that last paragraph, but I daresay it is an example of recency bias, and possibly ingroup bias toward the current residing civilization. This is partly tongue-in-cheek, but partly serious.
I don't think Scott's advocating for no revenge, at least I do not understand it like that. I am not a believer in "turn the other cheek", because it's really against basic instinct and I don't think it results in net good when advertised as a policy, contrary to forgiveness done after the offense (there it's mixed, dependent on how much it weaken the credibility of actual future retaliation.).
But I read Scott as pleading for no group revenge, which I am also definitely not for (even if it's also an instinct, much weaker though): There is very little sense punishing member of a group for action of other members. Maybe in some very rare cases where the non-perpetrators are actively and repetatively supporting the actions, but certainly not in general, even if the "inactive" members grudgingly express support when asked (that's the group dynamic, where treason cost may be high). It brings very little apart strengthening group dynamic which is a big part of the problem.
People who actively cancelled others before though, even made this a big part of their activities and identity? yes, no issue with retaliation....But it's seldom those ones that are targeted, only random members of the other group...
You're not wrong, for sure. The argument that people only recognize hurt when they feel it is powerful and attractive. It makes rational sense. But you're right that it just makes society more vicious over time. The way forward is to be kind and hold the moral high ground.
We've had a dynamic for at least the past eight years where every time Donald Trump tweets negatively about someone, some portion of his followers issue death threats against that person and their family. Its just that he spends most of his time targeting people in his own political party who won't toe the line. I wonder how you distinguish between this and cancel culture, or between autocratic intimidation and cancel culture, generally.
MAD needs the people with the weapons to fear the deterrent. The people doing the snitch tagging on Twitter are overwhelmingly not worried about the deterrent. The LibsOfTikTok lady already got doxxed, including to her employer. The "deterrent" here is that she might notice that prominent cancel-culture types on the left (who mostly don't fear doxxing / cancellation because they're already in the open) continue trying to cancel people on the right. Which isn't really a very powerful deterrent.
I think the Achilles' heel here is the fact that perceived "punching down" is frowned upon.
Even at a geopolitical level, if North Korea shot a nuke at us, we'd catch hell if we nuked NK back enough to wipe it off the map (ignoring radiological effects to NK's neighbors).
To put it another way, destruction of a weaker/less "privileged" entity is perceived as wrong. The downside of that is it gives license to that entity to really misbehave in unaccountable ways.
Maybe I'm too old school, but I think there is something different between wishing for the assassination of a political rival and a white guy putting on a sombrero. The former is getting close to not actually being legal.
Agreed, jokes and hyperbola are protected speech, imminent threat of violence is not. This case did not rise to the latter test, that's why I said "getting close".
Trying to create a set of rules/standards for cultural ostracization would never work. It's certainly difficult to pin down exactly what is and isn't acceptable to any individual let alone an entire society, but the real issue is it constantly changes. Gay marriage was universally hated until it wasn't, racism was culturally expected until it wasn't. It's easy to dig up a bad tweet from 10 years ago because 10 years ago that wasn't a bad tweet. The volume of news stories about subjects, issues, and conflicts people have never heard of until that very moment is astronomical and everyone forms an opinion based on the signals of their in-group in a matter of minutes. All of a sudden everyone is expected to have an opinion on the latest iteration of the Israel-Palestine conflict when it's thousands of miles away and has no impact on their lives. Even if you could perfectly represent a set of values of society at this moment in time it would be outdated by tomorrow. The world is constantly changing, people are constantly changing, and the rules are constantly changing. People have a desire to have the rules written down so they can clearly understand the rules of the game they are playing. The goal of this game is to get people to like you/not hate you and there are no rules. To be mad that the rules change is just as irrational as thinking all our problems will be solved if only we can eliminate everyone who disagrees with me. Cancel culture is a fundamental feature of humanity, social media just supercharged it and we give it an alliterative name. Establishing standards for institutions and moderation won't stop anyone from feeling they are one indispensable massacre away from solving all our problems.
I know I've complained a lot before about right wingers pretending to care about free speech, cancellation, political violence and persecution etc only to the exact extent that right wingers are the victims rather than the aggressors, so I feel duty-bound to post a mea culpa.
I intend to vote yes on CA Prop 34 despite it violating my principles (bill of attainder, free speech, etc.). Having true principles is hard.
Since part of the commentary has been, naturally enough, around the history of cancellation, I'm interested in this book which has come out, and it's free-access for now - Erasure in Late Antiquity. I'm sharing it widely, see link below! I'm also wondering about the Book Review on 'Real Raw News' being relevant: is revenge fantasy likely to be cathartic, in the sense of purifying through reducing the tendency to actual vengeance?
I want to preface by saying I am super against the vengeance thing.
But I'm a bit confused about the poll results you shared. You maintained
"Unless you really lay on the tribal signifiers, it’s hard to find a definition where most Democrats support cancel culture and most Republicans oppose it!"
But like, *is* it really that hard to find such a definition. I mean, even a very simple three bucket classification (for, neither, against) yields greater than 50% pro cancelation for Democrats and less than 50% pro cancelation for Republicans on q23 and q24.
Which almost literally satisfies the rather stringent standard of "most Democrats support cancel culture and most Republicans oppose it".
Aside from that I'm not sure so stringent a standard would be the correct one even under the assumption that everyone seemingly out for blood were actually purely rational actors in an iterated game behaving with an eye toward minimizing the danger of playing for everyone.
A less stringent standard of "greater degree of willingness to cause a greater degree of harm" seems to me much closer to the perception triggering people's impulse for revenge at a gut level here. And basically ALL of the questions vindicate that perception.
I do also wonder though, you brought up the example of ancient Egypt, where one side got canceled, then the other side came into power and counter-canceled the first one. But then the article just kind of wanders off to the rest of history where the same dynamic plays out in populations and times having no relation to or knowledge of the Egyptian one. Whereas supporting the pacifist position would require a counter-counter-cancelation to occur in that same society.
The data is confusing, but he is answering the question “But wasn’t the Left monolithically united behind cancel culture?” and I think the data does answer that in the negative. Republicans can still be relatively more pro-free speech, the question is what do you do with the next Dem you meet making a bad taste comment online. Are they "fair game" because the Left is monolithically united behind cancel culture? Actually there's a good chance this person is not.
And there's a good chance that guy in the grey uniform you just saw in a Normandy hedgerow isn't any sort of a Nazi, just some conscript who only wants to keep his head down and go home when all this is over. Part of what makes war such a nasty thing is that justice can usually only be delivered wholesale, not retail.
The extent to which Culture War matches Real War is debatable; at least with Culture War we're usually not trying to kill anyone. But the rules of engagement are likely to be ugly regardless.
As someone else pointed out, the poll questions Scott posted already have tribal signifiers added. It would probably be even with neutrally phrased questions.
Wait, your blog headline says "P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B)" and that all the rest is commentary, so why can't you just use that equation to figure out the right answer and just tell everyone? I'm sure they'd listen to you, because they and you are all so rational.
We don’t have to cancel, if we can find some kind of fine/punishment for lying, inciting violence and slandering political opponents. Whatever happened to monetizing campaign rhetoric as campaign contributions, equal time? Problem with using fire to fight fire, they take that fire and then accuse us of the very things we’re emphasizing about them. When you have financial control of the information, the only winners are the ones carrying out the narrative they control.
I think point 2 is a huge understatement. The last round of right wing cancelations was not the Red Scare, it's the one who has been going on since the 80s where any and all criticism of Israel gets one tarred as antisemitic and canceled. See the Guardian comic artist, the St Andrew Dean, Roth's unhiring from Harvard etc. Hell, the right managed to pass *laws* outlawing BDS, what the fuck are they even talking about?
And it's not limited to Israel either. Remember Kaepernick? There has not been a cancelation opportunity the right has passed. Self-congratulating for having a debate about it *now* feels delusional (as it would feel if the left felt high minded for developing some sane elements 4 years after the fact, to be clear).
Point 8 seems the most poignant, especially in conjunction with the facts above. Cancelations are never uni-directional. The right has used its weapons (accusation of antisemitism and unpatriotism) any time it could, oft successfully, but has that made the left's weapons ever weaker? The undoubtedly very satisfying feeling to get a leftist cartoonist fired and tarred for a Bibi caricature did them any good the day after, when it was a rightist cartoonist on the chopping block for some alleged racism?
The right is not the victim here. It's a symmetrical war where you celebrate the other side's losses one day and mourn your own the next. We can reach some sort of peace, or delude ourself that this one strike will win the war for good every single day, forever.
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.
1. I realize it doesn't address neighbors' concerns, but you can build domiciles that are virtually indestructible.
2. "More often" is doing a lot of work here. You're just guessing.
3. Because you're the kind of person who calls the severely mentally ill "basically rabid," the costs you dump on society are probably massive, whether those costs are financial or not.
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.
Are you daft, you can't kick holes in the wall or easily remove pipes in an American jail.
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.
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 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.
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.
Ah, so you don't know Harvey Milk was a pederast, huh?
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.
"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.
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."
140 Communist Party members were arrested and 93 were convicted on trumped up charges. I suppose a handful may have been guilty. I don't know if this was the extent of the prosecutions during the era.
6,000 were arrested during an earlier Red hysteria in 1919-1920.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Act_trials_of_Communist_Party_leaders?wprov=sfla1
>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're right that no one cancelled by the Left in the West gets the Salman Rushdie treatment
Salman Rushdie got the Salman Rushdie Treatment by the hands of Islamists, not the Right.
The 2 factions overlap insofar as both are religious and hate LGBT and/or atheists and/or abortion, but anything else is where they disagree, and disagree pretty violently too.
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.
Everywhere does have a "Left"-"Right spectrum - quotes to acknowledge the uselessness of the terms - but:
(1) In Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and rest of the worst of Middle Eastern dictatorships, the "spectrum" is more like "a crushing Islamist/military-junta/royal majority controls all of society, everyone else tries to keep their head down and a few mavericks manage to use the internet to make fun of the hegemon and post obscenities about them, hopefully without getting the Khashoggi treatment" [1]. There is no balance or symmetry, as there (more or less) is in European or more generally Western landscapes.
(2) I'm not a defender of the American and/or European Right, not by a long shot, the pro-Israel faction in particular are a bunch of pathetic spineless maggots, and absolutely nothing of value would have been lost if Trump's shooter had been a better marksman. I'm just of the general principles that if you want to blame somebody, you have to blame them for the things that are very strongly and characteristically theirs. The Islamist "Right" is so far down the list of """Things That Look And Act Like The Western Right""" that you might as well use Stalin and Mao to denounce the modern American left.
But yes, Rushdie was a very left-field (hehe) reference. Maybe he shouldn't have been brought up at all.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamal_Khashoggi
<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.
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.
Just popping in to add that Salt Lake City is the least religious community in Utah. Yeah, the Big Temple is here with the main church offices, but this is still the place rapscallion Utahns huddle defensively together. Downtown has lots of liquor stores and strip clubs.
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.
I haven't heard the word agnostic in YEARS. It was a VERY common self-descriptor in the 90s. It seems like most agnostics have rebranded themselves as chilled out atheists. At least where I live in the Western USA.
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.
"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."
I suggest we repeal all truancy laws and give voters little or no control over their children's school's curriculum. Parents who disliked the curriculum could than pull their kids out of school.
I very much dislike public schools and the parents who make them worse. Kids are probably better off meandering aimlessly or playing video games than getting their brains melted in Kid Jail.
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
Keep in mind that video games have been shown to be mentally beneficial. More research needs to be done but at the very least, gaming has neutral valence and compulsive gaming is a symptom of dysfunction, not a cause.
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.
Scott probably has modest expectations for changing any MAGA's mind, but he might be able to reach a few, this was an interesting writing exercise, and this post doubles as a generalized polemic against getting revenge.
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.
There's plenty of rightists on here. Even a few extreme rightists.
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.
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.
> their idiosyncratic demand for a Right of Return to Israel despite never being Israeli citizens
As opposed to any random Jewish rando who has never been to the Middle East in the past 2000 years, which according to Israeli immigration policies is **checks notes** a red-blooded Israeli with Right of Return.
> Israel gets far more attention in the West than other parts of the world outside the US and Europe
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.
> most of the general criticisms are untenable and ethically inconsistent.
Ah yes, the famously ethically-inconsistent and untenable "Colonialism is bad and killing 40K people in less than a year seems kinda sus", endorsed only by racist antisemitic monsters with a raging hard on for hate
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.
> Few people have a genuine opinion on Israel unless they're Jewish, crazy, monsters, antisemitic, or reacting to the crazies and monsters
You did it Anon, you prevented people from having the Wrong Opinion ^TM on Israel. And all it took was calling them horrible racist crazy monsters.
Please write this on the chalkboard 1000 times: "It's normal and OK to be anti-Israel and anti-Hamas."
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)
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
It's kinda of a very tired pedantic gotcha though.
Person 1: The only thing that we can't do right now is drive 30 kilos to this far fancy place just to eat
Person 2: So I challenge you to go to India to have your meal there
Person 1: ....
Person 2: Ha !!! So there are **other** things that we can't do, not just one
What's the interesting argument here except that the person you responded to used the very standard English convention of using intensifiers like "Only" to say something that isn't literally true in the strictest sense but true in every other sense?
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.
How can it be a taboo when so many people criticize Israel?
How can be criticizing wokies taboo where there are so many who make fun of wokies?
How is the N-word taboo if every other rap song uses it and people slap it on every meme text?
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.
Did you know that in 25+ US states (out of 50) abortion rights are significantly more liberal than abortion rights in virtually all European states?
As we can see from the handy map here,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Europe?wprov=sfla1
In Germany, Belgium and Switzerland, abortion on demand (AOD) is banned after 12 weeks. the great majority of European states ban AOD after 10-20 weeks. Britain and the Netherlands are outliers at 24 weeks.
In 25+ US states, there is no hard and fast upper limit for AOD. Pro-choice activists are working tirelessly to return us to the status quo immediately post-Roe: no hard and fast upper limit for AOD in any state. Any implementation of European style limits is treated as a grave threat to womens' rights.
To be sure, abortion after 24 weeks is quite rare here. Still, comparisons between European and American abortion laws are more complex than you may have realized.
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
But that's just circular. The thing that gets you cancelled is "Not bootlicking everything Israel does". There is nothing inherently right-wing about this and there is a metric shit-ton of leftist critiques of Israel and indeed the entire historical Zionist project.
If you define everything that gets you cancelled to be "right-wing" then yes by definition "right-wing" is the only cancellable thing in existence, but that's not what "right-wing" means.
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.
McCarthy was probably damaged in every way you can imagine. I know the ACX ethos says it's rewarding for people with contradictory politics to discuss politics civilly, but we have fundamental disagreements on historical facts. That kind of nips any ideological compromise right in the bud. (Or political compromise if you prefer).
> 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!)
Sometimes, your domestic political enemies ARE dominated and controlled by the wantonly evil or insane. Even paranoids have enemies.
Let's just say this shouldn't be your *premise* in a democratic country?
Whelp, I disagree when it comes to my beloved United States. I'm a European style social democrat heavily influenced by Marx. I'm saving us a pointless back and forth by taxonomizing myself. We tend to be so coy and vague about our political tendencies here that we waste an enormous amount of time arguing about the leaves when our true disagreement is about the roots. We're so divergent beneath the superficially homogenizing sheen of civility; that we can't even separate satirical comments from sincere ones.
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).
Chapo Trap House is the biggest Marxist podcast. While they never specifically condemned rioters or looters, they. heaped scorn on the 1619 project, the bestselling book White Fragility and implicit bias training. (also known as diversity training, or basically anti-white workplace struggle sessions). They are harshly dismissive of any diagnosis of America's ills that centers race.
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.)
Zizek isn't mainstream but he "plays one on TV." He really is a massive Internet celebrity. Huge. A one man industry.
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
Since we're on thw topic, it's pretty heinous how we treat people acquitted of sex crimes and domestic abuse. While some acquittals are clearly a case of getting off on a technicality (Cosby), we definitely need to respect acquittals more.
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".
You don't see the hundred million Americans talking about their perfectly normal and reasonable work place because that's boring. American work places aren't extreme, internet discourse is extreme, and Americans rule the internet.
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.
"Either let the employee and employer agree on these perks voluntarily" - which means the employer dictates the terms in practice. Inequality of bargaining power exists.
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 haven't seen anyone use the term left-libertarian yet. Did that term die off with Gore Vidal?
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?
give a simple solution after simple solution and ask if they feel incontrol while doing nothing?
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
Do you think people who want to "watch someone, anyone hang" are open about this? Or even know their own true desire for random mayhem? No one is the villain of their own story. I can't read your mind, so I can't accuse you of being deluded about your own motivations! But on the other hand, I don't think YOU can read your (subconscious) mind. Might want to hedge your bets on revenge, just in case you're internally compromised. (I need to hedge my bets, too).
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.
I'm NOT SO SURE. There's a (weakening) norm against unapologetically getting revenge. I think that we are quite tolerant of revenge as long as it is carefully framed as not-revenge.
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.
Hatred is cruelty. If to no one else, then to yourself. No this isn't pithy nonsense. Anger takes energy and focus to maintain; effort best spent elsewhere.
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."
This is one of the best things I've read in 25 years of reading comments sections and web forums. I'm too physically exhausted now to laugh but I'm grinning from ear to ear.
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.
Actually, I absolutely reject Karl Popper's so-called paradox of tolerance. I found Popper's framing repulsive when I learned about it as a teen. Twenty years later, my political philosophy has transformed, but I STILL abhor Popper's logic.
There is no paradox of tolerance. Tolerance is honorable and I believe in "death before dishonor." No man lives forever and no system lasts forever. When it is impossible to maintain the system without adopting the vicious ways of our foes, than we have reached the natural and acceptable endpoint for that system. Life can suck. Don't make it worse by losing your soul.
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.
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 and came away with the opposite take from you.
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 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.)
Were there any employees giving feedback that opposed the "tank and file?"
Typo on my part, "rank".
There were definitely, and pretty much always are, conflicting views. People fought about all of this stuff, pretty openly. I remember some body quit after the drone footage ("Maven") controversy and cited a sense of hostility towards people who served in the US military. Discussions around China always prompted some degree of pushback from Chinese employees who took their government's position (by which note I do not mean "all Chinese employees"). I remember a heated meeting about Google sponsoring CPAC, which a lot of people objected to, but also that some conservative employees attended the meeting and voiced support for it. Generally speaking people felt pretty empowered to express their views and Google wasn't a literal monoculture, although in most cases it was pretty skewed more left-wing than the general population.
Although if I'm being totally honest I don't remember any body giving a heated defense of Damore specifically. I do remember a close colleague commenting that in some sense he had a point, in that it was clearly really hard for people to express that specific position without getting a lot of shit.
Hey don't be slandering Vader! ;) He never force-choked for bad news, just for blaspheming the Force or stupid screw-ups. Still a waste of personnel though.
"Appology accepted."
Captain Needa basically gave up too easily. The bad news he delivered was his own failure. Instead of brainstorming possibilities he jumped straight to falling on his sword. Noble of him to take the rap, but if I was Vader I would've said the following:
"Have you any theories as to how they escaped?"
"No my Lord, the ship is too small for a cloaking device, and they didn't jump into hyperspace. Plus if they were to either cloak or jump they would've done it long before now."
"Okay, so my next question is: WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?!! You wasted time and shuttle fuel just to come tell me you can't think outside the box?? If they didn't disappear, then they are STILL IN THE AREA. so get back to your ship and FIND THEM. Check your sensors, send TIE fighters out to patrol, just DO SOMETHING!"
If you consider the Damore cancellation fine, then you're part of cancel culture.
Scott likely read the memo and argued extensively about its topic. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ (I say just "likely" because it engaged with an article criticising the memo, rather than directly with it).
"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."
Huh? Harris dropped out months before it even looked plausible that Biden might be nominated.
She was floated as a VP pick early on, and the clean exit was helped by the backchanneling. It was also not hard in December 2019 to believe that Biden was going to win. Buttigieg was the only plausible competitor at that point.
Her clean exit from the race? She left in December, before any primaries had happened. She was going nowhere. How messy could it have been? I believe December 2019 is also before Biden made his pledge to nominate a Black woman specifically.
Since you remember the race very differently from me (in terms of who was a plausible competitor), I think I am more inclined to believe Matt Yglesias's account, which I can't find but which has it that there was indeed pressure in 2020 not to cast doubt on the wisdom of Biden's choice of Harris.
Happy to read any accounts that disagree if you can find them! You will along your way find many articles criticizing the choice on the grounds that she ran a bad campaign.
He made the pledge because he had picked Kamala, this isn't 6-D chess.
But *why* did he pick Kamala is the question being asked. What did she bring? What was worth making the bargain about?
There are now new articles popping up about her problems retaining staff, very like the articles from 2021 about her problems in first year of being VP. Allegations ranging from she's a bully to every place she's been in charge, the work environment has been chaotic and with a lot of turnover of staff, so she hasn't anyone experienced or long-term.
From 2021:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/12/04/kamala-harris-staff-departures/
From 12 hours ago:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2024/07/22/kamala-harris-lacks-top-team-for-white-house-bid/
These aren't new questions, so the query remains: is she indeed 'the most capable' or not? If not, why picked *except* as a DEI hire, which is why nobody would dare speak out against it back in 2020, as Scott claims?
He was planning to pick Klobuchar before the George Floyd incident.
Just as an aside, while I'm not thrilled with choosing political leaders based on identity (skin color, sex, sexual preference, etc.), it seems like a pretty different phenomenon than affirmative action in other places.
Politics is very often organized along identity lines. I wish it weren't, but it is. Harris is very likely to choose a white man as her running mate for those reasons, and that guy will be an identity politics pick in the same way she was. Similarly, Biden was Obama's VP, and I'm pretty sure part of Obama's calculation was that a relatively young and inexperienced black guy would be easier to swallow, paired with an old white guy who'd been hanging around in Washington for many decades.
You choose a running mate to help you win the election, and identity characteristics are relevant for that in ways they will never be relevant for how well you write code or fill cavities or design airplanes or whatever.
He pledged to select a woman, color unspecified, during the debate with Bernie in March
He was most likely to pick Klobuchar, but then George Floyd happened and Klobuchar had a bad record of prosecuting police misconduct when she was County Attorney in Minneapolis. She publicly took her name out of contention.
Yes, this fits my memory better than what PSJ was saying.
There was also a scandalette about Klobuchar's mistreatment of staff.
Dropping out likely didn't have anything to do with it (you're in a stronger position, not weaker, for running a strong campaign (which she didn't do)).
Endorsing Biden surely did, though.
How much of that was really "make the bargain: drop out, you get to be VP" and how much was "she dropped out because her campaign was tanking"? That is the question being asked - that she only got the VP gig not even as a consolation prize, but that Biden had said he was going to pick a woman VP.
Picking a black woman instead of a white woman would be extra credit points, and there wasn't a lot of choices for selection there, so Kamala got the call. If she got the call because "black woman, that'll do!" then the questions about her capability are relevant. Just as relevant if the impetus for asking her to drop out was "yeah she's streaking ahead, she'll be the nominee, but this racist sexist country will never elect a woman of colour so for the sake of the nation we'll ask her to drop out and make her VP instead as a reward for her patriotism".
If "they wouldn't elect a woman of colour" was a consideration four years ago, why isn't it now?
I’ve seen this debate play out on right wing Twitter.
I broadly agree with Scott here. Cancellation sucks, no one should do it, we need very strong norms against it. Random Home Depot employees are not a legitimate target for character assassination.
That said, expressing support for political violence is going very far! In most previous eras, long before 2015, if you said something like “John Hinkley was an American hero, I’m upset that he didn’t succeed” in a public space, you could expect a visit from the FBI!
Left bubbles have lost touch with reality and they don’t realise how fucked up it is to wish death on their main political opponent. (The same is true about the pro Palestine rallies, by the way, which tolerate a level of anti-Semitism that would never be condoned if it were directed against Blacks or the LGBTQ community.)
Meanwhile the environment in left dominated spaces is such that college professors have been cancelled for saying there are two genders, or NYT editors fired for giving a platform to a conservative writer. This is a dramatic departure from the ACLU going to courts to demand rights for freedom of expression for literal Nazis, which is how the left thought of free speech 40 years ago.
So, I’m torn. I think where I come down is that I’m against random people who are just trying to hold down a job getting RT’d and cancelled by LibsOfTikTok, almost regardless of how odious their position, but I’m OK with public figures or people in positions of authority being held responsible for speech that literally incites violence. I’m OK with Tenacious D having to cancel their tour. 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.
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").
There are definitely some MAGA extremists and Jan 6 was definitely a national embarrassment. And there have been plots to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer and kill Nancy Pelosi by some of the less hinged members of the Red Tribe.
That said I do feel that the left has taken this way further, particularly in academia, education and the media. There have been cases of people getting fired (!) for saying very normal things that most people agree with. That creates an atmosphere of fear and is not hospitable to right-wingers or even to centre-left liberals who value free speech nd freedom of enquiry higher than social justice.
https://www.thefp.com/p/carole-hooven-why-i-left-harvard
I personally don't think getting people fired is taking things further than trying to kill people.
Now you're conflating two things, where you argue that political violence is worse on the right (possibly true, but the support for the Trump would-be assassin was alarming.)
I'm not arguing that point, though. I'm saying cancel culture is way worse on the left. That's what we were originally talking about.
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?
Can’t remember. Probably someone dobbed him in/doxxed him
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?
Well the point of free speech is precisely that you defend the rights of people you hate to say things you despise.
Incitement of violence is certainly alarming though. I think we have to recognise what brought us to this point - the absence of this culture of free speech you refer to, particularly in academia and media, to the point where people are so intolerant of opposing points of view that they will literally say “speech is violence” - and then turn around and argue that actual violence should be tolerated and encouraged.
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...
In some alternative universe, someone took a shot at Biden instead. And in that universe, undoubtedly there's some right-wing dorks who joked about how it's a shame the bullet missed. And in that universe, some of those people got fired. And in that universe, somebody somewhere probably called that "cancel culture" and complained about it.
But it wouldn't be a *central* example of cancel culture. If "cancel culture" just meant that you could lose your job for wishing death on opposing politicians, then few people would be outraged about cancel culture.
The equivalent of getting cancelled for saying that trans-women shouldn't be allowed in womens' restrooms isn't getting cancelled for saying that someone should be murdered, it's getting cancelled for saying that trans-women _should_ be allowed in womens' restrooms.
Sounds like a balanced comparison.
Isn't there laws or law proposals in some states to make it illegal for trans women to be in womens' restrooms? Are the politicians proposing those laws getting cancelled in any meaningul way? Note that I'm not from the US, I'm genuinely asking.
Liberals don't have the power to cancel conservatives. You would only be cancelled if you believe certain things and surround yourself or are employed by the blue tribe.
Or any neutral company in a panic because their social media team is reporting massive negative public opinion because Jack in accounting posted something mildly positive about Ben Shapiro. Or any company with a Blackrock investment. Or any company in a Blue Tribe dominated field, or reliant on vendor in Blue Tribe dominated fields. Or a Blue Tribe company.
There is not allot of neutral, hr departments, black rock, etc. means there will be an affect where it matters most; on the balance sheet of the fortune 500 and that place you spend 8 hours a day with little control over your time.
What about Harald Uhlig? Economics is part of academia, but usually tolerates people on the right. But the Federal Reserve dropped ties with him after he criticized BLM on twitter. I don't know his politics, but that utility worker that someone complained about making an "OK" sign while his vehicle was stopped at a red light was canceled by a liberal despite not being part of that liberal space.
It is a grave mistake to consider economics in any way politically aligned with stereotypical academia.
My understanding is that the typical academic economist is a moderate Democrat, it's just that the rest of academia tends to be more left leaning. But he does still seem to be a counterexample to the claim that the left only cancels their own, as I haven't seen any indication that he was on the left.
Or if you're employed in a profession which is controlled by a blue-tribe guild (e.g. law, medicine, etc.)
Yeah, good thing no conservatives ever work anywhere except conservative companies. And good thing every progressive company has a conservative doppleganger with a few positions in the same field of expertise open at all times just in case someone slips through the cracks
Politicians are immune from cancellation (for most values of that poorly-defined word). They can't lose their job except by being voted out, and if a politician is voted out for having opinions that differ from his constituents' then that's not really cancellation that's just... how it's supposed to work.
Maybe it's different in the US, but here in the UK, where party discipline is generally somewhat tighter, there have been cases where parties were pressured into deselecting candidates by concentrated negative coverage of something the candidate had said or done.
As you may know, party discipline in our two major parties is so lax that they aren't even parties in the same way you have parties. Best to think of them as something between parties and bcoalitions. Correct me if I'm wrong, readers, but I think we have no direct analogue to deselection.
Impeachment?
I kind of think it's stretching to call a politician being voted out as "cancelling" given that their job description involves "periodically be put before the mob to see if you're fired."
But maybe Scott McRory who went from popular in Charlotte to a trans-hating monster.
No, politicians are in the small set of people whom it is entirely sensible and right to remove from their jobs because of their political ideas and actions.
Right, and this also points to a tactical argument against the right-wing engaging in cancel culture. The right may be able to get people fired for wishing Trump had been killed, but those people aren't convincing anyone to become left-wing anyway. The left-wing counterparts of the important right-wing arguments that get suppressed—that cops kill black people left and right just for being black, that outcome differences between demographic groups are a result of discrimination, that trans people should be treated as the gender of their choice—remain thoroughly mainstream, and the right won't make them cancellable anytime soon. And if the right won so thoroughly that it could cancel people for these left-wing arguments, it wouldn't be needed; this is a general argument against censorship, that it can only be wielded by the side that has the upper hand anyway. Meanwhile, by cancelling people for saying extreme stuff that won't convince anyone who doesn't already agree, it loses some moral high ground without any political benefit.
Only because something that is a Sacred Value to somebody else isn't a Sacred Value to you.
Afaik nobody has gotten cancelled for saying that Trump shouldn't be assassinated.
I'd be pretty outraged about cancel culture even if all it meant was I could lose my job for wishing death on politicians.
Unless I'm holding a magic lamp, I should be allowed to wish for whatever the hell I feel like. It's a sentiment, not a bomb.
There's an easy compromise here: be magnanimous with the general public, and only cancel public figures who have a documented history of gleefully cancelling others for petty reasons. That way, genuinely censorious people get their comeuppance (but no worse than precisely the thing they inflicted on others) while the general public is spared another round of cancel culture.
OK, I really gotta object to this Postcards from Barsoom guy saying "Those few left-wing voices in the early teens who championed classical liberal principles of freedom of expression were summarily cancelled themselves, and are largely on our side now."
No, the principled liberals have not joined your side, they have stayed principled liberals and not joined a clearly illiberal movement, any more than they joined the leftists/SJers previously. I'll grant that plenty of people *did* join you, but those were obviously people who were thinking about people rather than ideas, y'know? The sort of socially-influenced person who says "well since these guys were wrong, their opponents must be right!" Scratch such people and you won't find much coherent principle at all, mostly social reasoning instead. A person who's actually thinking should be entirely capable of being against multiple things at once, you know.
Really I must repeat that as always I think Scott, and many of the people he discusses, are making a mistake by using a one-dimensional political spectrum rather than a tripolar model as I've discussed in the past or as Nate Silver has discussed here: https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-liberalism-and-leftism-are-increasingly
...but of course the idea of the one-dimensional political spectrum is still influential, and it does influence people to do stupid things like e.g. join the traditionalists/authoritarians because the leftists/SJers are being stupid. No! Stop looking at who's wrong and joining the "other" side, as if there were only two sides and one of them has to be the right one! In fact there can be many sides and they are entirely capable of all being wrong simultaneously! Just figure out what's right without thinking about the people involved and go with that!
...sorry, that turned into a bit of a rant, but like, no dude, people joining a traditionalist or authoritarian movement are not in fact principled liberals.
(And yes I am aware that leftism and social justice have difference between them but they are similar enough that for my purposes here they can be grouped; I regard them together as one approximate "pole" in the three-pole way I'm thinking about things, which, checking Nate Silver's article, I see, so does he.)
Well, the American political system just isn't equipped to provide for tripolar options, so most people end up picking a binary side. That's also related to negative partisanship. Most people aren't that thrilled about their side, but they really hate and fear the opposing one.
Thanks for objecting. I unresembled that remark so hard myself that I could no longer take him seriously.
IIRC John Carter is not from the USA and doesn't live here, although he allegedly did for a time. It's quite something to see people hop on this foreign windbag's jock, delighting in his prejudicial subversion of American values like free expression.
Did you change your voting/donation patterns? If not, how is anything that you just said meaningful or relevant? "Man, I really object to the tactics of this political coalition but I will still support its local representatives whenever I have a choice" is valueless and meaninless. Ditto to you, Geoduck.
And yeah, this goes for folks on the right who object to Trump but are ready to pull the lever for him anyway for tactical or strategic culture war reasons.
If it doesn't change your vote or your dollar, it doesn't matter. All else is wind and electrons. This is the fundamental failure of the past 20 years or so.
EDIT: Hell, I'll settle for "Left social circles whose members expressed approval/satisfaction at cancellations".
I generally have always voted third party, which is admittedly pointless. But I'm also in Texas, which is very much not a swing state. Without meaningful political representation, except by accident, I have historically done things like put a lot of time and money into the ACLU.
I no longer support the ACLU, and feel somewhat burned and suspicious. But I am interested in supporting FIRE, who I think are demonstrably non-partisan and involve several former ACLU heavyweights from "back in my day".
Some may attach any connotations they want to this position, but I deny that it constitutes any sort of rightward shift on my part. I hope that answers your question.
I think that's a fair response, and kudos for stopping support of the ACLU now that they're busy filing amicus briefs in opposition to their traditional civil libertarian positions. I withdraw my veiled accusation in your case, while emphasizing that it is a more general complaint of both sides "moderates" in the culture war.
A little more willingness to have enemies to the left/right would go a long goddamn way here, and I find it very telling that the response from the majority of the commentariat here is to make arguments for why the other side totally deserves it/is worse.
"I'm now no longer a supporter of a noted Lefty institution, itself supported by the majority of the Left, but this isn't a Rightward shift."
I dunno, man. Post about your issues with the ACLU on a heavily Left-oriented subreddit, and then on a conservative one. I bet you get very different responses. If we are not to take this as a shift on your part — "I've stayed the same" — then okay, fine, but if the culture moves around you such that the Left has moved away and the Right has moved closer, is that — practically speaking — much different?
Not that it really matters, I guess. I just see a lot of this and feel like it's one of the reasons for "your side's" (mine also, once, long ago) deterioration: unwillingness to do anything to oppose it, even rhetorically.
I'm with geoduck. My voting and donations have completely changed from 15 years ago. (I caucased for Obama in 2008.)
FWIW, I stopped donating to the ACLU a few years ago, when I saw enough evidence that they had largely abandoned their free-speech-over-all-else commitment for a different set of ideas.
I agree it should change your voting/donation patterns, but it *does* matter even if you don't.
Most people let their political social web (and by extension their political party) massively influence their opinions. For some good reasons (a politician has considered more information than many people), but also very many bad ones.
Maintaining this mental distinction of "I'm merely voting left/right, but these are my views, it is just that one of the left/right are best representing them despite their sheer inadequacy."
If you don't have many people like this who have specific beliefs and don't trivially shift them around, then you're far more able to have extreme political shifts — aka the effects of polarization. It also makes so there's more room for shifting the beliefs of a party, if someone actually has notably distinct beliefs.
I consider the past 20 years as being primarily due to polarization and people not being prepared mentally (or mature enough) for internet level connectivity, which increases polarization and makes social effects a lot stronger because you can hear about news instantly and get everyone's opinion on it. (And then bubbles, etc.)
Maintaining a bastion of distinction in your own mind between "my values" and "the party I'm voting with" is useful for general societal sanity, even if we're currently stuck with a terrible system.
> OK, I really gotta object to this Postcards from Barsoom guy saying "Those few left-wing voices in the early teens who championed classical liberal principles of freedom of expression were summarily cancelled themselves, and are largely on our side now."
if you were given names would you go "not a true liberal"?
No doubt there are true liberals who were cancelled and have realigned. But Carter is making an unsupported categorical claim.
>>> No, the principled liberals have not joined your side, they have stayed principled liberals and not joined a clearly illiberal movement,
he's making a very very strong claim without such nuance
Beautifully said.
I completely agree about the tripolar model, and the rest of it too. Thank you for stating all this so clearly. :-)
> And yes I am aware that leftism and social justice have difference between them
I've generally started referring to the "economic-left" and the "identity-left", but those are pretty crude terms. I tend to think of the identity-left as using the practical techniques of Marxist movements, but abandoning the economic and historical theory in favor of pure coalitional politics.
I'm curious about your thoughts, if you feel like sharing?
„The median victim of cancel culture is some center-left college professor who sent out an email saying that he supports BLM but questions some of their tactics.” This is exactly right. The right wing likes to scream about cancel culture but no right winger ever seems to actually get cancelled. They just don’t get invited to the cool people’s parties anymore. Boo hoo. Did Bari Weiss get „cancelled”? She seems to be higher profile than ever despite how much the left hates her. Is Hanania cancelled? Sailer seems to be doing better than ever. Look at Louis C.K. He may have lost access to the hip crowd, but he’s still performing and still making more money at comedy than most left wing comedians will ever see.
Gina Carcano might be an example of someone who got cancelled (fired from a show in her case) for holding right-wing opinions?
Yeah, I would agree with this. People with relatively middling power/influence tend to be the only ones cancelled (contrast with, say, Mel Gibson).
EDIT: As pointed out to me, Gibson is a bad example. Maybe Kanye West, so far?
Mel Gibson was most definitely cancelled. RDJ's appeal for his forgiveness would've been unnecessary if it hadn't been the case.
Yeah, looking through more details I agree that you are right.
Actually, Candace Owens lost her job! A victim of cancel culture. (She got fired by Ben Shapiro)
Or Tucker Carlson getting fired by Fox. Or Bill O'Reilly getting fired by Fox. Or Glenn Beck getting fired by Fox. The point is, if you're a pundit that lost your job, you got cancelled.
My gestalt is that the current “left” is more cancelly than the current right. And I agree that cancelling generally has traction as a “same side” phenomenon like Scott says (cuz how effective would a righty be at cancelling Maddow; or a lefty taking a run at Carlson). But it’s because the left is the more enthusiastic participant that the median victim would be someone left of Center.
But it’s also a minority scenario where someone actually loses their job etc. Most examples are far more transactional. I think whereas lefties eating their own is probably not something that stirs righties so much, the campus environment is what brings it more into focus even for normies. When invited speakers aren’t allowed to do their thing due to perceived wrongthink (on university grounds which is generally a left-coded arena these days), that’s something many/most would find generally distasteful. And it’s the many examples of “minor” cancellation that I think registers after a while, rather than the headline events that are few and far between.
I think the reason why academic cancellation tends to loom large in people's minds is because, even if you aren't on the left, you generally need a degree in order to get any sort of remunerative or statusful job, and so you can't avoid spending a few years of your life in academia. This gives large numbers of people a personal interest in what goes on there that they don't have regarding most other left-wing spaces.
It is kind of funny to see how little this stuff matters in the real world. A few years ago, I saw a white male LPN complain about how his black female relief was always "running on CP time". He got a dirty look, but no discipline.
Louis CK is a right winger? The guy supported Hillary and supports open borders because "It shouldn't be so great here in America"?
Sailer couldn't give public talks for a decade because Antifa-types always threatened the venue and got it shut down.
How about right-wingers who are banned from social media like Stefan Molyneux and Jared Taylor, are they "actually cancelled"?
Cancel culture means, as far as I can tell, being "cancelled" for behavior or opinions that were acceptable until very recently, and that self-imposed judges of morality have suddenly decided are now outside the bounds of what is socially acceptable. Molyneux and Taylor are certainly subject to censorship, but since their opinions were not allowed real visibility in mainstream media in the Reagan 1980s or Bush 2000s either I have a hard time seeing them as "cancelled". They were never really allowed in public in the first place, social media accidentally offered them a small window of additional freedom that then got shut down. True, Louis wasn't a right winger, but he was cancelled by the left, and the right likes to make him a martyr as far as I can tell. Sailer is able to reach a far larger audience now than he was able to reach in the late 20th century when he was still writing for "respectable" right wing outlets like the National Review. Yes he gets harassed, but is he "cancelled"? Seems like the 2020s have been the best of times for him. Over and over again the right seems to get outraged not because they are literally forced into silence, the way a critic of Putin or Orban might be, but because people from elite colleges call them deplorable for their views and refuse to respect them.
Jared Taylor popped up on the pre-social media web. I didn't even know he ever had a twitter account until people mentioned him being banned from it.
Sailer used to write for UPI, not just National Review.
"literally forced into silence, the way a critic of Putin or Orban might be"
I know Orban quarrels with NGOs, has he "literally forced into silence" any particular individual? I know he's banned certain foreigners like Richard Spencer, but that hasn't exactly silenced him.
I think having to ruin your regular career and make your living in the right-wing griftosphere is actual and not fictional cancellation, akin to being ostracized from your polis and having no choice but to work for the Persians
No enemies to the Left, no friends to the Right. Of course they massacre their own side; it's why they are getting more and more extreme. Also, Bari Weiss is a unique case of a well-spoken, attractive, charismatic woman getting fired from the NYT and cast out of polite society for not being a Red Guard at the exact moment a network of people who had been cast out already was developing.
I seem to recall RINOs being a thing?
In that there was and is a group of Republicans who support the Democratic policy platform, and only run as Republicans as either containment or because the Dem brand is locally poisonous and/or the R side is wide open, sure.
See my comment at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/some-practical-considerations-before/comment/63041689
Tl;dr: cancel culture mostly doesn't affect big-name political opinion journalists, bloggers who can make a living from their political writing, but rather it puts a thumb on the scale at not-inherently-political institutions, which near-invariably become progressive in practice when certain political questions (especially id pol: race, gender, sexual orientation) do come up.
Right-wingers definitely get cancelled.
Your celebrities are going to get out of cancelling without as many problems, yes, and?
Cancel culture has a strong chilling effect, and just because they do a lot of it to people relatively aligned to them doesn't mean it isn't bad??
There's also an astounding victory for the right in keeping gayness out of public life for (at least) decades. It didn't last.
For what it's worth, I remember reading people from decades past wondering if they were the only gay person.
Maybe the Right should cancel Lefties for crazy opinions (or aggressive ones), but not standard opinions?
For example : wishing the current right leader dead, cancel. Wishing the right loses, no cancel.
Saying something like "we're coming for your children", cancel.
Quietly transing their own kids, no cancel.
Etc etc.
Cancel the nasties, leave the freaks and the mistaken
There's the problem that what counts as "crazy" or "aggressive" vs. "standard" opinions is contentious and ever-changing.
Ten years ago, for example, "quietly transing your own kids" would have been regarded as crazy, and many people (largely, but not exclusively, on the right) still regard it as such. So what looks like a justified cancelling for a crazy opinion to one person looks like an unjustified cancelling for a standard opinion to another.
who coordinates this stuff? does anyone have faith in this kind of coordination?
I deliberately have not followed the Home Depot story because I don't need outrage fodder (there's more than enough of that to go around).
I wholeheartedly agree that getting a low-level employee fired for a stupid remark on her private account is wrong.
But (isn't there always a 'but'?)
I go into this with old-fashioned values and principles which I have been told over and over again, by both sides (or however many sides there are) are dumb and stupid and ineffective and nobody thinks like that anymore. This is the modern world for modern audiences.
Honour? Personal dignity? A slew of other values I picked up from reading Sir Walter Scott at too early an age? Nobody cares about that stuffy old shit anymore.
So. I trust Scott, because he's been up the sharp end on this and he's never done this kind of "your views are abhorrent to all right-thinking people, I cast you forth into the wilderness, shame, shame!" treatment of us on here. He's been remarkably tolerant. That's why I know he's put his money where his mouth is.
The people on my side/the right/conservatives/not that lot calling for the heads of their enemies on a platter? Never let it be said that I've not held my share of grudges and revenge fantasies, so I understand - but I still condemn the attitude.
The people on the other side/the left/liberals to progressives/that lot? I don't trust a single one of them one freakin' inch. If Kamala/Gavin/Generic Democrat wins the election, they will be right back out there looking for heads on spikes.
Both sides are "it's not wrong when we do it" and both sides *are* wrong about that, but unhappily I'm now long past the point of expecting any graciousness from anyone.
Example:
"At the risk of getting cancelled myself, it kind of seems like Democrats now wish they’d put a little more of thought into picking a popular/electable VP in 2020 instead of the most diversity-box-ticking person they could find on short notice."
Just before I came on here to read this post, I was browsing the online news headlines. And an Irish newspaper is printing an opinion piece (filler) from an American journalist on "The Washington Post" about "If Democrats dare to dump Harris, they will face a deservedly bitter backlash".
(At first I thought it was a home-grown journalist because the name is Irish, but she's not).
I'm not going to pay out a subscription just to read this, but I think we can all imagine what it says. Why the hell is an Irish paper printing American racial politics crap? Well, aren't we all The Modern Audience now? This is the Right Kind of Views that the Right Kind of People hold.
(There's an equally stupid filler piece about Kamala probably won't be tracing any Irish roots, but at least that has *some* shred of relevance to Ireland, given that we suck up as hard as a Nilfisk industrial vacuum cleaner to whomever is the American president because of our economy and needing a powerful ally).
And that's just one example of why I don't trust "the left" (that ill-defined term) because the 'right-thinking' people are just champing at the bit to get or hold on to power and be able to wield the daggers.
God help us all.
While I agree that *too few* people think of honor and dignity in Walter-Scott-esque terms these days, do not give in to despair. There are still some of us.
As a leftist person who’s long been against cancellation for reasons similar to what you describe, it helps to remind myself that my concepts of “the left” and “the right” from online discourse are both nonhuman mobs / monsterous figments of the internet, and it’s not principled or realistic to project them onto any individual person I talk to. My litmus test now for whether a political writer is worth hearing is if they stand up for the dignity & humanity of all people. Even if I agree with someone politically, I try to regard them with serious skepticism if they make any calls to cancel / gulag / paint a group of people with a broad brush.
This post is why I am subscribed, even though I read in full may be 30% of usual SA missives
That's interesting — this is like maybe the second time in the past five years I didn't read a SA post, and in fact felt a little disgusted.
I predicted, a few years ago, that Scott would fall like all the rest and eventually post the same milquetoast garbage many other people like him ended up posting. So far, I've been wrong. I hope I continue to be.
>Ideally these commitments would have legal force, letting students/stockholders sue for violations.
In keeping with the theme of the post, I think this is likely to lead to similar downstream problems as the civil rights stuff one paragraph above. The problem where these sorts of rules lead to collective insanity is because youve removed discretion from the local decisionmakers.
A few comments
1. I've always thought "Cancel Culture" interpreted as a demand rather than a name- e.g., abandon symbolic representation- would be a great name for an Anarcho-primitivist movement.
2. I agree there has been quite a lot of cancelling from the left generally, but there's a saying in equity law "He who comes to equity must come with clean hands". For the right to represent themselves as the injured party, now just seizing the weapon of their persecutor, it might help their case if they hadn't already cancelled a bunch of people in recent memory (e.g. Kaepernick,) Especially when we factor in the friendly fire element, I'm not even wholly convinced that more rightists have been cancelled by leftists than leftists have been cancelled by rightists. There's a lot of, e.g., teachers being fired by school boards. It's not as flashy as a left-wing show trial and Twitter cancellation, but when it comes to getting people in trouble, it can be just as effective. When I've bought this up up to rightists a lot of them have responded with some variant of 'ah well that doesn't count because of course it was untenable for so and so to keep their position'. I can't say I find that especially persuasive.
3. Scott points to polls, but even among the politically active and influential parts of the left, it's simply not true there is no opposition to cancellation. You can find endless leftists on Twitter lamenting this or that ordinary person- or even celebrity- getting screwed over. The view that cancelling in general is bad even when it's something I REALLY don't like is rare everywhere but I see little evidence it is rarer on the left than the right.
4. Maybe this is undermining my own case, but arguably the attack on the Akahnatenists worked out pretty well for the religious traditionalists- Egyptian monotheism was annihilated for over a thousand years.
5. Re: Don't go mad with power till you have power. I can say that the one thing that actually positively makes me want to cancel someone is if they've cancelled someone themselves recently. Starting a barrage of cancellations against leftists will attract counterfire and in many cases it will be effective. Everyone always thinks their enemies are vicious, yet everyone's enemies, almost always, are not yet being as vicious as they could be.
>There's a lot of, e.g., teachers being fired by school boards.
I think theres a good case that political opinions really are relevent to the job here, since socializing children is a big part of the effect/purpose of school.
> e.g., teachers being fired by school boards
Teachers are public servants, and the entire point of school boards is to provide the public with a mechanism to oversee the operation of those public servants.
School boards firing teachers is a sign that the system is working correctly.
One of the ironic parts is that basically *the original* case of cancel culture, long before Justine Sacco, was Stacy Snyder, a student teacher who was cancelled due to a MySpace photo captioned "drunken pirate".
Regarding point 2, is there a resource that lists teachers that have been fired by school boards for their views? Maybe an organization that helps them, a la FIRE, or maybe FIRE itself? I'm interested in lending them a hand.
Teachers in the classroom don't have the same speech rights as someone out on the street with a soapbox and some leaflets. The teacher is (a) acting as their employer's agent, on their employer's time, and (b) is likely a recipient of government money, which comes with an awful lot of strings and conditions.
I agree with this, but think those considerations need to be balanced against the value of teachers having a reasonable degree of freedom to say things that are unpopular, even by community standards, which ought to escalate as kids get older (and will never be absolute).
Your quarrel is with state and federal caselaw, unfortunately.
Unless there are literally no limits on the state's authority, probably not.
Feels like a motte and bailey here, one of the first things new teachers learn is to be very careful on social media and/or delete their accounts, which to me does not plausibly have a relevant educational justification.
I'm probably not important enough on the right to count as an objector, but I loathe LibsofTikTok even more than usual for that behavior, and have been tweeting in opposition to this since it began. As someone who has been pseudonymous for twelve years, I find any form of doxxing or cancel culture pretty repellent, regardless of the political side. Quite a few others have been as well, most more notable than me (Reason magazine come to mind), mostly on Twitter.
I wrote about asymmetrical execution, ie cancel culture, a while back (https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2021/03/22/asymmetrical-executioners/) and observed that the left was going out of its way to cancel its own.
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.
Yeah, it was weird how that happened. I have been online for nearly 30 years and never used my real name. But my earlier incarnations were more loosely protected. Now I make sure Google doesn't connect my id and real name, gender, location etc.
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.
>I hate this because I’ve fought with these people on the Left, and they sound exactly the same.
Yeah, no. This is "creationists say that evolutionists are closed-minded, and evolutionists say that creationists are closed-minded" stuff. Just because two sides say things that are grammatically similar doesn't mean they're equally valid. It's something you have to look at at the object level--they may sound the same, but are they equally correct?
(And if your answer is "well, everyone thinks they're right, so you have to have standards based on what people think about themselves", I again point to creationists and evolutionists saying similar things. We don't want to teach creation and evolution equally because both sides think they're right and so any standard has to apply to both sides equally. We need to *figure out* who's right and treat them unequally based on that.)
And they don't sound the same anyway. The right is saying "we used to have free speech, until the left started cancelling". Notice how Scott's quote isn't the same at all! In his quote, the left is going on about how the right has done evil things. But the left is *not*, *not*, saying "we used to have free speech, until the right stopped that". In fact, in the quote, the left isn't expressing admiration for free speech at all, let alone complaining that because of the other side, such a thing is no longer possible. That's massively different from what the right is saying.
Yeah "free speech" is now right coded as a value. That's awful for the left, and is probably the main reason I personally switched my voting allegiance.
But to be fair to Scott, it's true that if you cherry pick the worst norm-breakers on either side, you can come up with a laundry list of bad stuff that right-wingers have done too. That's why it's not fruitful as a method of argumentation.
The right's idea of free speech involves an awful lot of banning books from school (and public) libraries.
If Apple already has Windows PCs available for employee lending through IT, and I, an Apple shareholder but non–Apple employee, advocate against Windows PCs being available to employees on the grounds that their garden is insufficiently walled and that's immoral to expose employees to, I think you could make a colorable argument that I'm trying to ban Windows PCs from Apple's IT library.
You're right, that *does* sound like a very different case than public and public school libraries.
What's said in school is government-endorsed speech, so banning controversial works from school is no different than banning government employees from conducting political speech while they're on the taxpayer's dime.
And you can thank the left and the first amendment for that, ironically enough, as it was the left that forced a separation of religion and school. Nobody major argues that banning religious proselytizing from schools violates free speech.
I think it's a stretch to say "no different" - actively broadcasting political speech during your workday as, say, a teacher is different than "having a book available that someone could borrow in the school library". One is speech to a captive audience that has little choice but to witness it.
The book doesn't just magically appear in the school library. Someone has to make the purchasing decisions as to what books to put on the shelves, and that person has a bias.
It would be one thing if school administrators were paragons of neutrality, but they're not. If the school administration doesn't reflect the voters, the voters are well within their rights to use their elected representatives to rectify the problem, and allowing no controversy is ironically less disruptive on schools than allowing all controversy.
I don't feel like this really addressed my point.
At this more broad level of argumentation, I would suggest that schools have responsibilities other than merely teaching - or stocking books that present - the majority viewpoint.
The books in question have porn in them. They are personal accounts of sexual encounters, with illustrations. DeSantis held a press conference about removing them and ambushed the media with pictures of the books and they had to cut the video feeds because of content restrictions.
I choose to interpret that charitably as saying that some or the majority of the books being banned have obscene materials in them, in the legal sense, and we're likely to disagree on the percent, but that ignores recent history.
PEN America's rundown of the types of content being challenged ( https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor-books-in-schools/ ) may help provide a good baseline for the rest of this conversation, should you wish to engage in it.
Some quotes:
"Beginning in 2021, a range of individuals and groups sought to remove from schools books focused on issues of race or the history of slavery and racism, mirroring a campaign ... restricting discussion of these and other concepts in school classrooms and curricula."
"Complaints about diversity and inclusion efforts have accompanied calls to remove books with protagonists of color, and numerous banned books have been targeted for simply featuring LGBTQ+ characters. Nonfiction histories of civil rights movements and biographies of people of color have been swept up in these campaigns. For example, many volumes in the popular Who Was? chapter book series and several biographies of Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor were banned in Central York School District in Pennsylvania. That ban also impacted hundreds of books with protagonists of color, including the Caldecott Honor–winning A Big Mooncake for Little Star."
"As the school year progressed, those demanding book removals increasingly turned their attention to books that depict LGBTQ+ individuals or touch on LGBTQ+ identities, as well as books they claimed featured “sexual” content, including titles on sexual and reproductive health and sex education. These trends were already identified in PEN America’s first edition of Banned in the USA (April 2022) report; however, from April to June, there was an acute focus on these topics."
"From April to June 2022, a third of all book bans recorded in the Index feature LGBTQ+ identities (92 bans). Over the same short period, nearly two thirds of all banned books in the Index touch on topics related to sexual content, such as teen pregnancy, sexual assault, abortion, sexual health, and puberty (161 bans).
"These subject areas have long been the targets of censorship and been controversial from the perspective of age appropriateness, with standards and approaches varying from community to community about what is seen as the right age level for such material, as well as the degree to which these topics should be addressed in school as opposed to in the home. ... While debate on these issues recurs, wholesale bans on books deny young people the opportunity to learn, to get answers to pressing questions, and to obtain crucial information."
If you're still reading: That's two thirds of books banned that feature topics related to sexual content, and one third that doesn't and is banned for other reasons. Of the ones related, I'm sure many look like porn, especially when viewed out of context, though it's hard to teach about, aay, puberty or sex ed without explaining the changes people will go through.
We're talking about efforts that can be tied to the political right, not every effort to ban a book.
But as for the link itself, Pen defends Gender Queer as a book about LGTBQIA+ individuals. IIRC, that's got an illustrated section about a blowjob. So right off the bat, their categorization isn't credible, and an excellent example of why people just want a blanket ban on LGBTQIA+ material, because, on close inspection, we keep finding porn in them.
Which of these efforts mentioned above can't be tied to the political right? It is my impression that all or nearly all book banning efforts in America can be.
And have you read Gender Queer? I have. It's remarkable. And yes, graphic and uncomfortable. It has that blowjob scene, true. (I'd argue that it's not porn in that it wasn't there for salacious or prurient purposes.) And a disturbing panel with the narrator metaphorically impaled on a spike during a gynaecology visit. I would definitely not show the book to children.
Happily, it wasn't marketed to children.
"The book was marketed to adults and older teens, and [author Maia] Kobabe has stated that their intended audience was 16-plus."
Also Kobabe: "I originally wrote it for my parents and then for older teens who were already asking these questions about themselves."
It's funny you mention PEN America because they canceled a panel featuring Russian writers because it would offend their presence would offend Ukrainians. They don't actually stand for free expression as they claim to.
There's a little sleight of hand going on when it comes to attempts to "ban books". It's only possible to object to a book that is put in the library in the first place. This means that lists of banned books depend on the political bent of the librarians deciding what to stock in the library. If a library won't stock an anti-trans or other right-coded book in the first place, you won't see any leftists trying to ban it. It's already not there, they don't have to.
You're going to see most book challenges come from the right, if the left can get all they want through the librarians without using challenges.
Is it your contention that public libraries, of the sort that more than 50% of all book challenges in the US are to, do not carry right-coded books? Or that public library book challenges are coming from both leftists and rightists, while schools only carry left-coded books and thus are only challenged by right-leaners?
You do know that you’re citing an openly partisan activist organization?
Not sure if the content restrictions you're talking about are ones set by the media outlets or third party platforms (e.g. Youtube). If it's the latter then pretty much everyone on the left or right thinks they're very unreasonable restrictions (e.g. people having to use euphemisms like "unalive).
Cable and broadcast standards, so at least in part the basic regulations of the FCC.
A lot of those efforts are bad, but public libraries are not significant vectors for ideas in the internet age. The ongoing campaign to make them into high-visibility moral cause is pretty cringe.
The efforts to make them into a high-visibility cause by those who want to remove books from them, or by those trying to prevent that. I'm trying to figure out if you're saying it's bad and also cringe to make a moral cause of banning books or to care enough to bring visibility to book bans and oppose them. (If you're saying a third thing, please clarify.)
(Question mark after "prevent that". Apologies.)
I'm saying a third thing: book bans are terrible and deserve to be opposed. But public libraries are no longer a significant part of most American's lives and the labored attempt to magnify their importance is saccharine and embarrassing.
The actual problem is that there's a universal tendency by the party in power to make government a moral authority, which drills down into all parts of government (like schools and libraries). Society means getting along with people with different moral beliefs and values. Using the power of the government to force moral values weakens society.
We should be concerned when someone with government power uses that power to proselytize their moral code to the public, especially when those individuals aren't elected. In a more trustworthy society, we'd have methods in place to monitor and ensure that those with government power don't abuse that authority. At the moment, that random public pressure is the only way to do that seems problematic, but it's not the root problem.
>"The actual problem is that there's a universal tendency by the party in power to make government a moral authority, which drills down into all parts of government (like schools and libraries)."
Glib but earnest response: that's (part of) why neither of those institutions (along with many others) should be government-run.
Any power in the hands of politicians & bureaucrats will be abused at times, so giving them any more than is absolutely necessary inevitably worsens that problem.
"that's (part of) why neither of those institutions (along with many others) should be government-run."
From a theoretical perspective, I agree. The problem is how to get there from here, when the intermediate steps seem to involve a lot of angry unemployable uneducated that are on welfare and willing to vote for anyone that promises them more government benefits. But that's another discussion.
Not everyone has access to the internet.
I think that's technically true, but false in most every way that counts. A quick sanity check supports that: 95% of US adults use the internet now, and the lowest-usage age group (65+) is a 88%. (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/)
More importantly, for anyone motivated to seek ideas and information out, there are no barriers to finding them, except perhaps the sheer amount of material.
Lack of access to the internet-- or lack of private access-- would be more common for young people.
The point is to reject the humiliation ritual. We will not eat the bugs*, we will not suffer LGBTQ indoctrinatory texts in our school libraries.
*I know nobody’s trying to make anyone eat bugs.
I sympathize with the impulse to protect children; I say that as a libertarian bibliophile.
I do too, though "for the children!" is a common refrain that I've long grown skeptical of the sincerity of.
https://themillions.com/2012/03/ban-this-book-an-uncensored-look-at-the-lorax-and-other-dangerous-books.html
The books are still legal and available.
Small inconveniences make a large difference.
school libraries have finite space, so by definition the vast majority of books ever written will be "banned" from them while readily available at book stores/Amazon/everywhere else.
I don't think this rates at 1/100th of the importance that seems to get placed on it.
... and parents and pressure groups, rather than development experts, educators, or librarians, should be the ones deciding what goes in those collections?
Ignoring that more than 50% of the ban requests are from public libraries, not school ones (see link to google sheet and ALA above), "people can still purchase the books" doesn't seem like a great reason not to be concerned about efforts to remove them from public and school libraries on ideological grounds. "I don't want my children having easy access to books I don't want them reading" is a lot more privately implementable and morally defensible than, "I don't want your children to have easy access to books I don't want my children reading," even if we do scope this discussion to just school libraries.
yes actually the taxpayers should have a say in what goes into the taxpayer funded things.
Also given the track record of "development experts" and "educators" on things like phonics I'm not sure they should be afforded the deference you are giving them
Thank you for sharing your stance. I'm not familiar with your "phonics" reference. We disagree on whether to trust experts and probably on what the goal of these book challenges is. Hopefully we can find common ground about information access being important, especially to a wide range of viewpoints.
Meta-comment on the comments: In all seriousness, this thread on book-banning in public libraries and (especially) public schools is really interesting. Even a generation or two ago, libraries were hardly a major source of obscene, subversive, counter-cultural, etc. information for kids, notwithstanding the occasional (and usually convenient and fishy) anecdote from an intellectual adult. Now, as others have pointed out, the books on the library are much less important than the internet (which can be accessed at a lot of libraries). I doubt most of the objecting parents really believe their kids are likely to change genders or “turn gay” or hate America as an incorrigibly and systemically racist nation simply by stumbling on some books in the library. (Of course, the most controversial books get signal-boosted and sometimes put on literal tables in prominent places by the attempts to ban them – an irony that probably deserves more comment.) The book disputes are hot and high-profile primarily because they are skirmishes in a cultural proxy war waged by adults against other adults. That’s not to say that the opposition to these books doesn’t involve concerns about children. It’s remarkable how many girls (“at birth”) of my kids’ generation have decided that they’re non-binary and/or gay and/or (less likely) want to fully transition. The reasons for this phenomenon are core aspects of the heated debates. Is it because the kids found and read a few books in the library? Surely not, but there is something in the cultural air that peripherally affects school and public libraries. Some parents are worried about this and are looking for obvious if not-exactly-central battles to fight. Of course, some parents take their kids to Drag Queen Story Hour.
Hey Moral Particle, Thanks for the meta-commentary. Sidestepping the library issue for a moment, I do have a couple points about your aside (which don't contradict it, but do propose a plausible reason for the phenomenon you mention some parents being worried about.
'It’s remarkable how many girls (“at birth”) of my kids’ generation have decided that they’re non-binary and/or gay and/or (less likely) want to fully transition. Is it because the kids found and read a few books in the library? Surely not, but there is something in the cultural air that peripherally affects school and public libraries.'
Point one: I can't speak to the trans experience, but people don't 'decide' their sexuality so much as realize who they're attracted to.
Point two: It seems at least plausible that the thing in the cultural air could be that, with increased social awareness of gender nonconformity, your kids' generation a) has the vocabulary to describe what they're going through, b) has less (though still some) taboo around articulating what they're going through, and thus c) is more open about sharing their experience. This could result in gender-nonconformists being more visible and less closeted, even if they're not a larger proportion of the population than they used to be.
Thanks for the reply!
That’s a reasonable and (I think) mainstream interpretation. Putting aside gender identity to focus on sexuality, there’s an interesting and vigorous debate between Bryan Caplan (betonit Substack) and Sungjoo Yoon (Napoleonic Substack) about some of these issues. I don’t find the genetic analyses on either side particularly compelling, and I don’t know how you could rigorously determine what a baseline percentage of “true” or “natural” level of sexuality is or test whether (1) some communities in the contemporary U.S. culture engage in persistent “hyper-public celebration of gayness” and (2) whether such celebrations result or even could result in anyone’s “decision” to be “gay” or “queer” as opposed to a “discovery” that one is fundamentally “gay” or “queer.” Could there be some instances of one and some of the other? The suggestion is usually met with scorn and even calls for cancellation (we’re back on the cancel-culture topic, hurrah!). Doesn’t such a retrograde attitude lead to the horrible and ineffective “Pray Away the Gay” camps? Not necessarily. Nobody doubts that numerous gay people historically repressed their sexuality and pretended to be straight for social reasons. To suggest that some – maybe just a few, maybe concentrated in certain generally young age groups – might repress their sexuality and pretend to be queer for social reasons doesn’t seem so outlandish or even offensive. In any case, it’s not at all clear that it’s a reason for concern, even if one understands how socially and/or religiously conservative parents might believe otherwise.
There are many, many communities online with thousands of people claiming to be teenagers or young adults who "thought" they were trans for this very reason. Unfortunately, the topic is too politicized for good statistics to be available, last I checked; but if you look at e.g. the Reddit "de-transitioning" sub, it's fairly evident that these people are mostly what they claim to be (check out the post histories) and that the proposed influence on young people today is at least happening /sometimes/.
The thread only reinforced my belief that the left can't be given a single cm. Look at how many times people had to press Aaron to say what he obviously wants. It's obvious he was so indirect about it because he knows it looks bad to say that he wants books with illustrated sections on blowjobs to be in children's libraries.
>it wasn't marketed to children.
>I do trust school librarians to choose appropriate books for the collections
>Hypothetically, I'd want those who know much more than me about child development to provide access to it to those for whom it's appropriate
And of course, he phrases it this way because he knows the credentialed midwits who fill the ranks of library administrations all lean his way and so he's technically telling the truth, except he only cares about the outcome. He wouldn't feel the same way if most of the experts wanted to keep books with illustrations of blowjobs out of their libraries.
Never agree with a leftist policy, no matter how reasonable it seems, no matter how many safeguards they put in to satisfy you, no matter how many panels of experts they promise will keep things reasonable.
> But the left is *not*, *not*, saying "we used to have free speech, until the right stopped that".
I'll say it, you guys did McCarthyism, kept gay people in the closet, and you got the Dixie Chicks canceled for correctly opposing the Iraq War. This is just the chickens coming home to roost. You're mad the shoe's on the other foot now.
Better?
> If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught you
> that. It obviously hasn’t, so try a different strategy.
This confuses two different positions: "Cancel culture doesn't exist, but if it did it would be a good thing" and "Cancel culture is really bad, but one-sided cancel culture is even worse". Obviously not all conservatives, but at least half of those you quoted learned very well that cancel culture is bad, they just view the alternative as worse and explain it quite clearly.
On the other hand, have you seen a single progressive admitting that they realize now that cancel culture is bad, and proposing a truce? If not, then clearly there's more work to be done.
> The hidden decision here is whether to treat people as collectives or individuals.
Nope. The point is that canceling a Home Depot cashier is supposed to send a shiver down the spine of a whole lot of onlookers. That's all, this is not a retribution, this is terrorism, in the purest meaning of the word.
*When* we will see random progressives saying things like "this can happen to me, I don't like it, how about a truce?" we will have to discuss the issues of collective action and all that. Until then the beatings must continue.
> Jefferson and Madison wrote the First Amendment to defuse the entire conflict from above, and
> everybody remembers them, and it actually made a long-term difference.
They came from a culture that learned that Cancel Culture was bad at the hands of the British and crossed the ocean to escape it. The same was true of most of their audience. I've seen claims that the entire "classical liberalism" thing was the result of Catholics massacring Protestants and vice versa until both sides got really fed up with the constant bloodbath.
The problem with your proposals is that they put the cart before the horse, you can't solve the cancel culture when half of the country *enjoys* the cancel culture. You don't have a plan for convincing them that cancel culture is bad actually, and while they are unconvinced they will simply not do any of the things you might come up with.
Hurting the people who hurt us until at least some of them realize that not hurting each other is preferable is a plan. It's not guaranteed to work, but the alternative is guaranteed to not work.
> half of the country *enjoys* the cancel culture. You don't have a plan for convincing them that cancel culture is bad actually, and while they are unconvinced they will simply not do any of the things you might come up with.
This, this, this and so much this.
> On the other hand, have you seen a single progressive admitting that they realize now that cancel culture is bad, and proposing a truce? If not, then clearly there's more work to be done.
Couldn't you also make the inference that what you're doing isn't working?
> They came from a culture that learned that Cancel Culture was bad at the hands of the British and crossed the ocean to escape it.
I don't think that's an accurate summary. Puritans went over to have a church purified of Catholicism, Virginians went over to make money...
> Couldn't you also make the inference that what you're doing isn't working?
It only got a chance to maybe produce some results literally after Trump got shot.
I want to clarify in no uncertain terms and without mincing words: in my opinion this should be understood as terrorism, plain and simple. Not as a rightful retribution, not as a punishment for evil deeds, not as a collective punishment in particular, but something that chills the enemy's blood: "I can be next".
That woman was canceled for an AIDS joke in 2015, that was when cancel culture reached full speed. Since before then Scott and other people, myself included, wrote thoughtful missives to the left explaining why cancel culture is bad. This produced zero results, objectively. As in, we got a bunch of people on our side, but the people who really enjoy the righteous high from canceling weren't swayed a bit. A more militant version, "canceling is bad and we will cancel them until they get it," would have worked even better on our new allies--and would have *some* chance of working on our enemies. And we've been only trying it in earnest for a week.
I just really don't see any alternative.
I disagree about it just being since Trump was shot. People on the right have been trying to cancel people on the left as well for a while (Al Franken was a notable example years ago, though it was easy for the Dems to remove him as they could also replace him). They became more successful after Elon bought twitter.
> This produced zero results, objectively. As in, we got a bunch of people on our side
Getting a bunch of people on your side doesn't sound like zero results. People have been listing off anti-woke liberals, and that seems like an accomplishment. There are organizations like FIRE & Heterodox Academy which aren't dedicated to the political right, but are to the cause of free expression against the cancellers, and I think that counts for something.
I think that it's the first time everyone agrees that it's The Cancel Culture (on the right) and not isolated incidents. A public person getting canceled is different from a random Home Depot employee.
> Getting a bunch of people on your side doesn't sound like zero results.
Yes, but is it enough? Are we winning the hearts and minds of cancel culture enjoyers?
I mean, if *I* were to argue against my position, I'd point out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omagh_bombing for example, which basically ended the Troubles as far as I understand. But arguing as myself, I'd point out that we are not so lucky to have cultural terrorism supported by a minority of the population, with the active part scoring an extremely foolish self-goal. Like, the implied course of action is to do nothing except whine and hope that at some point some truly atrocious canceling will happen and then everyone be like, oh well, that definitely went too far, let's condemn it. I don't see it happening because I have not seen anything like that happening in the past decade of cancel culture dominance. The oppressors are happy to oppress and show no remorse.
Incremental progress won't feel like "enough", but it can still be the long-term winning strategy.
> half of the country *enjoys* the cancel culture.
I didn’t even know this. Half enjoy it? I obviously live in a bubble. Can you link me to your source?
>On the other hand, have you seen a single progressive admitting that they realize now that cancel culture is bad, and proposing a truce? If not, then clearly there's more work to be done.
I've seen about as many as right-wingers admitting that the right does in fact cancel people. (Which is to say, a small but significant number on both sides, because both sides are not monoliths.)
> I've seen about as many as right-wingers admitting that the right does in fact cancel people.
Literally every single thing Scott quoted in the beginning of the post admitted that the right cancels people. The only thing that can be discussed about it is which ones are gleefully screaming "it's our turn" and which expressed the idea that I tried to clarify in my comment, that a one-sided application of cancel culture rules will never result in the left getting fed up with cancel culture.
How many people on the left are getting fed up with it? Freddie DeBoer, and only because a lot of it is in fact friendly fire? I'm sorry but I don't trust the enemy to fundamentally reject cancel culture because of friendly fire, I'd only expect them to get somewhat better at not doing friendly fire.
Again, look, I don't claim to have a foolproof solution, just a solution that *might* work if we are so lucky. I observe the absolute absence of anything resembling a solution from the high road side.
This is a rare comment of someone who thinks cancel culture is terrorism and support it at the same time.
No, I believe that the only way to establish a cultural norm against terrorism is to terrorize the terrorists, until they decide that maybe it's not worth it.
Well, maybe not the only way, I'm all ears for practical counterproposals.
>I'm all ears for practical counterproposals
Make firing for political views (probably _particularly_ for mainstream political views, say those that 25% or more of the population holds) illegal? Particularly when expressed at any time other than work hours?
OK, so why don't you make it?
I feel that the discussion happens on two separate levels. Proposals like yours rely on an assumption that we have the political power to pull social engineering tricks like that. We don't. If we did, the problem would have solved itself. I'm asking for realistic solutions to gaining the necessary political power, to getting a significant fraction of the left to stand up against cancel culture.
If they did there would be no need to codify anti-cancel culture into law in the first place, it will just disappear. No corporation would fire an employee for a risque twitter joke if it were socially disapproved. But we are not in that world, so I'm asking how do we get there? Continue to whine or hurt them back?
Many Thanks!
>Proposals like yours rely on an assumption that we have the political power to pull social engineering tricks like that. We don't.
Well, Trump has 60/40 odds of being the next POTUS. Depending on what happens to the Senate and House, might there be the political power to do it?
>to getting a significant fraction of the left to stand up against cancel culture.
That is an alternative path. I don't know which is more realistic. The center-left stood by and just _let_ the Woke take control of most of media, most of education, HR departments... I don't _see_ them pushing back against the Woke, except maybe e.g. Bill Maher... Maybe try to publicize the "friendly fire" cases and try to built a revulsion against cancelling? It seems like trying to shame the Woke, and the Woke seem impervious to shame, self-righteous even when proclaiming utter nonsense.
I lean towards trying to use law to disarm them, if at all possible.
In lieu of an upvote button, I just want to say you've perfectly put into words exactly what I was feeling about all this. I'm aware comments like this are low value, but I always appreciate it when I get them myself so I'm paying it forward.
When you write
> "Politicians should dismantle the government apparatus propping up cancel culture. Certainly the sorts of things mentioned in the Twitter Files count here [..]"
what kinds of things are you talking about? Because from what I understand, the Twitter Files didn't really show much at all, and the summary on Wikipedia says it contained a lot of "false assertions". Sure, it also says that the Twitter files showed that Twitter allowed a U.S. military middle east influence campaign but that has nothing to do with cancel culture.
They showed that the Biden government exerted pressure on Twitter to censor speech it didn't want spread on the platform eg suggestions the Covid vaccine was not safe, the 2020 election was stolen, etc. It presumably did this on other platforms as well, but Elon Musk didn't buy other platforms and expose censorship, so we don't know for sure the extent of it.
But how did they "exert pressure", beyond just talking with Twitter? I wouldn't call it a "government apparatus propping up cancel culture", I would say there are Twitter processes "propping up cancel culture" (e.g. moderating, removing misinformation).
The problem is who gets to be the arbiter that defines misinformation? If I am very left wing, I think "misinformation" is saying "trans-women are not women." If I am very right wing, I think "misinformation" is saying "some historical records cast doubt on the existence of Jesus." I want to live in a society where both of those people can express their opinions, even if others disagree.
I'm just saying that removing misinformation wasn't forced by the government but decided by Twitter. If the government could force Twitter to remove misinformation before Elon bought it then they could do it after too. But Twitter now does a lot less moderation and removes a lot less misinformation so if someones dislike how Twitter was before then they should blame previous Twitter leadership/moderators and not the government.
Yeah, Elon definitely told the would-be censors exactly where they could shove it. Good for him.
The point is that the government has no legal right to actively censor speech - that's in the First Amendment. So all they can do is this dubious "pressure" campaigns with private companies. But you're right that if an Elon Musk is in charge, and is willing to take some hits to his reputation and bank account, he can absolutely be a champion for free speech.
I feel like that's too black-and-white. Yes, the government hasn't been literally forcing Twitter to do things in such a way that Twitter was powerless to say no. At the same time, I think it's naive to suggest that getting a message saying "Hello, good citizen, we're the government and we want you to do X" won't exert a lot of pressure on the recipient to do as asked.
Messages were likely more along the lines of "Hello, fellow Good Person On The Right Side Of History, it's come to our attention that you haven't brought deplorables sufficiently under control, which seems bad. By the way, you know that we have cool parties that nobody would want to miss!"
I don't think the government even needed to *imply* a threat, because Twitter was on their side. Twitter wants to be known as the place where you can hear the latest news as it happens, not the place where unhinged conspiracy theories circulate freely. So if the government goes to them and says "You have some unhinged conspiracy theories about COVID-19 gaining traction," Twitter's natural reaction will be "yeah, that's not a great look for us, we'll clean that up" rather than "how dare you suggest we censor our users."
Twitter was never a neutral champion of free speech, before or after Elon took power. They want the speech that appeals to normies who will click on ads.
(Edit: Also, given that this is the pandemic we're talking about, probably some people on Twitter's Trust and Safety team was afraid that spreading misinformation about Covid could literally get people killed. Like, that's not strictly a business incentive, but it had to have been on people's minds at the time.)
The basic accusation is that the government was using implied threats or bribes (e..g. favorable legislation with respect to the Communications decency Act) to get Twitter to take down stuff, which made it State Action., and a violation of the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court agreed with Pazzaz about this recently, in Murthy v Missouri. If you read the opinion or listen to the oral arguments, you can get a good sense of what conservatives are alleging happened, how the court reasoned about it, and where the current legal line is.
(The line (IANAL) seems to be: the government can tell social media who to censor; they don't have to obey; the government is breaking the law when they try to threaten social media to make them obey. In this case, there's no evidence of such threats being made.)
Many conservatives think the administration made a veiled or implicit threat of unfavorable regulation if the social media companies didn't censor their users. If so, they did a good enough job veiling that they got away with it. Who knows where the truth lies.
Pretty dubious though.
Like, if Musk gives a suitcase full of money to a US government employee, that ermployee is in trouble even if it is claimed that no corrupt facor was being given in exchnage.
Giveng the government a valuable favor in th e gform of censorship of stuff the government doesnt like carries a stong implication that some corrupt benefit was being provided in exchnage, even if you cant prove it.
You should listen to the SC oral arguments, there are good points on both sides. The government has to be able to say stuff to people, to argue in support of their interests, without it being automatically assumed to be a threat just because they're the government.
Who need threats? Compliments work just fine.
That's a nice eyeball you have there. Very... round. It'd be a shame if anything happened to it.
It's "the implication".
It is absolutely incredible how Wikipedia still has a reputation of neutrality, instead of being known as the hyperpartisans they are. Unless you do know that, and cynically exploiting that reputation to launder your own position.
It's accurate about apolitical stuff; shores up their reputation.
I wouldn't say that - not only are there plenty of times where articles are used by people to push their own non-political ideas, but half the articles of any decent length - at least the ones not about clear subjects where it's obvious what should go in, like individuals or cities - are just plain poor quality.
> the summary on Wikipedia says
Do you believe the partisans on your side agreeing with you is evidence in favor of your side?
This article reminds me of the golden rule of “do unto others”. And as a rule that’s been around for a bit and seemingly stood the test of time, it probably a lesson worth heeding (even after you remove all the religiously nonsense of the source material). So thanks for the reminder.
That’s true. That golden rule probably doesn’t apply to nation-states. And it wouldn’t apply even to individuals when it comes to self-defence. No one would advise just bending over if someone wishes to do you (or your country) physical harm.
But it seems most of cancellation occurs over concepts and ideas, where the fragile in the crowd wish to punish someone for wrongthink or wrongspeak.
As you say, the courts are there to arbitrate “wrongdo “ or actual egregious acts; whereas the things people get cancelled over are too petty for courts to bother with.
I believe this too, the trouble is I want what's best for myself and others and I'm not convinced licence brings out the best in people.
I want others to ensure that people who publicly call for the assassination of their political opponents are ostracized from my community. The Golden Rule dictates that I must help others to ostracize people who publicly call for the assassination of their political opponents from their communities.
Do unto others until they stop doing unto you.
I think that misses the basic point of the rule.
Also, as Scott posted in reply to someone else: an eye for an eye for an eye for an eye……
I haven't sorted my thoughts about this yet, but it strikes me as significant that "coordinating toward a pareto optimum" does actually require coordination. This is feasible within a faction, but between factions it's harder.
If others outside your faction aren't actually willing to parley, (or if there's no central authority with whom to parley; i.e. notice that the culture wars don't have Commanders in Chief who decide the terms/conditions of surrender), then escalation really does seem like the only action that makes sense.
Am I missing something?
1) We got Kamala because Biden promised to select a black female VP, which massively narrowed the pool of possibilities. (My suspicion, BTW, is that he made this promise as the only palatable way to avoid pressure to select Bernie as his VP)
2) IIRC Biden's dismal approval rating was actually the highest approval rating of any G7 leader before the recent UK election. Post-Covid inflation is everywhere and voters hate it and blame the party in power. Biden/Democrats have actually handled this challenge really well by world standards.
3) You say, as an argument against cancellation, that cancellation generally targets members of one's own camp rather than the other camp. This is true for the left wing, whose tendency to infight is legendary ("People's Front of Judea", more recently Ralph Nader, Jill Stein, "Genocide Joe" re Gaza, etc.). I don't think it's actually true for the right wing (for example, the Christians enthusiastic voted for an adultery who appointed SC justices who overturned Roe v Wade). The very example you are talking about (re assassination attempt) is rightists cancelling a leftist, not a rightist.
"(My suspicion, BTW, is that he made this promise as the only palatable way to avoid pressure to select Bernie as his VP)"
Ooo interesting theory, I like it. How do you reply to the objection though that in modern times its very rare for presidential candidates to choose their major opponent as their vice president?
How about, not his major opponent.
I think Biden deliberately picked a weak VP, and then undercut her once in office, in an effort to avoid being pushed aside for his VP. It ultimately didn't work.
(My suspicion, BTW, is that he made this promise as the only palatable way to avoid pressure to select Bernie as his VP)
No, it was a sop to win the support of Jim Clyburn and the Congressional Black Caucus, which is what saved Biden's candidacy by throwing their weight behind him in South Carolina and other heavily-black state primaries.
> I don't think it's actually true for the right wing
Do you remember the acronym "RINO"? The Tea Party era had a quite a bit of infighting...
Trump is retruthing that he wants military tribunals held against Liz Cheney. Her and other right wingers who were critical of Trump's election fraud lies were repeatedly subject to harassment and pressure from other Trump supporters to tow the party line. Mike Pence was targeted on Jan 6 by chants calling for his hanging while Trump egged on his supporters by blaming Mike Pence via twitter and in the speech before the march to the Capitol. There's a huge right wingers cancelling right wingers epidemic.
The main thing I got out of this was a terrifying insight into the other side's echo chamber, and how different the "realities" we each live in are.
The mobs of online trolls who were sending death and rape threats to JK Rowling over some questionable tweets definitely exist. And while many people in my social circle dislike Rowling for what she's gone on to say, they don't agree with or participate in the online threats.
More fairly, there have been cases where people have been denied a platform to speak at a university (or worse, lost their job) over their viewpoints. I _do_ know people who, as undergrads, participated in protests against speakers at university. But as Scott says, there's a smooth spectrum between 'cancel culture' (and especially the kind of mob psychology that means it often gets pointed at the wrong targets) and social norms, boycotts, etc. The people who participate in these things are aware of the paradox of tolerance, and think anti-hate-speech laws and customs are important, but generally don't have a coherent philosophy of where to draw the line.
But on the right, there's also been plenty of cancellation, although the "online hate mob" form _might_ be less prevalent? (I'm not sure, I tend to have a better idea of how my own tribe is destroying itself.) There have been protests around the world against drag shows, with the explicit aim of trying to get them cancelled (or banned). The National Trust, a heritage charity here in the UK that looks after old fancy buildings and bits of countryside, has been the subject of a very concerted (but so far unsuccessful, fortunately) cancellation attempt that started in 2020, when they dared to produce a report examining the historical links between their properties and the slave trade.
The authors of the comments Scott has collected seem to think that all Democrats are a threat to democracy by virtue of cancel culture, and if you look at online left-wing rage-bait factories you'll see a pervading view that all Republicans are a threat to democracy because of how Trump broke with all norms in 2020 and refused a graceful transition of power - there was a coordinated attempt to overturn the election results, leading up to the events of January 6, 2021.
Even looking at the comments on this post, many of them argue from a point of view that the Other Side is all the same and all buy into their great evil sin.
If these are the polar opposite worlds we live in, and the level of threat we each perceive from the other side, it's hardly surprising that people are discussing resorting to violence.
So I guess this boils down to another generic comment about how scary polarisation is. In general I agree with all the actual points Scott made.
>There have been protests around the world against drag shows, with the explicit aim of trying to get them cancelled (or banned).
Protesting against X to get X itself banned isn't cancellation. The protesters didn't usually look up the drag show performers, find the ones who had regular employers, and complain to them to get them fired. They were only trying to stop the drag show titself, they were perfectly happy with drag show performers making a living in otherr ways.
HTF did drag shows, etc get on the cultural and political docket? That whole world is about as significant as a fart in the wind. I'm just baffled.
The answer is "because someone decided to make it political". Drag queen story hour was intentionally created by activists; it wasn't just drag show performers randomly deciding "i'll get a book from the library and while I'm here, may as well entertain some kids". They have over 50 chapters now.
Yes...'activist' culture is not healthy.
I don't care at all at this moment about "what the recent historical record shows" or etc , but I'm applauding Scott for appealing to principle. Even most of the practical reasons adduced, like the rhetorical "what could possibly go wrong?", are still matters of principle because they are the considerations that gave rise to liberal prioritization of free expression in the first place. I even hold out a little hope that, because of his (earned) outsized platform, Scott is not just pissing into the ocean here & might have a tiny chance of actually having a positive impact. In general I fear that this chapter of the conversation is going to be just like all the other chapters, endlessly distracting & infuriating until the next installation cuts it fruitlessly short, & the Circle of Life, Revenge, Dialectic, whatever you want to call it, keeps on spinning. I'll just add, with my inconsequential groatsworth, that principle is on the side of _thought_, & revenge is just more same old same old. That doesn't guarantee principle will win! Not short term and not even arc-of-history long term. But it does clarify which side to be on if you want to think, not react.
I am generally very apolitical, but when I read about this stuff, I always think about one specific aspect of it.
For me, the most concerning aspect of this is the mixing up of commercial transactions with ethics/politics. This is something that seems mostly unique to american political life as far as I'm exposed to it - the notion that commercially transacting with someone (buying their products, employing them, consuming media they produce) means financially supporting them, which means any counterparty to such a transaction must wholeheartedly support whatever political/ethical views. I've seen it in other cultures/countries, but less.
In other words, I firmly believe in commercial transactions that are limited in scope enough that they don't include "the good in this world". When I am being hired or hiring someone, I really don't want to think about their ideological positions, and I don't want my employer to think about mine - I have job responsibilities to fill/be filled, and all that should matter is my (or the candidate if I'm hiring) capacity to fill them. The notion that I must also be conscripted to fight someone's political war in this process really concerns me.
Does this "principle" have a name and has anyone discussed it in depth? I feel like I'm dancing around it and throwing examples at it, but IDK if I'm managing to define it right.
I personally refer to it as the "pecunia non olet" principle. It's more directly applicable to SELLING to bad people than buying from them, but I think it generalizes well enough.
>The notion that I must also be conscripted to fight someone's political war in this process really concerns me.
Very much agreed!
Totally irrelevant pedantic comment, but I can't help myself:
The Aten/Amun priesthood vs Jefferson/Madison comparison at the end is appalling how on earth does that make it in, dude? :D
I'm pretty sure the story of Aten/Amun survived in the minds of the priests/nobles of Egyptian civilization for at least 5x the time in which the US has existed. We don't know about it cos you know 1300BC vs 1700AD
I didn't want to be the pedant in the comments, but I thought the exact same thing when I read that part.
They did a good job canceling Akhenaten, since Egyptologists didn't really know of his existence until specific archeological finds in the 19th century. He was removed from compiled king lists and all. But yeah the memory certainly endured for a few generations, it seems to have been a somewhat traumatic episode in Egyptian history.
Besides, ironically, the story of Akhenaten is *now* one of the best-known from Egypt, arguably precisely because of his cancellation of Amun and other gods.
I primarily know about it because of the connection to King Tut.
That made me realize that Scott's statement that "nobody remembers" the priests of Amun is straightforwardly false: Tutankhamun was the leader of that faction (at least symbolically) and he's certainly more famous than Jefferson and Madison. Probably more due to his tomb and mask than his actions against Atenism, but still!
A couple of these points are persuasive and worth bearing in mind, namely 5 and 8- we would definitely have to be far more judicious about whom we cancel than the left, and the nature of the "conservative" movement hardly inspires confidence that will happen.
As for the rest I humbly attempt rejoinders from a right-wing perspective.
1. We already knew cancellation was bad and did not need to learn the lesson, but leftists do.
2. I don't know what a Very Smart person would conclude from this, but to a dummy like me it suggests right-wing cancel culture is going to happen anyway and there's no point complaining about it.
3. Ditto.
4. "This isn’t a knock-down argument. Sometimes you’re right when you think your enemies are bad, and they’re wrong when they think you’re bad. I can’t say for sure this isn’t one of those times." Narrator: it was one of those times.
6. That ship has sailed and we are reaping the rewards of an omnicrisis of competence right now which will only escalate and right-wing cancel culture might even remediate that in part by culling the worst diversity hires.
7. This is just the Moral High Ground restated, with the additional claim that the public likes the moral high ground. Clearly false: we had it anyway and Dems kept winning. It's a 50-50 nation.
9. We should absolutely smash the regime's levers of power, and it is more important. But have you considered that right-wing cancel culture could help us get there by purging the most inveterate supporters of the regime?
Just thoughts, pls no bulli.
The claim that "we (i.e., people on the right) already knew cancellation was bad and did not need to learn the lesson" seems hard to believe. What would you call what happened to Colin Kaepernick, for instance? Or, as another commenter here has pointed out, the "Libs of TikTok" account that just got someone fired from Home Depot has done the same to dozens of people over the last few years. All from the right, not the left.
And, a few decades back when it was the right rather than the left that had most of what you might call the soft social power, it's not like they didn't use that to make life unpleasant for their ideological enemies -- e.g., gay people or people in favour of gay rights. It's just that, because they held a lot of institutional power too, they were able to do it by means more effective than organizing mobs from the bottom up. No need to get people to write to X's employer urging that he be fired for, say, "promoting homosexuality", if instead you can have _laws_ saying that "promoting homosexuality" is illegal. (With those words defined extremely broadly, of course.)
It doesn't look to me _at all_ as if the Right is any more on board than the Left with the principle that people shouldn't suffer severe consequences for expressing their political opinions.
I think that if it seems like "cancellation" is Something The Left Does, that's mostly because the _term_ cancellation is Something The Right Uses, and when someone loses their job (or never gets it in the first place) for being too "progressive", or too gay, or not Christian enough, it _doesn't get called cancellation_ because the people who get upset about it use different words.
> No need to get people to write to X's employer urging that he be fired for, say, "promoting homosexuality", if instead you can have _laws_ saying that "promoting homosexuality" is illegal.
I mean, that's kinda *good*, right? Going through defined legal processes, vs. summoning up an angry mob? The formal legal system, vs. lynching? Arguing genteely in a comment section, vs. stalking them and destroying everything they love in life? One is calm, controlled, accountable, even somewhat reversible. The other is none of those things. Imagine that January 6 did somehow result in Trump being President now - would that really be no different than him having run a slightly better campaign and getting more votes?
Given any particular state of the law, it's probably better for going-after-people to be restricted to what can be done through the law.
Given any particular level of desire to go after people, it's probably not better for it to be _possible_ to do it simply by exploiting laws that criminalize the people you want to go after.
(Obviously what one thinks about any of this depends on whether one thinks the people being gone after are bad people whose actions, words, or whatever _ought_ to be illegal.)
If someone wants people who "promote homosexuality" to be unemployable, is it better if they work towards that goal by stirring up mobs to complain to those people's employers, or if they work towards that goal by lobbying the government to make "promoting homosexuality" illegal? I'm honestly not sure, but it seems like essentially the same impulse in both cases, and if they do the second of those things I don't think it entitles them to boast about how much less cancel-y they are than people who, in a similar situation but with less leverage over government power, do the first instead.
Gay people were at risk of being jailed.
At the object level, I agree: that's not my preferred law.
But I'd rather live somewhere where homosexuality was prohibited by law, than somewhere where homosexuality was discouraged by mob action. And I'd rather live somewhere where homosexuality was allowed by law (my favorite of the 4) than somewhere where homophobes were discouraged by mob action. And I think it's probably easier to get to a healthy version of 3 by way of 1 than by way of 4.
I suppose you're right. I'm British, and from here it's perhaps too easy to forget or overlook the blind spots of the American right. They have one about flags/anthems and a massive one concerning cops, neither of which really apply over here. I agree that thing about the football player or whatever he was is good evidence that some on the Right never did realise cancellation was bad. Libs of TikTok is a bad example though, both because all she does is repost videos of what leftists actually say and do when left to their own devices, as public information, and what people do with the knowledge is up to them; and because she postdates wokeness and leftist cultural hegemony and is thus part of the reaction to cancel culture.
I'm in the UK too! But maybe I spend more time being the sort of online that gets me exposure to US culture.
I don't think I understand your argument about LoTT.
"all she does is ...": The predictable result of her doing this is (in some cases) that a bunch of other right-leaning people all try to get the person she's posted video of fired. We know this is a predictable and desired result because she's boasted about it.
Why does it matter exactly what it is she does in order to get that result? You surely can't seriously be claiming that _merely because she doesn't say the words "hey, everyone, please try to get this person fired"_ that can't be an effect she expects, and hopes, her videos will often have?
"she postdates ...": you argued that people on the right always knew cancellation was bad, even before people on the left started doing it. LoTT (so I claim) is evidence that some people on the right _even now_ don't know cancellation is bad. Isn't the fact that she got started after people on the left started doing cancellations _more_ evidence that the Right didn't "already [know] cancellation is bad and did not need to learn the lesson", rather than less?
I think I would claim that "exactly what it is she does" is the crux of the issue, with her as it is with anyone, yes. Merely because she doesn't say the words "hey everyone get this person fired", she isn't participating in cancel culture - you appear to think that's some kind of scholastic evasion, but it seems to me to be straightforwardly what's at issue here. That intentionality would seem to be the definitive characteristic of a cancel mob - writing to venues trying to get events shut down, to employers trying to get employees fired, to publishers trying to get books withdrawn or not published in the first place, etc. There is nothing wrong or unreasonable about simply reposting other people's unedited videos so that they get a wider audience, and I don't think a helpful definition of "cancel culture" could encompass such neutral activity. The reaction to her videos occurs solely because what's revealed in them is so pathological. That's the main contrast I see between standard leftist cancel culture and what might be described as the right-wing response: they are trying to prevent expression and exchange of ideas, whereas we react to it; and the ideas/expressions they attack are usually dangerous to them precisely because they are defensible, even virtuous, or at least not obviously repugnant - at any rate, potentially plausible to reasonable people who might hear them, which is the exact reason those people need to be prevented from hearing them by the cancel mob; whereas what we attack is the worst of the worst and already in plain sight.
Regardless of the above, your last paragraph is eliding various claims made in different contexts. The reason we are having this discussion in the first place is because there is an open question whether right-wingers should adopt the leftist tactic of cancel culture, despite (and unlike the left) knowing it to be wrong. Libs of TikTok, by your estimation, is someone whose answer to that question is yes, we should; that wouldn't prove that she doesn't know cancel culture is wrong, only that she is willing to use the left's weapons against them. If you were to say that she (and anyone else on our side) is more morally culpable than the left because she is doing what she knows to be wrong and they are not, just as a strange man who kills a woman in the woods is more culpable than a brute bear which does, that would be a consistent and compelling argument I can respect to a degree. It's the Moral High Ground argument that the American right, in the Trump era, has collectively answered with "screw off!". I do think we should be willing to sacrifice the moral high ground and use the enemy's weapons and tactics to defeat them for the greater good, but I acknowledge it's an intractable moral problem which risks making us worse than them.
Question: Since a large fraction of the power of cancellation lies in getting people fired, what about laws to limit that power? We already have various protected groups. It is illegal to fire someone because they are in a protected racial minority, for instance. What if expressing a political opinion, particularly on one's own time, particularly a "mainstream" opinion (say one held by 25% or more of the populace) was an illegal cause for firing? Would that pull some fangs from the woke without becoming like them?
It's a good point and I'm theoretically in favour of giving workers protection from all forms of frivolous and non work related dismissal for things short of crimes. But as always the devil will be in the details and we'd have to judge proposals by their specific merits and demerits. I'm also a bit gloomy about the prospects for success of legislating for things culture won't support, though ofc that's no reason not to try it.
Well, maybe you're right and LoTT would be more clearly engaging in cancellation if she'd said something explicit like "Any teacher who utters the words “I came out to my students” should be fired on the spot".
Oh, wait. https://web.archive.org/web/20220306004129/https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1473787418041995266
I do agree that it's relevant whether the things that she draws attention to are Objectively Terrible, things that any reasonable person would agree one should get fired for.
Like, e.g., organizing a class of young children to hold a little "pride parade", which so far as I can tell means waving some flags around in the name of the idea that "we are all special and our differences should be celebrated". (https://web.archive.org/web/20220325221031/https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1507480007261646856 which, as per your observation that LoTT simply shows what people are doing rather than calling for anything bad to happen to them, is headlined "Stop sending your kids to government run indoctrination camps"). So pathological!
(For the avoidance of doubt, I _completely agree_ that reasonable people might hold that teachers of small children should not be doing that. But it seems to me to fall right into the "things that people probably should not get fired for, but that a prominent Twit could easily stir up enough of a mob about to get them fired anyway" bucket.)
But, I dunno, maybe you think that having a bunch of small children wave rainbow flags in the name of "Pride" is Objectively Terrible, perhaps because you expect that what she's actually telling them behind closed doors is "you should all be having lots of anal sex" or something. But you might want to consider the possibility that there's more symmetry here than you think: the right finds some things on the left Objectively Terrible ("so pathological", "obviously repugnant", etc.) and tries to cancel _those_, while the left finds a different set of things on the right Objectively Terrible and tries to cancel _those_; that the picture isn't, as you suggest, that everyone agrees that the left's cancelling people for saying/doing reasonable rightish things because they see how reasonable they are and are afraid, while the right's cancelling people for saying/doing obviously-repugnant leftish things because they see how obviously repugnant they are.
Your suggestion that maybe what's going on with LoTT (assuming for the sake of argument my claim that she's engaging in cancellation) is not "the right doesn't know that cancellation is morally bad" but "the right knows perfectly well that cancellation is morally bad, but none the less chooses to do it when fighting liberals" is an interesting one, but I'm puzzled by your making it, for three reasons.
First, suppose you're right; I don't see how there are more grounds for applying this to the right than to the left. That is: it seems just as possible to me that (many cancel-happy folks on) the left do in fact regard cancelling people as morally bad, but think the badness is justified by the benefits it brings.
Second, does it _look_ to you like LoTT and her fans are thinking anything even slightly like "this is a morally bad thing we're doing, but we unfortunately have to keep doing it because the stakes are so high"? It doesn't to me. It looks like they're doing it _gleefully_. (As, often, are their left-wing counterparts.)
Third, suppose you're right about this. Then -- as you concede in your second paragraph -- your position amounts to this: "The left thinks cancellation is morally OK, but the right is better because we know it's morally bad but do it anyway.", and that doesn't obviously put the right in a better light than "It turns out that the left and the right both think cancellation is morally OK".
I tend to take leftists at their word that they see "reasonable rightish" things such as stopping immigration and knowing the difference between men and women as repugnant and pathological (although I don't doubt many of them are insincere about it). But that just proves to me that they are morally deranged. I am not going to accept a pure, relativist moral equivalence between their habits of thought and mine. But I expect you're right that some of them see it that way.
LoTT is not cancelling anyone just by stating that they "should" be fired if she doesn't try to make it happen. That's an obviously unreasonable standard. I often declare what I think should happen; you probably do too. When I say something like "transgender drugs and surgeries should be outlawed and the people who induce children to use them should be treated like child sex offenders!" I'm not participating in cancel culture, because I have no power to make that happen and am not undertaking a process which would lead to it. If LoTT herself had ever rung up a school and said "look, this teacher is gay, you must therefore fire them" - or instructed others to do so - and the school had said "right away, miss!" she would be doing right-wing cancel culture; prove me wrong by all means, but I highly doubt that has ever happened or ever could. And if I am right, then all she is doing in your example is "putting the world to rights" in the way everyone frequently does. The contrast between the way wokes in the publishing trade tried to stop Abigail Shrier's book "Irreversible Damage" being published and succeeded in getting David Starkey rejected by his publisher, or wokes in academia succeeded in getting James Watson (!) fired from his research laboratory or drove Bret Weinstein out of his post, is obvious (just four examples out of countless). Cancel mobs are often physical and openly violent, or at least implicitly violent - just ask Posie Parker or any British Jew. You will rarely if ever find that on the right. The closest I can think of is the people who pray near abortion centres, and are now being arrested and jailed for that in both Britain and America; I'm not sure even that is cancel culture, unless the term includes appeals to divine as well as mundane authorities to cancel things! But let's say it does, as it's arguably the same activity - I still think there is no equivalence between trying to cancel abortionists for killing babies and trying to cancel writers and scientists for stating heterodox opinions. There are quantitative and qualitative differences between leftist cancel culture and what we do currently, and sometimes both are present; this is enough to explain why right-wingers' acceptance of a degree of retaliatory cancellation (to the extent that we have so far) is not symmetrical with theirs as you suggest.
The moral quandary is much more interesting and nuanced. You asked three questions. The second usefully answers the first: it's entirely clear that leftists are gleeful about any inconvenience, humiliation or pain they can inflict on their perceived enemies, up to and including death. The Trump assassination attempt proved that categorically - beyond media talking heads reciting boilerplate off a script, I have not encountered a single leftist anywhere online who regretted it or thought it wrong, only a division between those who think it fake and those who think it admirable. Whereas the fact we are discussing this at all proves it is not so clear cut on the right. I already stated LoTT (and I think we can assume her followers) are people who have considered the question "should we adopt leftist weapons to win the culture war?" and answered "yes", which accounts for the activity you see there. I assume that at some point they will have thought about it. For there to be the equivalence you suggest with the woke cancel mobs, they would have had to just launched into it as an obvious and natural first resort against people who disagree with them. If you look you will find plenty of handwringing about this question in conservative journals and podcasts, and many op-eds stating the answer should be "no". Look at it another way: could you be having this conversation with a leftist? You could not: they would rail against you abusively for trying. It's only because I concede that cancel culture is a morally bad thing that I feel a duty to get into these weeds.
And your third question is framed unfairly to me. My position is not that "the right is BETTER BECAUSE we know it's bad but do it anyway". It's that we risk becoming as bad as the left by using their tactics, but the situation is such that we should consider going down this road anyway because we have ultimately to think of a greater good (beating the left). It's the difference between a human being - a reasoning animal made in the image of God - doing something wicked, and a brute beast performing the same act on instinct. I don't think anyone would argue the human is better BECAUSE they know what they're doing what they know to be wrong! It's that good and evil are choices for us, and not for the animals. (As things develop I am increasingly coming to regard the left as subhuman - or perhaps differently human - much against my ideology and inclinations, and with great apprehension of what this could lead to.)
This latest cancellation started with “Libs of TikTok” who’s been active since 2021 and has gotten a lot of people fired without much pushback from the right, who were very sympathetic when she got doxxed.
She has gotten a lot of money and influence from her activities and seems unconflicted about her behavior.
It would therefore be more accurate to say that cancel culture is SOP for both the right and the left and has been for years, and draw conclusions from there.
Gotten a lot of people fired? I'm skeptical. I don't really follow this person, but I've never heard of such a thing happening. What kind of things did they get fired for, and from where?
If there's anywhere in the U.S. that expressing typical Lefty opinions gets you fired, I'd like to know where.
You could Google it!
LoTT claimed to have gotten ten people fired just since the assassination attempt.
Oh, sorry, I meant "fired for the same sort of things people get canceled for, but the conservative version". (I don't really care about LoTT enough to Google it, heh -- just thought you might have examples handy since you seemed better-informed about the individual in question!)
Isn't this a "multipolar trap" from Meditations on Moloch? In the competition within your political party for moral goodness, you have to cancel people in order to gain an advantage over the others [because if bad opinions are violence, how can you NOT cancel?]. Not cancelling is like deciding to not take steroids when everyone else is. Then once everyone in America is trapped and can't get out, it will require government regulation to ban cancelling.
I guess this just goes to show that Tit-for-Tat (and even Tit for 2 Tats and Tit for Tat with Occasional Forgiveness) just isn't a good strategy on a mass scale. It works great for individuals & fine enough on a small scale, but worse & worse as the scale grows and more & more people are lined up on each side, with itchy trigger fingers & personal vendettas.
I.e. Tit for Tat works great when there's 2 people, 1 on each side, and them forgiving each other stops the death spiral of "An eye for an eye!".
It works fine, I guess, when there's 20 people, 10 on each side, and all 10 forgiving the 10 on the other side stops the death spiral. Sure, occassionally a single person *won't* forgive, or will just pretend to forgive, and restart the death spiral... but that can be mostly avoided by having the other 9 monitor & discipline the recalcitrant one to *force* them to bury the hatchet.
It doesn't work when there's 200 people, 100 on each side. If only a single person can restart the death spiral... but you have more & more people, each of whom could snap... then you have an exponentially worsening chance of everyone agreeing to forgive, and a exponentially growing (well, sigmoid growing) chance of even just 1 person dooming everyone with their *personal* inability to forgive.
Things only grow worse at 2000 people, 20 000, 200 000, 2 million... Tit for Tat works great at small scales, where most people live their lives, but if they bring it to the big scales, they're just going to get everyone killed. A difference in scale leads to a difference in kind here, one most people don't intuitively grasp until it's too late & they're *already* locked into the death spiral. You just have to forgive more at these bigger scales, and avoid treating the actions of 1 individual as the actions of an entire side, and have a higher threshold for "We should just murder the entire other side", and learn from history that "If we punish them just a bit more, they'll *finally* get scared & submit to us rather than getting angry & fighting back!" didn't work the previous 100 times, and a thousand other things that go into the difference between us & grunting cavemen.
Or as Scott put it,
"People talk about “liberalism” as if it’s just another word for capitalism, or libertarianism, or vague center-left-Democratic Clintonism. Liberalism is none of these things. Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war.
It was forged in the fires of Hell – the horrors of the endless seventeenth century religious wars. For a hundred years, Europe tore itself apart in some of the most brutal ways imaginable – until finally, from the burning wreckage, we drew forth this amazing piece of alien machinery. A machine that, when tuned just right, let people live together peacefully without doing the “kill people for being Protestant” thing. Popular historical strategies for dealing with differences have included: brutally enforced conformity, brutally efficient genocide, and making sure to keep the alien machine tuned *really* **REALLY** carefully.
And when I see someone try to smash this machinery with a sledgehammer, it’s usually followed by an appeal to “but racists!”
You say we must protect freedom of speech. But would you protect the free speech of *racists*?
You say people shouldn’t get fired for personal opinions that don’t affect their work. But would you let *RACISTS* keep their jobs?
[...]
Ah well. They said a racist thing. Guess we’ve got to kill them."
, in "Against Murderism" back in 2017: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/ (give it a read if you can, the entire thing's great & there's more to it than I can quote here)
I suppose you could argue that peace is watered by blood alone. It is very American at least to believe that the Tree of Liberty requires blood sacrifices from time to time, like an Aztec altar to the Gods; not too far from there to imagining the Dove of Peace only being satiated by rivers of blood.
And wasn't that what Turchin theorized was going on in "Secular Cycles" and "Ages of Discord"? https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/12/book-review-secular-cycles/ & https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/02/book-review-ages-of-discord/ -- he theorized that there were generational cycles of "social contagion" of violence, "social exhaustion" of people getting fed up with the violence/"war weariness", and then "social turnover/loss of immunity" as the years pass, people get old & die, and a new generation grows up without any firsthand experience of why war is bad, only the narrative that War is Glorious.
Still, can't we get this done some other way? Or at least in a smaller way? Perhaps we can get ourselves to recoil in horror from violence *without* first having to attempt to outright wipe each other out, a la what happened in the European Wars of Religion. Perhaps we can recoil in horror just as much from just a few deaths, instead of a few million. Do we *really* need to go through the entirety of the European Wars of Religion again? Or can we learn from the last time & only murder each other for a few days before we get the message, not like multiple centuries?
i.e. There was a progression over time from the European Wars of Religion (lasted a few centuries, consumed an entire continent, killed millions in each war & tens of millions overall, explicit goal often was wiping the other side out) to say The Troubles (lasted a few decades, consumed part of a continent, killed thousands, explicit genocide wasn't the goal compared to the relatively more moderate ethnic cleansing); the Protestants & Catholics still had to work things out by murdering each other, like you said, but they didn't need as much murder this time. Why can't we continue the series and need even less murder this time? Turn the other cheek after merely dozens of murders, not thousands or millions? If you've got to kill back to make a point, for God's sake at least try to *minimize* the killing, not *maximize* it.
Which is to say... if the right wing commentators Scott highlighted *have* to be cold & calculated about this, discussing their plan rather than just flying into a blood rage... they should at least try to be cold & calculated in favor of maximizing their side's chance of success (by cultivating good PR, not throwing away the moral high ground, & showing *some* degree of restraint), rather than cold & calculating in favor of losing oneself to blood rage & slaughtering as many as possible. That's just self-defeating, even if they don't *care* about the lives they're taking. It's the same reason the military has rules & Geneva Conventions & the like about this sort of thing, rather than just gassing & nuking everyone & everything in its path. If they can't turn the other cheek, they should at least try to emulate the military.
And I'm saying, "Murder bad, actually." I don't have to have a plan for "complete resolution" to be able to say, "Less murder is better than more murder.", in the same way you don't have to have a complete plan for transgender kids to be able to say, "Transgenderism bad, actually." (or whatever). If people are insane, being able to deal with that insanity one small step at a time is necessary for dealing with it at all. If instead the lunatics could insist "I don't see a complete treatment plan, THEREFORE I should be able to keep doing whatever I want to kids", then the battle is already lost. Lost to the most fanatical, terminally online, "activist" kind of person, rather than ordinary people like you & me.
One advantage of a conflict inside a nation is that we _do_ have a government more powerful than either faction. I'm not thrilled by adding yet more laws. But cancelling gets much of its power by threatening peoples' livelihoods. If firing people for political comments (particularly on their own time, particularly if they are "mainstream" comments - say something 25% of the population agrees with) were illegal, cancelling would be much less of a threat. The legal system could force disarmament, unlike the international case.
Personal nitpick - "eye for an eye" ends in 2 eyes lost, not infinite eyes lost. The first guy took the second's eye, and the second took the first's.
It's also a limit and a requirement for equal measure - the lord who takes a peasant's eye loses his in return, instead of shrugging and giving the peasant a single gold coin or whatever, and the peasant who takes the lord's eye loses in return, instead of the lord killing him and his entire extended family.
He takes my eye, so I take his, so he takes my other eye, so I take his, so he takes my wife's eye... it can get out of hand.
At the point, you aren't doing "Eye for an eye". He's doing 2 for 1 and broke the rule.
Only if everyone agrees that the first eye being put out was indeed the first eye being put out.
"I'm just getting revenge for the evil thing my opponent did" while completely ignorant of the thing my opponent was getting revenge for.
He's only got two eyes. That's pretty easy to check.
Maybe someone or something else put his eye out.
"If everyone would follow my extremely stringent and authoritarian ruleset to the letter, we'd be living in a utopia"
good luck with that
Not when group identity politics are in play. "One of them" takes my eye, so I take the eye of "one of them". And the response to that involves taking the eye of person #4, because they're in my group. And so forth.
Just like all those people who try to figure out "when" the Israeli-Palestinian conflict started, and wind up going back to the Sea People invading Egypt or something.
That's one of the things the rule was intended to prohibit.
>Just like all those people who try to figure out "when" the Israeli-Palestinian conflict started, and wind up going back to the Sea People invading Egypt or something.
You might be morbidly amused at a musical summary of the past 3000 years in the area that Nina Paley wrote and animated 11 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tIdCsMufIY I found it grimly entertaining, hope you do too! The list of conquests is in one of the comments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tIdCsMufIY&lc=UgzoZxPXz83efecZkG54AaABAg 25 conquests in 3.5 minutes
I definitely agree cancellation is bad full stop and agree with Section 9 that we need to create a social environment where cancellation is structurally as nonviable as possible. I don't feel any urge to defend the right wingers wielding what they think is a stick now in their hands because deep down I don't think they are any more principled than the members of the left who wielded the stick previously.
I'd be interested though in hearing how 2024!Scott squares what he just wrote with 2012!Scott who argued quite convincingly here: https://web.archive.org/web/20161019200037/http://squid314.livejournal.com/309196.html that we can see Revenge (such as cancelling left wingers after the left has been doing this to the right) as an act of Charity towards wider society. Now I'm not saying the vengeful modern right believes they are being at all charitable when they go around cancelling random store workers but the mechanism in 2012!Scott's post works just as well regardless of the mental state and beliefs of the person taking the revenge and society benefits just as much either way.
This is why I personally at least, while not supportive of right wing cancellation efforts, am (for the moment at least) content to ignore their volleys towards the left without any consternation in a way that I wouldn't be were the sides reversed.
The "revenge" in that example involved taking a manager to small-claims court. That's much more formal than revenge via social media mobbing.
Small claims court was one of his proposed retaliations, but he also had "and seeing if I could get a newspaper to take up the story and drag this guy's name through the mud as much as possible.", which seems like it maps pretty well to social-media mobbing.
The general thrust of his argument was "doing everything I could to make the manager regret the decision, even if it's net negative to me, because if everyone did that no one would make that decision", so I think the general idea fits.
That was an "and" rather than an "or", so there's both the formal process determining who was correct, and the publicizing of it.
I agree that he's doing all of those things, but I don't think he's doing them in sequence: if he was unable to win in small claims court, I think he'd still go to the newspaper. In fact, I'd be surprised if he didn't go to the newspaper _before_ his court date since he could do that immediately but might have to wait a bit for court.
Shortly afterwards he writes "My manager would be out an employee and have a court case and an angry mob of newspaper-readers to deal with. ". Note "court case" as opposed to "judgment", suggesting that the newspaper-readers would be angry at the manager _before_ the court case had reached resolution.
In this article court isn't "the formal process I follow to determine whether I have a legitimate grievance", it's "an additional way I can hurt this person I have a grievance against"
I was thinking of it as distinguishing legitimate vs illegitimate grievance so it wouldn't be just another symmetric weapon. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
"Let's cancel the cancellers" is just a modern version of the "There's no freedom for the enemies of freedom" of the the French Revolution Louis de Saint-Just.
I thought the modern version of that was "You can't tolerate the intolerant"?
Worth noting how misunderstood Popper's "paradox of tolerance" is: https://x.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1367869888157646850
I have to agree with what Scott wrote here from a principled free speech stance. Although I'm not convinced that advocating for political assassination is in the same category of general political disagreements that get most people cancelled. I don't think most conservatives will find this article very compelling, though.
From a game theory stand point, if you expect the other side to defect (use their power to cancel opponents, in this case), you should also defect. With this section,
> "Take a second to sympathize. From the Right’s perspective, the Left has beaten, shamed, and terrorized them for at least a decade. Now, the moment they get some chance to retaliate, their enemies say “Hey, bro, come on, being mean is morally wrong, you’ve got to be immaculately kind and law-abiding now that it’s your turn”, while still obviously holding behind their back the dagger they plan to use as soon as they’re on top again."
If your side decides to turn the other cheek, they just get slapped over and over again. Of course, the obvious objection to this is everyone gets a better outcome if both sides cooperate (agree to stop partisan cancel culture). But how do you convince your side to forsake vengeance when the odds are good they just end up being the chumps when the other side defects? "Just let them stab you in the back, you don't want to be the kind of people who backstab" probably doesn't sound very appealing to the guy with a knife hilt sticking out of his back. I really don't know how to overcome the inertia of vengeance, because the first group to stop getting revenge risks getting screwed over with nothing to show for it.
You might be thinking, then everyone just ends up in a perpetual loop of revenge, and that's how you get Moloch. Yeah, pretty much.
I think you are wrong about "most cases". Here's a collection of them:
https://x.com/SoOppressed/status/1282404647160942598
Brendan Eich? There's also been various professors let off because they disagreed with some cultural viewpoint or method of going about things.
I think all the groups need to feel the misery of Moloch for a while, before an enlightening figure arrives on the scene, somehow stands above the fray, speaking loudly and eloquently with a worldview that will elevate everyone.
When that figure arrives, if he can speak to both sides, the message will be well-received. The alternative should be obviously terrible.
As it is.
I think there's a religion based on a similar idea. I wonder what happened to this "enlightening figure" …
The other side is all Nazis, and anyone advocating tolerance of Nazis is a Nazi, and you know what we do to Nazis around here, right?
Spoiler alert: his message wasn't as well-received by the authorities as you might have hoped.
"I really don't know how to overcome the inertia of vengeance, because the first group to stop getting revenge risks getting screwed over with nothing to show for it."
Seems like there are lessons to be learned from non-violent protesters like Jesus, MLK, and Gandhi.
Progressive values are the default in most power centers. You can try to expel the left from those power centers, but it will probably come at the price of your own soul. You can try to tear down those power centers and build new ones, but you'll probably have to make a deal with the devil, and he'll demand your soul, too.
Luckily, there's another way! To paraphrase Orwell:
"If there was hope, it must lie in the [normies], because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of [America], could the force to destroy [cancel culture] ever be generated."
But remember, the culture skews left, so that's the default normie position. To break that stranglehold, you have to expose the hypocrisy of the left, because if there is one thing *everyone* hates, normies included, it's hypocrites.
But you aren't going to expose the hypocrisy of the left by becoming a hypocrite yourself.
No, what you need is a martyr.
Because if there is one thing that *everyone* loves, it's a martyr to a righteous cause.
And yes, that will suck for the martyr(s), at least in the moment, but redemption will come with time. Luckily, the stakes are a lot lower today than they were for Jesus, MLK, and Gandhi. Martyrdom in 21st century America rarely requires actually dying, or even something like jail time. There may be a steep reputational and economic price to pay, but that can be mitigated through supportive social networks of your own.
So there's your blueprint for how to break the perpetual loop of revenge: Step 1) Don't be vengeful; Step 2) Hold yourself to the highest possible standard, so as to put yourself beyond reproach in all the ways that matter; Step 3) Willingly suffer to expose the hypocrisy of cancel culture; Step 4) Take your message to, and win over, the masses; Step 5) Mobilize the masses for change.
I basically agree with this. Interestingly the right sees Donald Trump as their martyr, although he seems to have skipped over steps 1 and 2 and gone straight on to 3, 4 and 5
You write
>Plus or minus a few civil rights laws, cancel culture isn’t implemented at the government level.
And a few sentences later you write:
> Academics should encourage their schools to adopt the Chicago Principles, and businesspeople should encourage their companies to become mission-focused in the style of Coinbase. Ideally these commitments would have legal force, letting students/stockholders sue for violations. Politicians should incentivize the institutions they influence (eg state universities, government contractors) to do this.
If cancel culture isn't implemented at the government level, why would the government level (legal force, sue for violations) be useful in ending it?
Even if it was useful, I wouldn't even grant private companies the right to declare themselves "mission-focused" (i.e. non-political). Picking Coinbase, of all companies, as a company worthy of emulation shows me how much I disagree with this notion.
But even granted all that: declaring the activities of publicly funded institutions as "mission-focused" and therefore outside the political realm is just absurd. What activities should be subject to public scrutiny from within, if not those directly funded by tax money?
Sure, but the crucial difference is that burglary is well-defined as far as the state is concerned. Cancel culture, as Scott writes, is not. That makes it hard, if not impossible, for the state to get a handle on it.
What was wrong with him pointing to Coinbase?
What's wrong is that Coinbase has built its business model around crypto "currency". The crypto ecosystem, from mining to transactions, has considerable environmental externalities, and environmental questions are of course highly political. That makes it all the more important that all of society, including Coinbase employees, may discuss these questions. Not only allowing, but (hypothetically) even legally protecting Coinbase's "mission focus", i.e. ignoring all political questions relating to Coinbase would undermine that fundamental right.
In a more general sense, Coinbase and most other companies only care about politics insofar as it affects their bottom line. Viewed from that angle, "mission focus" is just a euphemism for control over employees who should get to work instead of not working or even interfering with company policy. That seems union-busting-adjacent to me, and since I'm rather in favor of workers' rights, that does not sit well with me at all. And that's also why it seems even more absurd to allow the same for government agencies, with either internal staff or contractors.
TL;DR: Even if legally protecting "mission focus" would have any effect against cancel culture, I find it likely that it would have even worse, unintended consequences on public discourse about company ethics. Coinbase in particular has a lot to answer for because of their business model.
My understanding is that externality comes from them using energy. So would this apply to every business that uses energy?
Yes, but not limited to; it applies to every company, no exceptions (or rather, strictly limited, well-defined exceptions). Every business has externalities and opportunity costs on the societal level. That is why I wrote in my original comment that "I wouldn't even grant private companies the right to declare themselves 'mission-focused'". Every business uses resources (e.g. energy, manpower, raw materials), feeds them into some process, and ultimately produces goods and services. Each of these steps must, in principle, be subject to scrutiny and discussion.
>anyone is allowed to scrutinize and discuss anything they please for any reason at any time.
Not under the "Mission focus" as per Coinbase. That was the specific thing I've been commenting on, not on the overall problem of cancel culture.
The title of this post didn't fully display because of the length and I went into it expecting advice for a very special kind of Bay Area house party.
As the proverb goes, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
See also: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-10-24
That's not the proverb, and has always struck me as exceedingly stupid. The world has more than 2 eyes.
Iterate: eye for eye for eye for eye for eye...
Or recurse.
What's the third eye for?
2nd for 1st, 3rd for 2nd, 4th for 3rd...
Fights do not necessarily end after two punches, you know?
That's why it's a rule of justice.
Wrong. The 2nd is for the 1st and the 1st is for the 2nd.
How could the first be for the second, when the first eye taken was done before the second eye was?
The 1st for the 2nd violates causality.
It started at even, right? Zero to zero? It doesn't have to stop when it hits even.
Just one data point:
I am a follower of the liberal streamer "Destiny". In 2022 he got de-partnered from Twitch because he made insulting remarks about BLM rioters. In 2022 he got permabanned from the platform over drama concerning trans women in sport. In both cases right wing commentators expressed sympathies for his treatment.
Now Destiny has decided to focus aggressively on conservatives. Those conservatives decided pretty much immediately to go after him. He had his Kick account temporarily suspended, and his Twitter account permanently demonetized.
Such is the fate of the center-left commentator. They are caught in the whirlwind of both left and right wing cancel campaigns. center-right figures like Mitt Romney and Liz Chaney are also already on the chopping block.
Yeah this dynamic feeds purity spirals on both sides. Centrist moderates don't have a tribe to back them up.
I daydream about building an electorally viable centrist political movement, but you know. Easier said than done.
Destiny is truly the greatest test of one's commitment to freedom of speech, because he's an insufferable and abrasive little manlet who's certain to piss you off at some point, no matter your political beliefs.
That being said, would you say that the stuff that got him banned from Twitch and what got him kicked off Kick are generally equivalent?
Destiny approves of (neigh further, ADVOCATES) murder of people without trial.
He deserves whatever he gets. From all sides no matter which one he's pandering to at the moment.
This is false.
I can only infer what he believes by what he says.
What did he specifically say?
He was on a little known podcast a few days ago. Piers Morgan. He said a lot of things.
Destiny lost his monetization because he openly celebrated that a guy died and wished for more. If you're going to be a public commentator and you don't control your platform, if you celebrate the murder of your political opponents you will end up with no platform.
And look at the difference here: He insulted BLM and rejected claims that transwomen are women, vs. celebrating a murder and wishing for more political terrorism.
This is one of the big problems with Scott claiming there's an equal right-wing cancel culture. The cancellations here involve things like supporting the assassination of your opponent. The cancellations on the other side involve things like saying that there are two genders, or "all lives matter". There's no equality here even if you can define a broad enough category that technically includes both sides.
Can we get the exact words of him celebrating and wishing for more? Whenever a blue-haired BLM activist is killed by sometime who happens to be black, half the right-wing internet decides to clown on them. I don't get worked up about it: everybody thinks it is very funny when woman's face is eaten by leopards. But hand-wringing when other people do it is stupid.
I forget the exact words, but it was explicitly in the vein of "glad he's dead", and not something with multiple interpretations.
I'd like to agree with Scott but this account of free-speech salvation history is part of the problem. Didn't Jefferson also say the priest is everywhere the enemy of liberty? It follows that society needs to be hyper-vigilant against possible religious back-sliding.
I thought that line was from Diderot, but you're right. (Diderot's expresses the sentiment better though.)
Currently, we don't seem to be at much risk of that unless we have a very big upheaval. The religious elements of the right have been getting weaker politically and weaker in belief over the decades. Just look at the early 1990s-2000s, where the right had quite a bit of power, but was still getting constantly pushed further and further back.
What I'm talking about is more like a founding myth - liberal society began with a purging of the old religion, so it has to be purged again and again ritualistically, regardless of it's actual ascendancy - Adrian Vermeule calls this the liturgy of liberalism. This is the foundation of cancel culture in my opinion.
The religious right in general has had an increased role in the right in the last thirty years. If you look at the 1970s, evangelicals had relatively little political power as an collective. They've ramped up in power over the years, and you can just look at recent Supreme Court decisions to see that they have new power. The Dobbs decision is the most obvious one - an issue that the religious right has focused on for decades and finally got enough power to achieve - but many other cases have also been wins for them. Or look at the recent Ten Commandments law in Louisiana, for something outside of the court system.
Taboo words have always existed in the West. Saying certain words are out of bounds in polite society is not “cancel culture”, and in fact the list of taboo words is a lot fewer than it used to be. For me “cancel culture”, as most people use the term, means punishing people for expressing opinions that were perfectly acceptable in the recent past. In that sense “cancel culture” is a left wing phenomenon because the right wing censorious standards for unacceptable religious heresy, professing Marxist ideology and sexual perversion haven’t become more strict over time, mostly the opposite. Criticizing Israeli behavior might be an exception though, that used to be fairly acceptable in large parts of the right, especially in the oil and gas industries.
> Unless you really lay on the tribal signifiers, it’s hard to find a definition where most Democrats support cancel culture and most Republicans oppose it!
I just looked at one graphic. Does cancellation of famous people make society worse?
Republicans: 75% yes, 8% no. Democrats: 38% yes 38% no.
So... uh...
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?
> if there are right-wing cancellation squads, they won’t cancel Rachel Maddow or Kamala Harris. They’ll get some WSJ writer who puts too few exclamation points after “MAGA!!!!”
No, because turning on itself is a characteristic of the left. The right is much more pragmatic about that.
In the left, to reuse a quote by Brendan Behan, "the first item on the agenda is the split."
This ignores the real dysfunction at the heart of Republican congressional delegations. The inability to elevate retain a speaker without tremendous acrimony has been a theme for 10 years.
I don't know US politics as well as my own country, where we have multiple small left-wing parties, some new-ish, and only 1 or 2 large, well-organised and centralised right-wing parties. But I suspect that even in the US (which the post is mostly about, of course), this Republican infighting doesn't actually do Republicans much damage, electorally. But some writers have forecasted that the Republican coalition will have to fracture, which would change this assessment.
What is a "RINO"?
"Republican In Name Only". I.e. republicans who had reservations about voting for Trump. Although the term predates the orange-man. (although idk what that has to do with the top-comment. is your comment misplaced?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_in_Name_Only
Thanks, but I knew that. My point is that it's so common an idea that there's a standard and widely-used term for it, so no, the Right is NOT pragmatically against infighting.
oops im dumb.
This is, to some extent, the exception that proves the rule. "RINO!", functioning as an insult, is equivalent to "Splitter!".
Also, isn't it true that this term is only a few years old? The right/left distinction I am talking about, which I certainly am not the first to see, is a hundred years old.
Hmm, maybe. Or perhaps your own group always looks fractious compared to the monolithic enemy, and given the overwhelming cultural dominance of the Left, that's the perspective one is typically exposed to.
The term is actually much older: Wikipedia says it was used in 1920s, 1950s, and 1980's. But ignoring those, I read that it's been common since the time of Bill Clinton, and I KNOW it's been popular since the Tea Party movement, circa 2010.
> perhaps your own group always looks fractious compared to the monolithic enemy
That's a great point.
The overwhelming cultural dominance of the Left, insofar as it's true, is localised to (parts of?) the US in the last couple of decades - the left's tendency to split is broader and older. The right really was monolithic and dominant for most of the 20th century, in many parts of Europe including where I'm coming from.
I was actually surprised at how long it took for RINOs to be rejected by Republicans. One of the few underlying principles of conservatism is that values aren't universal truths no matter the time or place, but rather developed over time within communities - hence a greater affinity for isolationism and tradition. A lot of of the RINO's main policy positions ran counter to that, eg our values are the universal truth, so we need to export it at the point of a gun. They said "American values" obviously but that was only window dressing.
What you're describing sounds like the neocons. They are in principle a different group than the RINOs. The Republican party has evolved on the issue of foreign intervention, at least nominally after the colossal fuck-up the the neocons, who during their dominance WERE Republicans in good standing, were seen to bear responsibility for.
On reflection you're right, though RINO does seem more like a low on content slur to outcast or discipline members of the American conservative tribe and so it was commonly applied to neocons as they were being pushed out. Not all RINOs are neocons but all neocons are RINOs, or something like that.
There's a real conflict between the conservative/religious factions of the GOP and the more establishment/business factions. And also the libertarian/freedom caucus types, although to a much lesser degree as there aren't that many of them. Romney and McCain were not very popular among the conservative base for example, being from the very moderate wing of the party. When there are only two parties, everyone has to pick one or the other and try to make their position under that umbrella as advantageous as possible. The parties may look like monoliths from the outside, but that very much isn't the case.
> unlike the enemy
This right here is how you know you've found a person not worth listening to. I genuinely tried giving Sean Hanitty a listen at one point in my life and one of his taglines was "behind enemy lines". That's really all I needed to know about him and I tuned out. If those on both nonexistent "sides" would quit giving credence to idiots who label *your fellow countrymen* "the enemy" we wouldn't be in this mess.
I do believe there are genuinely evil people in power. They aren't the kind that win elections. They don't actually care which "party" is in charge as long as the money keeps flowing and people keep dying. They merely use the party systems to manipulate and control us. Know your enemies, and just because someone voted for Trump (one of those people I just talked about who uses these systems to manipulate) does not make him or her your enemy.
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?
If you live in the US and have citizenship in the USA by definition we are not enemies, but brothers and sisters. Brothers have disputes, sell each other out, maybe even kill each other, but enemies we are not and speaking as if we were is detrimental to solving problems.
> 27 “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. 30 Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. 31 Do to others as you would have them do to you.
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 think that's my point. We should not refer to people we are not actively trying to dehumanize as "the enemy". It's wholly unproductive and leads to the turmoil we are witnessing. If we are enemies, the only solution is war, which is barbaric and evil.
If do unto others isn't the golden standard we are trying to achieve what are we doing as a species? Is raw survival really worth getting out of bed in the morning?
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.
Using Scott's own Mistake Theorists vs Conflict Theorists schema:
Hard Mistake Theorist explains to Hard Conflict Theorists why they shouldn't conflict. Mistake Theorists reading nod along vigorously.
Or alternatively: Hard Mistake Theorist shows the irrationality in the justifications Hard Conflict Theorists have written only as a fig leaf for doing what they intend to do anyway.
Yep.
The suffering is the data. The engine of the process is what it does. Blood for the blood god.
He is my enemy, his continued existence is a negative for my side.
How so?
This article, for example. He wants me to change how I act. At best I would gain but he would gain more. Likelier this would be straightforwardly detrimental to me. So he is a negative.
He is making an argument that cancelling is bad and we should not do it. Do you think cancelling is good? Or do you think that some cancelling is necessary to get us to a state of less cancelling? In either case you should be able to interpret him via "mistake theory" lens rather than assuming he's an enemy.
I'm not Rawls high on dissociatives. Attacks on the enemy are good, attacks on my side are bad. Simple as.
You don't have to feed obvious trolls.
Why do you disbelieve that there exist people who genuinely hate this author and his audience? Because it makes you sleep better?
I think they exist, I don't think they talk like this or would pop their heads in very often, if at all. If you do claim to be one of these people, why go to a place full of people you hate? How is that either fun or productive?
I saw a link to this article in another place, and it was early enough for my comment not to be completely lost, so I took the opportunity. As you can tell, it turned out to be a lively subthread. At double the post age from that, I made an observation that I still was literally the only person here who is in favor of the things Scott appeals us to drop.
Do you see any distinction between yourself and the folks cheering for cancellations on the right, or is it all who-whom?
Clearly he thinks that at least some people don't consider him an enemy and might listen to what he has to say.
Yes, those people are on his side. He is addressing mine.
I’m on your side, and I don’t think it’s fruitful to divide the world like this. Yes Scott is more left wing than both of us. Nevertheless he appeals to higher principle here, and I believe that’s the right thing to do, regardless of which side you’re on.
Unless you think that appealing to higher principle is just dog whistling for one side or the other, in which case I’m not sure what I could say to convince you otherwise. But perhaps consider that’s how the woke left cancel squad treats centre left liberals who didn’t put enough exclamation points after BLM!!!
Perhaps consider that the only principle that matters is that there are no bad tactics, only bad targets.
Scott is an enemy of cancel culture on both the left and right. He never endorsed cancelling anyone, so he's not a hypocrite selectively asking mercy from his enemies.
I never called him a hypocrite, I called him an enemy. He might be against the use of this weapon by both sides, that doesn't make him an ally or a neutral.
What's he an enemy of, in your estimation?
I'm who, not what.
No I mean the principled position that you adhere to. How is Scott opposed to that? I'm conservative fwiw, so consider this a safe space.
My only principle is the distinction between a friend and an enemy.
So you can achieve a more complete and lasting hegemony over your enemy by nesting the good parts of his inferior civilization within your super civilization.
You need some allies then. What do you make of this article? https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/19/opinion/vance-tech-alliance.html
The battle lines are set in stone, they are etched on skin in tattoo ink and with birthmarks, there is no untapped pool of neutrals to make into allies. My only hope is that more on my side see that the only narrow path with any chances of averting defeat lies in the only one area where the enemy doesn't yet have an overwhelming advantage.
Simply false. People like JK Rowling are up for grabs. People are constantly dying and dropping off the electoral register and being replaced by 18 year olds.
Nope, Rowling isn't and never was. She is 99% onboard with the woke, it's funny how quickly people forget all her statements about sexualities and skin colors.
Scott, I agree with the main point of this, although I think it's a lost cause given Republicans' consistent willingness to use whatever cancellation power they have to its fullest extent. However, I'm curious how your views here align with your 2020 and 2022 ballot guides, where you indicated that refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and denying election results were disqualifying factors for candidates.
Given this article's focus on left-wing excesses and things like the Twitter files revealing troubling collusion between government agencies and media, I think it's important to clarify your current stance. Do you still consider actions like election denial uniquely disqualifying? You listed various instances of collusion between liberal elites and the Biden administration. It would be helpful to understand if you see Trump as just another flawed Republican candidate, or if his post-2020 actions represent a unique threat to democracy beyond the "soft power" concerns you raised.
This article suggests there's a left-leaning problem of soft power erosion of democracy that the right shouldn't replicate. Yet you don't mention the very real, hard power attempt to subvert democracy on the right - something you acknowledged in 2020 and 2022. Clearly, hard power over actual election outcomes is more critical than soft power over media narratives. To be specific: do you expect Trump would try to hold power if he lost the next election, with some chance of success? Do you think there's a significant risk he'd make the US far less democratic in a second term, Orbán-style? I believe it's crucial to address these hard power concerns alongside the soft power issues you've detailed.
I agree that the “Right”, whatever it is, shouldn’t cancel as hard as the “Left” does.
But there are things that should be cancellable even while decrying cancel culture, and celebrating or calling for violence against specific individuals or groups is the main one.
This is the hidden asymmetry in the recent cancellation of ordinary workers wishing Trump had been killed: ordinary people cancelled a few years ago for innocent things didn’t celebrate or call for violence.
The ordinary people being cancelled now made the unprincipled sheeplike mistake of following a mob and being punished when the winds shifted and suddenly it was no longer OK to celebrate violence in the direction the media matrix they were embedded in had previously been demonstrating by example that it was OK to celebrate violence.
That unprincipled sheeplike mistake may be very forgivable, but it’s not innocent in the way people who weren’t calling for or celebrating violence were innocent.
>Curtis Yarvin calls cancellation “the Brown Scare”
"Bellatrix Lestrange calls this a Witch Hunt"
The framing: “getting a prole fired …” interests me.
I see the left and right both love the word prole.
Does anyone imagine that Lord Fancypants came down from the manor to get the ruffian fired? Because someone uttered the tedious “punchline” uttered by thousands, no doubt? Because someone who could say a thing like that is the sort of person who could do something much more serious, like lay out poison in the wood where the fox coverts are?
It’s all proles, all the way down - if we’re going to use the word, because you like it so much.
A fair point. The act of trying to get someone fired is a bit Karen-esque, class aside - libsoftiktok may not be lord fancypants but is aspiring to a degree of social control. If there's evidence of the home depot lady being a massive troll, I'd like to see it, otherwise a single comment in poor taste seems harmless. I'm not altogether against cancel culture - there are some journalists I'd like to see fired. "Prole" in this context is a call for some people to be marked out as civilians. Seems fair.
To quote Ken White of Popehat*:
'There is no serious argument that conservatives refrain from “cancel culture.” Conservatives attempt to cancel liberal professors[1] all the time. Conservatives decry disinvitation even as they indulge in it[2]. The meretricious Turning Point USA, which constantly bemoans cancel culture[3], maintains a enemies list of too-liberal professors[4]. Conservative luminaries accuse opponents of legislation of wanting to groom minors for abuse[5]. Our former President constantly complained about cancel culture and just as constantly demanded that people get fired for speech he didn’t like[6]. Don’t get me started on Colin Kaepernick or Liz Cheney.'
* Who Yarvin dismisses as "claming to be some kind of legal scholar" in the linked article
1: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/04/24/randa-jarrar-case-fresno-state-has-attracted-national-attention-much-it-arguably
2: https://www.thefire.org/suny-brockport-must-not-heed-calls-to-disinvite-former-black-panther-convicted-murderer/
3: https://www.tpusa.com/live/its-time-to-cancel-cancel-culture
4: https://professorwatchlist.org/
5: https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/equality/597215-gov-desantis-spokesperson-says-dont-say-gay-opponents-are
6: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/09/06/trump-attacks-cancel-culturebut-tried-recently-to-cancel-these-people/?sh=7dd897fe4b2a
Source article: https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-shame-and
1. Celebrating murder
2. Celebrating murderer
3/4. It's a list of people who cannot be trusted, there's no call to action
5. The bill required parents be notified of significant health or welfare changes to their children, banning "secret" gender transitions, banned pornographic material in schools, and barred sexual education before grade 3. If you make the school an individual, who is helping the child "transition", giving them porn, talking to them about sex, and keeping it all a secret from the child's parents, "groomer" is the MOST polite word one could describe that adult with.
6. It's Trump. He's got the philosophical consistency of half-dried dough. This isn't new.
Treating the other side as a giant homogenous blob is part of the problem.
Fair. I was quoting Ken as an objection to this article's premise that canceling is a thing that exclusively the left does which the right is a victim of, which I think is inaccurate.
> this article's premise that canceling is a thing that exclusively the left does which the right is a victim of,
Did you stop reading the article in the middle of the headline or something? Libs Of TikTok is going nuts going after randos. Scott talked about friendly fire.
Also Ken has suffered extreme internet poisoning. This is him the day of Trump's shooting https://x.com/baseballcrank/status/1812558203437351132 Josh Barro somehow went radio silent for several days after the shooting.
Jesus, how do you go from "respected Free Speech attorney" to "think tanks who disagree with me are a legitimate target of terrorist violence" in 8 years? TDS really is a hell of a drug.
An especially good piece!
Why do you think your audience has so many Trump supporters, even though it is mostly smart people?
I'm hatereading by now.
Scott has always been fiercely critical of illiberal 'liberals', and taking that kind of stance inevitably attracts some people who (rather than sharing your principles) are just happy that you're hitting their enemies.
He also engaged with and (with significant qualifications and reservations) helped to promote the neoreactionaries back when they were very obscure, and he's surely retained some readers who were reactionaries or reactionary-adjacent then and are Trump supporters now.
And 'Trump supporter' is no longer a niche category; the exact number will obviously depend on how we define it, but it certainly includes many millions of people.
>And 'Trump supporter' is no longer a niche category; the exact number will obviously depend on how we define it, but it certainly includes many millions of people.
Yup! And a lot of those are "supporting" him for Lesser Evil...
I wonder how many voters grimace as they pull the lever or mark the ballot...
The most recent blog survey had results posted here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2024
- Roughly 33% of the 5,786 readers who answered the "Political Affiliation" question described themselves as either libertarian, conservative, neo-reactionary, or alt-right, all of whom would have a significant proportion of Trump supporters.
- Of the Americans registered for a party, there was a roughly 4:1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans - but there were as many readers not registered for a party as there were readers registered for the Democrat party, and some fraction of them will likely be Trump supporters as well.
- More people described themselves as having become significantly further right than significantly further left over the last ten years (albeit those two options combined summed for only 33% of the total).
- The question "How would you describe your opinion of Donald Trump" had 71.8% "very unfavorable" to 0.7% "very favorable". Excluding the 7.6% "neutral" responses, there is a 21:1 ratio between negative and positive opinions of Donald Trump.
So, it depends on what you mean by "Trump supporter". If you mean someone with a personally very positive view of Donald Trump, then the survey results indicate that such people are in a tiny minority here. But if you mean Americans who might plausibly judge that more of their political and social goals would be achieved by electing Trump / Vance than Harris / ?, regardless of their personal opinions of the candidates, then the number seems to be still a minority but very much non-negligible.
Yeah the latter figure matches my intuition. The people looking to cancel leftists are in the 34% but might not even like Trump that much.
Because in the "approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches" who inhabit this lair, most of us are witches of one sort or another, even the principled civil libertarians? You don't have to be stupid to be accused of witchcraft; it might even make you more of a target.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
As for Trump, there's a lot of differing views about him here; it's sort of an all-natural whole-grain community, not the highly processed homogenized social food product that tends to be found elsewhere.
I was your standard college leftie when I discovered Slate Star Codex (except when it came to affirmative action). The more SSC comments I read, the more right wing I became. The SSC comments was the first place I saw that right wingers were able to engage with the left without social pressure, and I noticed that their arguments were usually better with clearer and more reasonable first principles. Before SSC, I thought leftists were smarter. After SSC, I realized that leftists are the midwits in the midwit meme.
Wait SSC radicalized you? Are you kidding?
I didn't know "Trump supporter" and "radical" were synonymous to you. Though I'd say I'm closer to "would rather vote Trump than Democrat" than "Trump supporter", as similar as the two are in practice. But maybe you're right, since I'd vote for a lot worse than Trump over most leftists in the West.
EDIT: Also, related to my first response, have you ever considered that SA's audience has an atypical number of Trump supporters because it is mostly smart people (rather than "even though")?
Sorry if I offended you. Just curious what made you switch sides.
I do think that smarter conservatives gravitate to forums like Substack. In general people here are smarter than average, more education usually means more left-wing.
No worries, I wasn't offended. It was more curiosity about your use of the word radical. That feeling is now extending to how you went breathlessly from "smarter than average" to "more education". Remember, my answer was that there was a contrast between my time in post-secondary educational institutions (full of midwits, even most of the profs) to my time spent lurking SSC (full of smart people).
SSC was a place where the smartest leftists interacted with the smartest conservatives, and the conservatives usually came out on top, at least from my perspective.
Re the comments about neoreactionaries, it was less them that swayed me than posters like David Friedman. In any case I think you might get a better idea if you read the comment sections under some SSC posts. Maybe you'll even undergo the same transformation.
Were you reading SSC ~10 years ago? Although Scott never fully agreed with the neoreactionaries, he went out of his way to publicly engage with them, promote some of the parts of their philosophy that he liked, and grow their audience. (He also applied higher moderation standards to his far-right commenters, which had the predictable effect of making them seem relatively more reasonable as a group.)
Who is an example of neoreactionaries?
Curtis Yarvin AKA Mendius Moldbug is the most well-known. He has a substack, though I'm not sure how helpful it is for learning about neoreaction.
https://graymirror.substack.com
Thanks. I tried reading it and.. just couldn't.
I do like the One Ring reference, felt I should mention that. Well done!
Agreed.
I'd add:
11. There's no one to (eventually) negotiate a truce with. Even if you can convince all the offenders that they are (were) in the wrong, you can't credibly promise that you and yours will stop with the cancelling. No one on the other side can do the same. The cancellers on both sides will honestly believe that they can't stop until they've gotten one more good shot.
I'd add another point: to quote Glenn Loury, there is no "free speech". We have rules saying the government can't punish you for your speech. But your friends, neighbors, and bystanders can punish you to the limits of their abilities if you say or do things that are too far beyond the pale. When the Dixie Chicks denounced George W. Bush, the government couldn't punish them, but their fans could stop paying for tickets or buying recordings. When spineless university presidents punished cis white male students for the same conduct they celebrated from "the disadvantaged", the government (mostly) couldn't hold them to account, but donors could. When Donald Trump claimed that a Mexican-American judge couldn't be fair, the government couldn't punish him, but customers and voters could.
The point is, don't be senselessly provocative, because there are (can be) consequences. And don't go overboard with the consequences, because they destroy the community.
I don't know man, to me every single person you screenshotted here seems batshit insane. If your screenshots would be a representative sample of my social media feeds I'd first freak out, and then do a lot of unfollowing. Are you sure these people deserve a response? I mean "cancel culture bad" isn't particularly a new or fresh insight.
Fair point. Many of the ACX posts are held to some "fresh idea" standard though, so I was surprised to see this one, but I agree that a good point is worth repeating.
This is the correct response to those posts.
Philosophically, this is a very good column. Realistically, it's irrelevant. This won't stop until, as the saying goes, we are all blind. We're too far down that road, and there are, IMO, only two future scenarios. One, the country fractures and dissolves. Two, the left takes over and conformance and compliance become legal requirements.
The left has always been much, much more aggressive at what we now call "cancel culture". I experienced it personally, repeatedly, 40 years ago while an undergrad. I experienced it when I lived in a liberal city 30 years ago. I lived with it when I lived in another liberal city 20 years ago. There is a reason for this.
Liberals tend to put relationships before principle. If they don't like you, personally, nothing else matters. Conservatives tend to put principle before relationships. They may not like you, but will still work with you if it is beneficial. (This is not a 100% thing - it's a "more likely than not" hypothesis.)
Both "sides" are now firmly committed to war with each other. I see that only getting worse.
In my lifetime, the right was more censorious in the years following 9/11. At the very least I think that period is an exception to the idea that "the left has always been much, much more aggressive" in this area. I wrote a thing about the parallels: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/conservative-cancel-culture-after-9-11/
The idea that it's just going to get worse and worse seems to disagree with the perception, observed by many on both the left and the right, that there has been a "vibe shift" in American culture: left-wing censoriousness hasn't disappeared by a long shot, but the effects are less widely felt. As one example, Scott's bete noir, the NYT, has reaffirmed a commitment to open debate, scolded (and in some cases fired) those staffers who attempt to bully the paper into certain political stances, responded to protests against its coverage of youth gender medicine by defending that coverage unambiguously, etc. For more you can read Freddie Deboer: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/dreams-that-didnt-come-true
You could be right about the post 9/11 period. I think the current "vibe" is just a brief hiatus. I hope I'm wrong.
Please don't use NYT and "open debate" in the same sentence. They remind me of my time in a rural area of a northeast state where the definition of diversity was "lutheran, methodist, catholic, and baptist".
One possible asymmetry between the sides is cardinal preferences: https://www.econlib.org/the-missing-right-wing-firms-a-plausible-resolution/ Liberals care more about politics than conservatives, so they're more willing to engage in what in other contexts would be called "altruistic punishment".
That fits my hypothesis as politics is the relationship between government and people, and the exercise of power - which is central to relationship based ethics.
No, it is distinguishing between friend and enemy. The right is far worse at it.
Why do you consider politics to be distinguishing between friend and enemy, and why do you think the right is not good at distinguishing between friend and enemy?
I believe that corresponds best to the concept that "cleaves reality at the joints." You are of course free to adopt a definition that is narrower, and so fails to include very closely related phenomena, or broad enough to include much I wouldn't consider useful to categorize as "politics" (à la "_everything_ is political"), but this is mine.
(Also, I figured my saying "No, …" in the context of arguing definition would be understood to be a disagreement of opinion, not of fact.)
In my experience, many on the Right usually refuse out of some foolish principle to retaliate against those who seek to ruin their lives and livelihoods, or worse, ALLY with them against people they generally agree with (and a low bar, would NOT seek to ruin their lives/livelihoods) but are insufficiently decorous.
I think you're being too pessimistic. There's at least two other possible outcomes
1) Trump and the movement he leads resets the culture and the right takes control.
2) The majority of people who aren't really engaged in the culture war get sick of the excesses of the left, and the pendulum swings back in a more tolerant direction.
A vaguely relevant, interesting historical anecdote about the time Bob Dylan said in 1963 that he sympathized with Oswald and everybody understandably lost their minds, but he was not really canceled.
https://www.daysofthecrazy-wild.com/watch-listen-bob-dylans-infamous-1963-tom-paine-award-speech/
Taking Reason's description of the Pinckney case at face value: isn't it material here that Pinckney's actual tweet -- "To [sic] bad they weren't a better shooter!!!!!" -- does *not* in fact equate to "[...] call[ing] for political violence and the ass*ss*nat*on of Presidents".
How is Raichik's public admonition to Pinckney's employer and its broadcast to all her followers not actionable? Isn't this a clear case of malicious libel?
If you can't see this as a call for the next guy to do a better job, I don't know what to tell you. 'I wish my political enemies were murdered' is about as clear a call for political violence as you can get.
To be clear, you're saying that "Too bad Governor Snagglepuss wasn't killed" and "I wish Governor Snagglepuss was dead" and "Let's kill Governor Snagglepuss" are all equivalent? And that they're all a "call for political violence"?
Because to me, examples 1 and 2 express an opinion and only sentence 3 is an actual incitement to violence.
I can't understand how you think it's legitimate to lump these three sentences together when they're all clearly saying quite different things. Does it not matter what people actually say?
All three are calls to violence. All three should be banished from civilized discourse.
Condoning violence is not the same as calling for it.
Making a tasteless remark is commentary, not incitement.
>"I wish Governor Snagglepuss was dead"
doesn't even exclude natural causes. (1) and (3) are more clearly calls to violence.
Regarding the claim that (1) is a call to violence:
"Well, he missed his target, and there it is." -- Is that also a call to violence? To your understanding, where is the line to be drawn?
Many Thanks! Well, (1) is
>"Too bad Governor Snagglepuss wasn't killed"
which _both_ expresses a preference that Governor Snagglepuss die _and_ phrases it in terms of "killed", which suggests a violent event (albeit with some ambiguity about intention - one might use the same word if the governor had almost but not quite stepped in front of an 18-wheeler). It is certainly more ambiguous than (3).
I would put "Well, he missed his target, and there it is." as less of a call for another attempt than (1) is, since it "and there it is" doesn't make it clear what the speaker prefers.
I don't think there is a clear line. To make an analogy with another realm where people make ambiguous statements and gestures, I would call (1) flirting with endorsing another assassination attempt.
The mechanism is important. Saying "I hope Trump drops dead of a heart attack" is categorically different than saying "I wish that guy that actually tried to assassinate Trump had succeeded." Celebrating political violence is different commentary than generically wishing ill on opponents.
I have to disagree with Archduke, none of this is actual incitement.
You could construe it as, "I wish that retired firefighter hadn't been killed."
I doubt that was her intention, but yes, quite so.
Hard to call it libel when it's your own words.
Easy to call it libel when you say one thing and then you're accused of saying something else.
If she only broadcast a paraphrased version, you might have a point, but though I haven't followed the latest news, it was my understanding that LibsOfTikTok typically includes the original post verbatim.
I'm only using the article in Reason as my source for this, and I'm assuming their quote of Pinckney's actual tweet and of Raichik's public admonition are both accurate.
My contention is that Pinckney's tweet falls well short of being 'a call to political violence and the ass*ss*nat*on of Presidents'. Which would make Raichik's characterization false and therefore libelous; and in fact maliciously so.
The US standard for libel is quite high, and while IANAL, I'm fairly sure the distinction between "I wish the political violent actor had succeeded" and "I am advocating for someone else to try again" does not even come close to meeting it.
What LoTT did can be bad without being illegal, just like what Home Depot Lady did can be bad without being punishable by law or mob (by her friends calling her a ghoul: allowable).
I have a rule to suggest: If your enemy breaks a written law, don't stoop to their level, no matter what. If your enemy breaks an unwritten norm, feel free to stoop to their level if it seems strategically productive.
(Most of these things are ratchets; and your side of the ratchet is going to get turned someday. Pick the most advantageous day for it.)
The endpoint of this iterated game is not an infinite hellscape of torturous oppression; it's a caste system with a strict code of etiquette, like most people have lived in for most of history.
Absent shared values, I don’t think you’ll ever have a shared definition of the Overton window.
Absent value realism, and some formal conception that is posed as an attempt to approximate true value - ie a socially constructed map of value - I don’t see how you get explicit shared values.
"This Isn’t Tit For Tat, It’s The Nth Round Of A Historical Dialectic..." Ah, that's what tit-for-tat looks like; you seem to be confusing problem-solving with problem management here. " An agent using this strategy will first cooperate, then subsequently replicate an opponent's previous action. If the opponent previously was cooperative, the agent is cooperative. If not, the agent is not. This is similar to reciprocal altruism in biology." If I eat a delicious shrimp scampi paired with a blue cheese and candied pecan chopped salad I have not solved hunger... Tit for tat is an excellent strategy, though it does, I suppose, suffer in comparison to magic wands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat
Tit for tat has the flaw that a single error in cooperation leads to an endless cycle of retribution, so in a situation where errors are possible, tit for tat with forgiveness (tit for two tats) is superior.
Aesthetically, I prefer random acts of forgiveness. :-)
I think this post misses an important argument. Cancellation is a signal to Others about what is and is not acceptable discourse, regardless of the impact on the individual experiencing it.
All of the data show that these signals have been received in many institutional spaces such that conservatives, moderates, and centrists feel very uncomfortable sharing their views or engaging in anything against liberal orthodoxy. Data argue this left 'skew' in acceptable discourse has gotten much worse over the past decade.
Cancellation by the right against the left could be reasonably seen as an attempt to shift this window back and establish at least some kind of left boundary on what is acceptable discourse in public spaces. That doesn't happen without Other People seeing that there can be consequences for expression of far left viewpoints. That there can be manifest consequences for expression of even mild-right viewpoints has already been well-established.
I read this newsletter for some interesting thoughts, some provocative science. I avoid it for the absolutely detached political punditry. For instance, Scott writes:
1) “I think this is part of why the Democratic Party is floundering right now.” And 2) “You, too, can one day have a party this self-sabotaging and incapable of winning elections!”
1) largest single fundraising day in political history. Immediate, unanimous embrace of a single candidate. Anecdotally, massive upsurge in support and enthusiasm. I honestly, sincerely have no idea how you can look at the outcome of Biden’s withdrawal as “floundering.”
2) A Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote in one of the last eight elections. Since 2010, Democrats have outperformed expectations in all subsequent federal election cycles. 2018 and 2022’s “red waves” never happened. The voters of this country have chosen a democrat to lead this country all but one time in the 21st century. I truly have no idea what you’re talking about.
But somehow Roe v Wade got overturned.
But yes, pat yourself on the head with that "massive upsurge", anecdotally of course, plus the presidential popular vote; in fact, pin a blue ribbon to celebrate the unassailable popular vote lead that happens to mean nothing as far as actual political victories. If you don't see how this is exactly what "floundering" is, I don't know what to say.
In case you're wondering, my political views are on your side; I despise Trump and what GOP has become, which makes having to write this ever more painful.
No, I honestly don’t understand how this is “floundering.” It may not be “maximally achieving policy outcomes” but it isn’t “floundering.”
Prediction markets still have Trump expected to win. Congratulating yourself on winning the popular vote is a distraction from our system having an electoral college, which is what you actually need to win.
I was not congratulating myself on anything. I was refuting two seemingly precise statements. A party changing course and rallying around a new, invigorating is not floundering, and Democrats win tons of elections.
The right embraces this mythology that they are the default winners when it has not been borne out in the 20th or 21st century. This is only true in heavily gerrymandered state elections. Everywhere else, the smart money should generally be on democrats.
I don't think anyone is a "default winner".
> This is only true in heavily gerrymandered state elections.
Gerrymandering only applies to the House of Representatives. Republicans seem to do alright winning the presidency, governorships & senate seats.
1) By "default" I meant something like "presumed to win."
2) I was specifically referring to state legislative elections. But to your point, yes, it does only apply to the House. Re: the presidency, I made my point about that in my OP—they do not, in fact, do alright winning the presidency in the modern era. For governors, that I'll grant you. I think it's telling however that Republican governor's outside of deep red states all tend to be non-culture-warrior, moderate Republicans; not MAGAs. The senate is a whole different beast where you're right, but I think mostly to do with massive rural over-representation, not gerrymandering, per se.
When do you date the "modern era" as beginning?
The fundraising total was mostly money being held back from Biden to force him out, and once the announcement was made, that money was then released. Basically, an accidental money bomb, not an organic spike in donations.
Also, the popular vote is bolstered by huge margins in areas with Democrat-controlled governments long-term, which is the exact issue the Electoral College was created to limit the impact of.
Hundreds of thousands of people greeted Joe’s endorsement of Kamala for giving to a political candidate for the first time ever. It was organic.
Sure. The uncharismatic candidate that slept her way into office and couldn't even survive to Iowa got a flood of first-time contributions in a totally organic way.
Or, you know, the roughly $100m that was being publicly withheld until Joe Biden dropped out was released.
Oh, this is the sort of person you are. Never mind.
2: And yet they won half the elections, huh.
5 to 3 is not half.
That's true. On the other hand, Reagan, Bush, Dubya, and Trump would be four. Clinton, Obama twice, and Biden would be four.
(Bill) Clinton won twice, as did Bush II.
Argh. Thank you. <headdesk>
If I were a personnel manager and Party A came to me with data detrimental or unflattering to another employee, Party B, and demanded I fire Party B, the first thing I would do is fire Party A.
I wouldn't want anyone working for me who is a neofascist snitch.
You realize that taking this to its logical conclusion means no bad behavior at work, no matter how awful, can be dealt with, right? What if Party B has been smearing shit on Party A's desk?
Well, C. G. didn't put any bounds on the variables, so yes, for the purpose of my specific example excrement has been applied to the work surface.
The point is that if "the complaining party gets automatically fired" is the default action of the manager, then: a) we can fire the manager and replacing him/her with a painted rock; b) eventually the place will descend into whatever the lowest common denominator prevails among the remaining employees.
I was expecting an ongoing harassment campaign by a sociopath.
It's wrong to analyze this event through the lens of a cycle of escalating violence. I did it myself, before I realized that isn't what's going on.
Left-wing cancel culture is when someone loses their job for violating any norm of the Left, no matter how unpopular and niche. It can be as small as donating years prior to support a popular California ballot measure, or tweeting that men are not women. Or it can be literally violating a norm that the Left just made up (such as the gentleman that got cancelled for making an "OK" sign out his truck window).
Right-wing cancel culture is nonexistent. You can't get cancelled for blaspheming Christ, for example. The man who made a work of art out of statue of Christ in a jar of his own piss received government grants. There is only a small window of power here for celebrating the recent assassination attempt on their political candidate. It will probably last only a few weeks. And it only works because mainstream leftists are willing to support the taboo. It's a good thing they are! This means we are still in a state of politics, and not in a state of war, despite all the rhetoric about Trump being an existential threat to the system.
This taboo against celebrating political assassination is not a partisan thing. It's a load-bearing taboo for our system of government. We depend on political assassinations being rare for our way of life to exist. This taboo absolutely must not erode, or we descend into a system of election by carbomb.
So it's just wrong to model this as tit-for-tat violence. It's 10,000 tits for one tat. And the one tat is a nonpartisan tat that absolutely must hold.
Even then, I feel like very low-level service workers should be below the line of fire. But teachers, media personalities, and celebrities must be made to hold the line or all can be lost.
Well, "punch the Nazi" is pretty mainstream these days, so why should "shoot the Nazi" be out of the question? The only reason that mainstream left is against this so far is because they still have to care about broad popularity, not because it conflicts with any of their principles.
You're overly villainizing the left here. Most Democrats (56%) in a poll by the Cato Institute said it was morally unacceptable to punch a Nazi. For comparison, 20% of Republicans said it was morally acceptable to punch a Nazi. Certainly a sizable difference, but still.
Regarding your remark about the importance of preserving the current system of government, I like that line "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" Perhaps a change would be a good thing.
The guy was a sociopath who reveled in excuses that made him feel as though his victims were complicit in his crimes.
Here's your problem, in the second Substack note:
"They should be beaten into submission by any and all means necessary.
Never stop until WE have the whip hand, to relentlessly and viciously persecute those who have destroyed, defiled, and desecrated our society."
It is axiomatic that in a democracy no one gets the whip hand: you can try to persuade but you do not command except by majority vote, and you give up that power the moment the other side has the majority. Childishly simple and obvious, I know. But the author of the note does not understand it and neither do many on his side or the other side. Anyone, from either side, who for any reason attempts to cancel someone else is doing precisely the same thing as stopping them entering a polling booth. Sadly, the rot is such that many would like the authority to do just that.
Cancel culture is a terrible thing, and so I agree with the general spirit of Scott's argument here.
Still, wishing death upon one's political opponents is also a terrible thing, especially in the immediate aftermath of an assassination attempt (i.e. when such wishes are more likely to come off as deadly serious). I also think the sort of person who supports the assassination of political rivals is probably going to be entirely cool with their politically enemies getting cancelled. You maybe even could consider political assassinations to the be the strongest form of... cancel culture. If you're condemning cancel culture in general, then maybe spare a paragraph or two for condemning calls for political violence? Especially if the core example of cancelling being discussed is one that involves someone wishing death on their main political rival.
I think America could seriously benefit from lowering the heat down some when it comes to politics. Less cancel culture would be helpful there, yes, but so would less tolerance for political violence.
I don't think this Home Depot worker should have lost her job... but honestly, in an ideal world, she would have faced some degree of backlash for her comments, since they're very much not the sort of comments America needs right now.
I wish people would just tweet less and hold their tongues more.
"Some degree of backlash" is a large part of the issue. If cancellers had a concept of "this person has been punished moderately, and that's enough", the situation would be better. Instead, the theme seems to be we'll punish as much as we can.
Agreed. One caveat: The cancellers may not be _able_ to coordinate, at least for some tactics. In e.g. an email campaign to fire an employee, cancellers may not know of each others emails.
The Peace of Westphalia came into being because all sides realized that the constant conflict was a threat to the survival of the states involved, even in victory.
The Geneva Conventions came into being because all sides realized how much worse than death a lot of modern weapons are.
Free speech and freedom of religion exist because most everyone had been on the receiving end of state prosecution and realized that an armistice is safer than trying to hold the club forever.
The core political advantage Progressives/Socialists/Leftists/Communists have is that, to them, the ends justify the means. They have built societies on mass murder of their own civilians. So, the rules exist only as impediments to their ascension and must be broken when advantageous. But the political advantage the American Right has is greater discipline and long-term thinking. This is becoming a pattern, from weaponizing courts to removing filibusters to cancellation. The Left has the first strike advantage and gains significant ground, but the Right eventually adopts the tactics to greater effect.
“If you feel like compromising with the Right, it’s important to remember what they’ve done" is followed by a list of POLICY ISSUES. It's not "The Right destroyed a guy for criticizing Trump's tax cuts", it's "The Right opposes our policy agenda". Whereas what's the defense of firing back from the Right? "They destroyed people's lives for questioning lockdowns, taking a picture with an Unperson, or making a non-ideologically compliant hand gesture."
You think the RIGHT has greater long-term thinking?! The long march through the institutions that the Left so successfully accomplished is not something the Right can hope to replicate.
There wasn't a pro-America Right during most of the Progressive Era, and I'm talking about today where the Soviet Union is not an active agent with long-term plans.
> The core political advantage Progressives/Socialists/Leftists/Communists have is that, to them, the ends justify the means. They have built societies on mass murder of their own civilians.
I am only half joking when I congratulate you for finding a way in which Hamas actually resembles the left.
Good post. I'll add one more thing. There seems to be a narrative on the right that the left became dominant because they were willing to use the levers of power against their enemies without compunction, and the right was impotent because they were so principled and righteous.
As the kids say these days, that's some potent copium. As someone who is pretty squarely in the middle of the political spectrum (or maybe on a different axis), let me tell you -- the right and the left both suck when they're in power, because people of all stripes almost invariably suck once they get power.
As for how the left gained power -- that's complicated. Some of it is the pendulum swinging, some of it is that they just had better arguments on certain issues (both more logically consistent and more emotionally resonant), part of it was a deliberate, and at times cynical, strategy to rise up through the institutions. But they didn't gain power by canceling their opponents, because cancellation is something that requires already having power. Which is why, as Scott already pointed out, cancel culture has often been used as a form of policing, not as a form of conquest.
Yes, there's a Cargo Cult aspect to the viewpoint. Eat the Home Depot Lady's heart to gain her courage!
I'd be interested in Scott's thoughts on the NRX dimension to this discussion. Somebody like Yarvin would say that the government is fake, the real government is the Cathedral, and the Cathedral functions (partially) by means of cancellation. So there's a huge asymmetry between left cancellation and right cancellation: right cancellation is a disorganized mob trying to escape a Chinese finger trap, while left cancellation is you interacting with the actual government.
It seems possible to me that online conservatives have absorbed the idea that political power in the US consists, fundamentally, of the ability to punish other people's speech. (Something Foucault taught progressives fifty years ago.) Politics is downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of what you're even allowed to say.
Could they just be getting a taste of (what they think is) true power and wanting to exercise it?
Yarvin is a great technologist (IMO) but he’s best known for his politics which make little to no sense.
What would "peaceful resistance" of cancel culture consist of? Would cancelling the cancelers not be "peaceful"?
the basic argument is that culture-battles determine the overton-window, which determines government-policy.
> The only people who could believe such rubbish are those with incredible safety and freedom, and no sense of history or even how a lot of other humans today live.
the guy has cited more primary historical sources than I'll ever probably read within my lifetime. So this prediction is a dud.
The very name of "cancel culture" may be misleading as to what needs to be fixed. No, I don't like the (non)-argument that "cancel culture just means accountability", but something valuable may be lurking in that general neighborhood. If "cancelling" means:
(a) looking at the past and rethinking which figures merit being held as an example (through monuments, named prizes, etc.),
(b) confronting people with their own statements and actions,
then I hope I agree that, while some 'cancellations' are clearly mistaken, objectionable, wrong, even disgusting, this is all a matter of degree: honestly, pretty much everybody supports *some* of (a) and (b), in some cases, and what we need to talk about is means, extent, what is and what is not reasonable, and so forth. Here it makes sense to fight against *excesses* in (a) or (b), or illegitimate ways to do (a) and (b), or the creation of a social panic.
Now, it may be simpler (and more satisfying) to fight against something that is wrong in all circumstances. In that case, what one needs to fight is toxic aspects of online culture (and general culture) that are particularly noticeable in the worst parts of so-called culture:
- informal fallacies,
- in particular, ad personam arguments, and their elevation to the level of principle ("I won the Internet today, I called a commenter a white male/green hermaphrodite/etc.; or mocked some idiot who had the cheek of making a point in that I posted a meme with the words "well, ackchyually" showing an obese man; also, I interrupted a speaker at DSA repeatedly because she committed the crime of speaking while Asian")
- unethical behavior by journalists or people who pass as journalists (this is very noticeable a thing that happens increasingly across the political spectrum),
- a hatred of nuance and argument,
while keeping an eye for certain well-known social dynamics: mob mentality, the narcissism of small differences (to use Freud's phrase),...
"There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever." https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/29/the-spirit-of-the-first-amendment/
That's compatible with confronting people with their statements to argue against them, but not for getting them fired.
I suppose there is the valid question of what to do with those who do not just present bad arguments, but try to kick the entire board of argument and counter-argument; that is, what to do with people who recur to frequent, disruptive personal attacks, and more generally with those who have personally indulged in and spearheaded the worst excesses of cancel culture, or, just as well, racist edge-lords and the like. *Something* needs to be done to enforce civilized dialogue. Of course this is just the old "shall we be intolerant of intolerance" question.
What to do with bad arguments is to make better arguments, while discounting such bad ones.
EDIT: I misread. But "personal attacks" are a known example of a bad argument, which the ancients knew as "ad hominem". And one can respond to that as being a bad argument.
Bravo! A humane approach to the topic. As an anti canceling progressive, I appreciated the broader historical perspective you took.
I think that the only way we will have a meaningful, durable norm against firing people for off the clock behavior / opinion expression is if there is a law banning it. There are just too many “too good to refuse” opportunities for cancellation otherwise. If after October 7, a junior lawyer at some elite firm had written something pro Hamas on a personal account, and it had gotten out and become public information, the firm would have almost certainly risked losing a lot of business unless that lawyer was immediately fired. Is this cancel culture? It seems to me like it is, but also it seems to me that anti canceling norms will never be strong enough to protect this hypothetical lawyer, and the only thing that would protect him is the law. However most people probably don’t want this kind of conduct protected, which I guess leaves us in the status quo, trying to use norms (and shaming?) to fight cancel culture in general.
>I think that the only way we will have a meaningful, durable norm against firing people for off the clock behavior / opinion expression is if there is a law banning it.
Agreed!
>However most people probably don’t want this kind of conduct protected, which I guess leaves us in the status quo
I have a suggestion for distinguishing what is sufficiently in the mainstream to be actively protected, while still (probably) excluding e.g. calls for assassination (not sure where the Hamas support would fall today).
I suggest that anything that is agreed to by 25% of the population is a sufficiently mainstream view that it be protected. This is set far enough above the "lizardman constant" (typically 4%) to not protect _really_ extreme views (which I hope covers the assassination case), but far enough below 50% so this isn't just ceding all discussion to tyranny of the majority.
Re:
>trying to use norms (and shaming?) to fight cancel culture in general.
To my mind the problem with this is that the Woke are typically self-righteous - and therefore shameless. _Maybe_ highly publicizing cases of "friendly fire" might help push back against them ("See who you just destroyed? Are you proud of yourself for doing that?") but I doubt that it will work.
I think legal protection is both necessary and might even put some backbone in firms that would otherwise cave to X-Twitter mobs. "No, we can't fire <employee> disagreeing on the minimum wage hike. It's _illegal_."
I think the Kamala thing in 2020 should be understood primarily as party unification. Biden did the same thing with Bernie and AOC, and it's very likely he managed to achieve as much as he did by having a party that (apart from Manchin) *acted* almost shockingly unified even though they ideologically weren't.
<i>Modern progressive cancel culture is the successor of the 1950s establishment that would cancel you for being an atheist pinko peacenik. Curtis Yarvin calls cancellation “the Brown Scare”, by analogy to the Red Scare that came before. And Arthur Miller called the Red Scare a “witch hunt”, by analogy to actual witch hunts, the Spanish Inquisition, and the history of burning heretics at the stake. And what was Diocletian’s persecution of the Early Church if not cancel culture?</i>
This idea of "succession" strikes me as historically dubious, at least if it's supposed to imply some kind of causal link between the various examples of cancel culture. When I was growing up in the '90s/early 2000s, it seemed everyone, right and left, agreed that free speech was important, that it was wrong to fire someone for their beliefs, and that it was a good thing we'd moved past historical bouts of intolerance into the free-speaking liberal uplands. Cancel culture arose in the 2010s for a variety of reasons, but it wasn't a reaction to McCarthyism, which had already been discredited decades ago. Cancel culture was/is independent of McCarthyism, just like McCarthyism was independent of the Salem Witch Trials, and so on. No doubt there will be similar phenomena in the future, but they'll likewise come about independently, not as a result of anything conservatives do or don't do in reaction to present-day cancel culture.
Incidentally, I find it ironic that the Spanish Inquisition is being listed as a forerunner of cancel culture, when in fact it was set up to try and make sure people got a proper trial rather than being extra-judicially punished as a result of frivolous heresy accusations. In other words, it was opposed to the 15th-century equivalent of cancel culture.
Um, that last bit is Catholic apologetics; I suppose one could say with equal accuracy that it was Beria's job to make sure that people got a proper trial (with confessions obtained by analogous means). Inquisidor Lucero, who burnt 107 citizens of Cordoba in a single day, might have been surprised at being described as being opposed to cancelling your neighbor.
Robin Hanson genuinely endorses cancel courts in order to fulfill that function:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/a-call-for-cancel-courtshtml
Lucero was a huge outlier who was forced from office for killing people without reason, so it's misleading to treat him as representative. According to Wikipedia, the Inquisition killed "At least 1303" people between 1540 and 1700, an average of just over 8 a year. Of course, records are often incomplete, so 1303 is very much a lower bound, but even if we assume the real total was several times greater, that still doesn't leave much room for regular hundred-person massacres.
The worst excesses of anything are going to be a bit of an outlier. Lucero didn't act alone, but rather within a structure that enabled him; yes, he was eventually deposed, but finished his days in quiet retirement. Your average victim of the inquisition died tortured and starved in a dungeon, not in an auto-da-fé (of which there were plenty).
Incidentally, the Inquisition killed supposed heretics up to the end of the 18th century. The last person in Spain to be executed for heresy (a school teacher) was hung in 1826 (not technically by the Inquisition, but rather by a direct successor - a "junta de fé").
Bryan Caplan weighed McCarthyism against modern wokeness in a series of posts you can find from here:
https://www.econlib.org/anti-communism-and-anti-racism-a-final-word/
"When I was growing up in the '90s/early 2000s, it seemed everyone, right and left, agreed that free speech was important, that it was wrong to fire someone for their beliefs, and that it was a good thing we'd moved past historical bouts of intolerance into the free-speaking liberal uplands."
Evidently you missed the whole business surrounding the Iraq War!
I'm not an American, so I kind of did. But as far as I can tell, opposing the Iraq War had ceased to be a cancellable offence by 2015 or whenever the current iteration of cancel culture began, so I still stand by my original assertion that cancel culture arose for independent reasons rather than as a reaction to previous censoriousness.
Whatever the optimal strategy to encourage a general shift away from cancel culture (which is just angry online mobs exploiting what tools they can), I'm skeptical that "restraint" on the part of a fraction of the right (much less ACX readers) would have any bearing on whether that happens, even if it was magically a sizable demographic. The mob is the mob, you can't reason with them and they will do what they're allowed to do, and often what they're not allowed to do.
If anything, such a change coming from the corporate policy and culture side would probably be informed by diminished tensions and/or increased apathy, *or* the sentiment that "ok that's enough now it's gone far enough let's settle down", which would only happen if the left-leaning majority feel just as fatigued. This might not make a dent, but much of the left-leaning public has been sick of this stuff long before.
Even though I don't expect polarization to tone down any time soon, I'm more confident that fading cancel culture would come from diminished tensions, or maybe a neo-luddite shift away from smartphones and news. It's not impossible if being more "offline" became a status/class signal, but in particular, parents are beginning to take the dangers of social media and smartphones seriously and evidence is piling up. Predictors for lower tensions could be a) better household economic outlook / reduced inflation, b) maybe a moderate administration that is tougher on protecting borders and miraculously appeals to a good majority, c) a cultural or policy pushback against the doomscroll and always being online
Good post. Important post.
Trump could have ended it in a massive win-win, but I think the window of opportunity has passed.
It would have been classy, a bit of "hot coal" for his enemies.
Imagine the universe in which Trump delivered a speech about how it is his blood that they are calling for, his blood that was spilled*, and he wants that blood to purchase something better than more hatred, and asks Home Depot to reconsider firing the woman - that this kind of thing creates an asymmetry of power between the working classes, who cannot afford to lose their job and thus are effectively silenced politically by these acts, and the elites, who speak with impunity, and who enable and promote these tactics to keep the working classes divided and impotent. Frame it finally about being gracious in victory; we've already won. Claim to be "spending" whatever goodwill he got from the assassination attempt.
* With some care taken for the family of the fireman who was shot and killed, note. This is a sketch of the idea, there are important details to cover to make this work that I don't mention here.
Hint very slightly at a religious angle, Trump suffering for our sins, and redeeming us. Don't be too explicit, but let people draw their own comparisons; they'll be all-too-willing.
Throw in some lines about this being a Democrat thing, that the Republicans are being infiltrated by antifa agitators looking to tarnish their good name with this obvious left-wing cancellation bullshit, to goad his opponents into criticizing and signal-boosting the speech with fact checks for maximum exposure.
There was a historic opportunity there that his campaign staff seemed to be completely oblivious to, and I think the opportunity passed over the weekend. It'd still work a little bit, but the news cycle has gone on too long, and it won't have the same impact.
I fully agree, it would have reflected well on him and his campaign - and a lot of his opponents would have hated him for it! So it would have ticked a number of boxes.
Your instinct here was a good one.
Watching politics is painful; nobody is very good at either policy -or- campaigning, and I'd think everybody involved would at least be competent at one of these two things.
Yeah, agreed. I guess in a first past the post system, though, you don't have to necessarily be good; you just have to be slightly less bad than the other guy.
I think you also have to remember that you and I are not the intended audience for a lot of the rhetoric from politicians. A lot of them make deliberately contradictory statements designed to appeal to different groups of potential voters. A lot of what they do/say is designed to appeal to each respective party's base, and I suspect both are somewhat dumber than average.
I am old enough to remember the Dixie Chicks. And Freedom frieds. And Ari Fleischer. And being afraid to ask “are there really WMDs though?” And this was at an Ivy League school, not that many years ago.
The Dixie Chicks were "cancelled" for things they said in their public persona as the Dixie Chicks to a paying audience. Nobody followed them, heard them say that they opposed the Iraq war while getting burgers at McDonalds, and based a campaign against them on that.
Nobody was cancelled over freedom fries either.
I believe there was an effort to destroy the Dixie Chicks' careers.
My point is that we don’t have to go back far (as Scott points out) to a time when conservatives were all for censorship, speech policing, shouting down ideas they didn’t like. In the 90s the republicans were the sanctimonious moralists! Somehow the democrats managed to adopt the unpopular part (sanctimonious moralism) without the popular part (patriotism, religion, traditional values etc)
I think a lot of people do consider "lost your career as a public personality for things you said in that public personality" to be cancel culture. E.g., a speaker getting disinvited from a college for their politics, or a comedian losing work because their jokes crossed a line.
Add "... to your customers".
There's a difference between "I, the customer, don't want to listen to that speaker" and "I don't want someone else to be able to listen to that speaker". If a group of people said "that speaker so offends me that I want to stay away from him, and I'll tell all my friends to stay away from him", so the college decided that the speaker wouldn't draw a big audience and wasn't worth inviting, I wouldn't call that cancel culture. College speakers being disinvited are never like that.
Good distinction! Thank you!
> If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught you that.
It did. The person you're responding to believes that. They are arguing that we currently have this bad thing, and in order to get rid of it, there must be symmetry in both sides perceiving it as bad. Your point #2 is, however, a good argument against that. I think Razib Khan gives the best argument in favor of right-wing cancel culture: unilateral surrender of a tactic will not get the other side to abandon it. Unfortunately, each side is too decentralized (bring back the smoke-filled room!) to actually reach anything analogous to an arms-control agreement.
> Likewise, if there are right-wing cancellation squads, they won’t cancel Rachel Maddow or Kamala Harris. They’ll get some WSJ writer who puts too few exclamation points after “MAGA!!!!”
But the actual examples you're pointing to are a Home Depot employee who wanted Trump assassinated, not anyone associated with the right.
I knew there was an argument like Razib's that I was groping toward. I think he puts it better than I could have articulated though.
Scott, you got so close to the point in (2), and then you spent the rest running away from it in terror. You're right to point out that "cancel culture" has existed in all societies everywhere for all of human history. That's because "cancel culture" is just what culture is. Cultures are fundamentally defined by a shared set of values and norms, which necessarily means that they must exclude those who reject their values or refuse to abide by their norms. There is no "principled anti-cancel-culture position", we've established what kind of woman you are, now we're just haggling over price.
And yet, there was a time when there was no "free speech" norm at all, however hollow it ends up in practice, so the working hypothesis is that the culture isn't entirely static.
The principle of "cancellation" involves the concern over the relationship between a person's speech and the role they are being cancelled from. In this case, it was an employee making a statement at work, to customers, in uniform. This is separate for getting someone fired for something they said in-private out of work.
That having been said I think the correct action in this case would be remedial training for the employee, not termination.
Are you sure you're correct about this? The Reason article says that she was targeted for social media posts, not for talking to customers while in uniform.
Yes, this. The lunatics tracked her down at work with a camera, Mike Wallace style.
It was only "at work" because the cancel-mob deliberately brought it there to get her fired.
I'm so tempted to point out the thousands of ways in which the right has cancelled folks who aren't maximally supportive of Trump, but it's both been explored in detail in the comments and irrelevant. Two wrongs don't make a right and all that.
So instead I'll just point out that I think we're doing...okay on the respecting speech front. Given that we're still legally allowed to proudly fly the battle flag of a rebellion that lost, that municipalities are allowed to incorporate it into their flag, I'd say we're doing better than most on the "respecting speech rights" front. I'm concerned about the direction our commitment to that speech is moving in, but I'm not concerned about impending disaster just because we yelled at some people with bad ideas.
Populist mobs always gonna populist mob. As long as the legal protections hold I'm gonna be hopeful.
I was briefly confused by the opening paragraph -- LibsOfTikTok cancelled someone on the *left*? And then the right got all excited because this was their chance for vengeance? Why were they hunting vengeance after this cancellation but none of the others?
It wasn't until the third reread that I realized that LibsOfTikTok must be a *right-wing* account.
It's even more complicated than that: LibsOfTikTok IS a right-wing account, but one that reposts LEFT-WING content, that those on the right would otherwise not see because of social media siloing.
Cancel culture is the ethos of total war brought to domestic politics. In total war, every participant on the other side, no matter how distantly involved, is a legitimate target on some level because they still function as a component of the larger enemy war machine. Bringing this same ethos to politics results in each voter being seen as a component of the enemy party's war machine, with the same outcome.
History has shown that the only way to end total war is to win completely or lose completely. It's impossible for any side to deescalate because asymmetric deescalation leaves your side vulnerable to the continuing attacks of the other. It is inevitable that this fight will continue, and cancel culture will worsen, for the foreseeable future.
If only there were something that could unite us.
I think this culture war is a bad thing. I think that having the right to free expression makes America a better place. I'm on the political right, because I think my side is more correct than the other side, but it still worries me some times that I may be trapped in a bubble.
Saying that, one of the root causes behind domestic strife has been the ongoing defamation of American patriotism / nationalism by the left. They're not entirely without a point; nationalism taken too far does cause serious issues, and our history is not perfect. But the perfect is enemy of the good. If we put our shared nationality ahead of other identities as something to unite around, it would help deal with a lot of issues.
>If only there were something that could unite us.
> the right to free expression makes America a better place.
Do you believe unity is possible, or even desirable, with people who hate the idea of free expression, considering it far-right, Nazi, fascist, etc.?
I think a very small number of people actually think that way (but more than the number of actual Nazis). The problem is that the small number of vocal protesters have an outsize influence on the folks in power.
Most of the people that vote for politicians that push the policies that encourage this have no idea what's actually going on with government, because they get their news from within the NBC-ABC-CBS-CNN bubble. They only have a soundbite level of understanding of major issues, especially controversial ones.
>Modern progressive cancel culture is the successor of the 1950s establishment that would cancel you for being an atheist pinko peacenik.
Dixie Chicks were completely annihilated for questioning Bush. People don't us the word 'canceled' for Gamergate, but each of the 'literally who' targets had their lives smashed and their careers disrupted.
If you want to say this is a pendulum that swings back and forth, you don't have to go back to 1950s to find the last time the right was on top, it's a lot more recent than that.
I actually think there's basically zero pendulum at all, both sides are attacking their cultural enemies by whatever means available at all times with little distinction, and the only ting that changes over time is the large-scale narrative about which side is 'worse' at the moment. Selective attention and motivated confirmation bias dredging up some examples from one side to form a 'pattern', dedicated attempts to dismiss and disavow examples from the other, until it becomes a meme that the broader media starts to run with and reinforce.
This is not an accurate description of Gamergate.
>It’s implemented at the level of media, institutions, and popular taste-making, which Democrats hold more firmly than federal government.
The owner of Twitter is 100% behind Trump, and seems to be actively interfering with the platform to aid him. Lots of other billionaires are behind Trump on the promise of continuing tax cuts, and any media they don't own already they can easily choose to buy up if necessary.
Even to the extent this sentiment was true (and not just propaganda) 8 years ago, it's much less true now.
I agree with all that, but there is an important asymmetry that needs to be addressed. The strongest advocates of cancel culture that I know personally are Marxists. This is not a coincidence. There were earlier conflict theorists, like St. Augustine, but Marx took it to a new level, one which sees hate-based violence not as one tool in the toolbox, but as the only indispensable tool.
Marxism is morally on a par with Nazism. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that he copied his approach to propaganda and violence, and his cancel-culture tactics for suppressing the voice of the majority, from the Marxists. Marxism lives on class-based hate; Nazism lives on race-based hate. Both reliably produce mass murder of a nation's own citizens. In the 20th century, more people died because they were targeted by either Marxists or Nazis as class/race enemies, than died in war. I'm pretty sure that Marxists perpetrated more cases of "judicial" murder than all other ideologies in human history combined, far outstripping Christianity, Islam, and Nazism (though perhaps not on a per-capita basis).
I think that Marxists, especially Marxist university professors, were the key vectors for propagating wokeism. I don't know anyone extremely woke who isn't also Marxist, or at least a self-declared "enemy of capitalism".
If we're aiming at an open society, Marxism and Nazism are the two most-obvious edge cases. You can make good arguments that we should outlaw both, and good arguments that we should allow both. But you can't treat them differently. They are equally dangerous and reprehensible. Allowing Marxists to be university professors is ethically the same as allowing Nazis to be university professors.
> Unless you really lay on the tribal signifiers, it’s hard to find a definition where most Democrats support cancel culture and most Republicans oppose it!
I'm confused about what you're trying to say here, given that this statement was immediately preceded by a bunch of screenshots of poll results that seem to contradict it. Did you perhaps mean to say the opposite of what you wrote in this sentence? That for any reasonable definition of cancel culture it's pretty clear most Democrats support it and most Republicans oppose it?
According to those poll results, a clear (though not overwhelming) majority of Democrats seem to support cancel culture, and a clear (though again, not overwhelming) majority of Republicans seem to oppose it (more so than even independents, which I find surprising). This doesn't entirely undermine your larger point, since "a clear majority" of Democrats in favor is not the same as being "monolithically united behind cancel culture". Obviously a pretty significant number of Democrats oppose it even if they're in the minority among others of their party.
+1
From https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1813932890436063647
How you contend depends on the terrain. In the late 1980s, when I was 15 years old, getting someone fired for a political statement would have been completely beyond the pale. But so would cheering for an assassin.
The world, however, has moved on, and it was not republican voters who were behind it, pushing. These kinds of nuclear tactics are the new normal which Obama's careful study of Saul Alinsky brought us to.
No one wants to live a world characterized by (metaphorical) nuclear exchanges, but nuclear exchanges, once they become part of the universe of discourse, and held off only by deterrence, not decency.
If relying on the decency of the left worked, we never would have gotten this far. The only feasible strategy for walking this back now is precisely what the right is doing... striking back with the same tactics and creating an environment of mutually assured destruction.
When the phenomenon of "cancellation" hurts the left as much as the right, only then will we hear the news talking about how it's a bad idea.
Then they will pretend they were against it all along, and it's an entirely new and horrible thing that the right came up with all on its own. They will attempt to memory-hole all the people they put in prison for defacing pride flags, all the people who lost their jobs for refusing to participate in a medical experiment, who lost advertising sponsorships for wearing a red hat.
You cannot recreate the genteel debating environment of a more civilized age simply by unilaterally pretending that it exists, and attempting to debate the radioactive cannibal zombies roaming the post-apocalyptic wasteland, instead of fighting them off with a sharpened piece of rebar. They'll just eat your brain.
That metaphor may seem... colorful... but anyone who has been paying attention for the past few decades knows that the left's recent ascendancy, and its vicious treatment of its fellow Americans, is precisely due to its realization that it could take advantage of the fact that the right wants to play by Queensbury rules.
But a set of rules can only exist by mutual agreement, and there is no mutual agreement. Unilateral agreement isn't good enough... if it were, we would not be here.
I utterly reject any argument that we are "sinking to their level". We are not.
There is no moral equivalence between an aggressor and a defender, even if they use the same weapons and tactics.
The right remembers this principle when it speaks of the right to bear arms. It understands the principle of a justified response, and of deterrence, and of provocation, and justified use of deadly force.
I am gratified to see that, at long last, some people on the right are starting to understand these same concepts as they relate to psychological, social, and political conflicts.
It is easy to say that the left are "not our enemies". In fact, the left themselves said this for about five hours after attempting to kill our candidate, before going right back to calling us an apocalyptic fascist threat to democracy.
In my book, the enemy is anyone who is trying to hurt you, especially if they salivate gleefully at the prospect.
Do I really need to post dozens of pages of receipts, screenshots of leftists salivating at the idea of hurting anyone who voted republican, wore a red hat, refused to take experimental drugs?
Or can we just agree to pretend that we have memories that are longer than the current MSNBC news cycle?
Both my wives lost their jobs in that "papers, please" moment. Both of them were remote workers who posed no threat of exposing anyone else to illness even if the vaccine had worked instead of randomly causing people to drop dead of heart failure.
I'm not a rich A-list author. I'm a working middle class dude. My parents grew up on farms in Minnesota. That year hurt my family, badly. It set back all of our plans, put our dreams on hold. Specifically, my writing career, such as it is.
The last round of "fire the republicans" delayed my first novel by two years. If we get hit by another, there will be no sequel. I simply won't be able to afford to sit at home and write. I'll have to start taking calls from Indian tech recruitment sweatshops.
I don't have the luxury of turning the other cheek and hoping they don't do that shit again out of the entire hypothetical goodness of their hearts. Maybe if I was wealthy, and could afford luxury belief systems, but I'm not and I can't.
I have to strike back and encourage others to strike back with me, and to make sure it hurts, so they will think twice before trying this again.
Being principled is nice, but it's also easy when you have no skin in the game. None of us are utterly immune to the consequences of politics, but some of us are a lot less immune than others.
Seems like I remember that, back in the 2000s, you'd occasionally hear about someone getting fired for complaining about the Iraq War or saying something nice about terrorists, or whatever. The left would be annoyed at this, and the right would reply: "The First Amendment only prevents the government from regulating speech! Private corporations are allowed to do whatever the hell they want."
I suppose they got what they asked for.
Maybe the next cycle will work out better if everyone remembers that free speech is more than just the specific words of the First Amendment; it's a basic moral principle that we should expect any institution with power to value.
----------------------------
Y'know, it sure would be nice if someone had looked at that business with the Amunites back then and said: "Maybe taking vengeance on your enemies is a bad idea, and you should try to practice forgiving them instead." The last 2000 years sure would've looked different if someone had said something like that, huh?
I linked it elsewhere in the thread, but I wrote a piece making a similar point about the post-9/11 era and how we've swapped sides in terms of who is saying they have a free speech right to cancel: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/conservative-cancel-culture-after-9-11/
> Unless you really lay on the tribal signifiers, it’s hard to find a definition where most Democrats support cancel culture and most Republicans oppose it!
Two points here. First, maybe not "most," but the data does show a very significant Democrat-ward bias in favor and Republican-ward bias against. Second, yeah, this doesn't have the support of the Democrat rank-and-file, it's pretty frustrating to see so many people being led around by the nose by leftist extremists because they haven't realized (or can't bring themselves to admit yet) what Ronald Reagan pointed out over 60 years ago: "I didn't leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me."
> 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, then believe that any action is justified against “The Left” because it’s coming for our children, then rile up a mob against a Home Depot woman who makes a bad tweet.
One significant difference here: "The Left" elevates its most horrible elements, while "The Right" marginalizes theirs. You'll be hard-pressed to find mainstream conservatives standing up for people like Alex Jones or Matt Gaetz. Marjorie Taylor-Greene only got elected by moving to a non-competitive district, and her antics got her kicked out of the House Freedom Caucus. When Joseph McCarthy took things too far, he was censured by his fellow Republicans.
Meanwhile, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are practically treated by Democrats as rock stars. And leftist terrorist leader Bill Ayers, whose group engaged in a spree of bombings in the 1970s that caused massive amounts of damage and killed multiple people including a police officer, in any sane reality would have died in prison. In ours, though, he got off scot-free, became a prestigious university professor, and started training the next generation of extreme-left radicals. One of his mentees, who literally began his political career in the terrorist's living room, eventually became a bit of a big deal. You might have heard of him: a guy by the name of Barack Obama.
> But even if you don’t care about those things, remember that cancellation is mostly friendly fire.
Cancellation on the left is mostly friendly fire, because of the leftist institutions bit you (correctly) mentioned above. The reciprocal doesn't seem true, though. The people being targeted by conservatives *aren't* "some WSJ writer who puts too few exclamation points after “MAGA!!!!”"; they're people saying "what a shame that the assassination attempt failed."
It seems like you fail to mention one figure relevant to your argument, no? Widely criticized by his own party in 2016 (and after by people safely out of political office) much like MTG or Matt Gaetz.
Rick Frank
>One significant difference here: "The Left" elevates its most horrible elements, while "The Right" marginalizes theirs
xyz
>It seems like you fail to mention one figure relevant to your argument, no?
You thinking of this guy, xyz?
“Trump said he would “stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi“ if reelected president, asking a crowd of supporters, “How’s her husband doing by the way?” and saying a “wall around her house” didn’t do a “good job” of protecting her 82-year-old husband from an intruder who fractured his skull with a hammer during a break-in last year—prompting laughter from the crowd.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2023/09/29/trump-mocks-hammer-attack-on-pelosis-husband-in-incendiary-speech/
He’s elevated about as far as possible.
Tucker Carlson has one of the most popular podcasts in the world and has interviewed Alex Jones favorably. You are also forgetting that Trump has threatened state politicians in recorded phone calls that he would turn his supporters against them for not going along with his election fraud lies, and he's retruthing for military tribunals to be held for Liz Cheney. Trump also used to retweet and retruth from Infowars or from organizations like OAN or Newsmax that used Infowars as the source for their election fraud claims.
"Only cancel those who have tried to cancel others" is at the very least a consistent principle that *should* lead to less cancellation in general.
Each side wants to claim that's it's the victim, the underdog, that it deserves sympathy and respect. And in a way, both have been, as the pendulum of power swings back and forth. Neither is blameless.
Personally, I understand the impulse to reciprocation of those on the right. "Historical examples of lefties being cancelled don't hold emotional salience to the modern left, so they must be taught not to deploy indiscriminate weaponry through personal experience" is a sympathetic take.
But in practice, traumatizing people does not actually improve their behavior. We should use self-consistent principles (such as the above "only cancel the canceler") to scope vengeance to those who deserve it, and extend mercy to everyone else.
“This will look like boring incremental progress, ie the only thing that has ever worked.”
This could possibly be true for everything, not just politics.
"Cancellation good"/"cancellation bad" is not a binary.
A) A person who mistakenly uses last week's "zir" instead of this week's "xim" should not be canceled.
B) A person who wishes Trump had been murdered (not just "expressing dislike for Trump") should be canceled.
This is an entirely consistent position.
As the noted moral philosopher Jules Winnfield observed in another context, those aren't the same ballpark, league, or even sport.
I think the relevant axis is this:
A.) A person whose cancellation upends their entire life and annihilates whatever chance they had at a comfortable life and retirement
B.) A person who can afford to be canceled
If group B wants to fight it out with cancellation, whatever. Leave group A out of it, because, insofar as politics is what politics is, all you're doing is prohibiting the working classes from participating in the political conversations that are happening.
You can safely ignore group B, and the rest of the argument here remains the same: A-group members on the Left have been cancelling A-group members on the Right for years. Is "descending into an orgy of vengeance" a good idea?
Perhaps this is why, when the Democrats were the party of the working class, they were the party of free speech; and now that the Republicans are the party of the working class, they are the party of free speech.
I know this post is mostly framed in terms of overt political cancelation - that is where people tactically target individuals seen on the opposing side in ways that can be leveraged for larger political advantage. Still, I do want to emphasize the distinction between using cancelation as a larger weapon in the political wars and using cancelation as an attempt to correct the specific perceived injustices, and how they're bound to be connected
For example, the classic example of cancelation for me is a famous (usually a male) comedian/actor/Youtuber/influencer/etc. accused (usually by a woman) of rape or some other form of sexual misconduct. Now there can be a lot of political assumptions behind how people respond to an accusation ("Women don't lie about rape", "She's trying to #MeToo the guy for revenge or clout", all the various debates about what counts as consent or sexual harassment and whether the accusation is true or not, etc), but my point is that most people aren't doing this just to own the righties or whatever. The average person is either trying to seek justice, trying to get information, trying to learn who to avoid for self-preservation, or (sadly) trying to enjoy the thrill of watching a former idol fall. And because of the ease of communicating online and the desire not to associate with people that are sleazy (or, if you're cynical, simply seen as sleazy), cancelation is a very natural response to a problem of accountability that we haven't quite solved. Of course, these individual cancelations - from the serious to the silly - all have a cumulative stifling effect that makes it a larger political weapon beyond any one individual case, which leads to the political debates about the utility of cancelation that we're seeing today.
So, to tie this back to Libs of TikTok, it might be easy to define a norm of not using cancelation as a larger political weapon to broadly own the lefties or righties. And you might even have broad agreement. But you're still going to have the base offense of wishing for the death of a political opponent making people recoil. And I'm not sure how you change that norm of cancelation here unless there's some other mechanism to bring about justice. And that desire for individual justice inevitably creates a weapon with a secondary political utility.
It's pretty damn important not to have a norm against saying things that are plausibly true or many people are thinking privately.
I mean, history is pretty damn contingent and if an assassin had been able to keep the US out of WW1 that would probably have been worth the backlash. I know I'm unsure if I think it would have been better if the assassin hadn't missed. OTOH it's very bad to have presidents assassinated. OTOH sometimes it can actually shock a polity back to some kind of unity not to mention the huge risks of bad presidential choices (tho that cuts both ways).
Has US been the world leader in cancel culture? If so why?
[Edit: Okay I know Akhenaten is not American, but I am referring to the modern manifestation of it, in a form one doesn't see so often in, e.g., Europe.]
No, but we're the world leader in cancel-culture-as-audience-participation-sport.
AKA Democracy.
Funnily enough, one of the top 5 tenets of the religion the right is committed to is literally about "turning the other cheek".
Orthodox interpretation: the priesthood should avoid violence altogether, and the faithful should only use it to maintain order.
Funnily enough, the "religion the right is committed to" (and also many on the so-called "left" -- not everyone is a Marxist atheist, dude) also recognizes that humans are fallible creatures who are all guilty of sins. Christians are directed to TRY to avoid sins, but the fact that they inevitably occur, and the method for achieving forgiveness, is baked into the cake. It's also a sin to engage in activity that encourages others to sin, and wishing for the death of another human being is one hell of a provocation.
You don't stop being a Christian just because you have committed sins, mang.
Funny also how you could have turned the other cheek right now instead of being aggressive.
Oh, you have no idea what I'm like when I actually get aggressive. Sorry if you were traumatized by someone disagreeing with you.
P.S. what makes you assume I'm a Christian? Unlike you, apparently, I understand the basic beliefs of every major religion.
There are roughly 4000 religions; how many of them by your count are, ah, major?
> how many of them by your count are, ah, major?
Ah, the ones to which nearly 90% of the world's population belong?
Everything else is a rounding error.
But you know that as well as I do. You're not tall enough for this ride, troll.
That would be none of them...
Wow. Such toughness on this anonymous comment thread. So impressive.
Oh, do be quiet.
Oh, you have no idea what I'm like when I actually get aggressive. Sorry if you were traumatized by someone disagreeing with you.
Oh, so why didn't you just turn your cheek instead of firing off that response? Be the change you want to see!
Yeah, it's one more instance of "I don't believe this dumb shit but since you idiots do, I'm going to try and use it against you". Not gonna work.
This is the "No I'm not a Christian, and I have nothing but contempt for your backwards beliefs, so no this argument wouldn't work on me, but maybe if I use it on you, you'll do what I want" meme.
I mean, it's true though. They hypocrisy will never not by funny.
TL:DR When THEY do it, then it is bad. Very Bad. Very Very Bad Indeed.
When WE do it, then It Is Necessary To Defend Our Democracy, or at most a measured response to outrageous provocation.
This is subtly different - it’s not mere hypocrisy, it’s more like “when THEY do it, it’s bad. When WE do it, it’s bad but regrettably necessary because THEY need to learn that it is bad, and they didn’t listen when we told them”
(Which might be disingenuous, but not hypocritical)
To be a bit pedantic, I don't think it's true that no one learns anything from being persecuted. It just tends to require extreme persecution (genocides, Jim crow) and even then learning something may not be the most likely outcome. But I do think sometimes when things become horrible enough people get pushed beyond anger.
Everybody learns from being persecuted, and the lesson is the hierarchy. The only question that matters is Who? Whom?
this reminds me of a line from a recent book review of TLP's "Sadly, Porn", from Scott's recent book review contest.
> The young child only responds to affect, to the emotion you're giving off. He hasn't internalised the sense of others being people, so when you calmly explain why he shouldn't do something, he doesn't get it. He doesn't interpret it as a real punishment. He does get it when you shout at him, but now you're doing it over something arbitrary, like spilling some milk.
> What happens next is the child cries and the parent realises what they've done, and then they turn around and console the child. This is the fatal step.
> What the child has learned from this process is that:
- Your authority is arbitrary
- You can be placated for them to get what they want
- All they need to do is figure out what will placate you.
> A harsh, even abusive parent who merely beats their kids for no reason is sure to give them some kind of pathology, but they won't get the second and third parts so this won't create narcissists. It's this unstable emotional dynamic: at once nurturing then punishing without a predictable underlying logic that could allow them to develop a clear understanding of right and wrong.
ergo, I'm not quite convinced that your claim is universal.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GYQw3pgvhi7hqOVR-Ql629Q_8thbyHe8sSRy5voyt30/edit
> remember that cancellation is mostly friendly fire
Like the curious case of I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter. Originally a gamer meme against transgendrism, it was used as a writing prompt by a transgender author in a pretty good scifi short story. Only problem is twitter-brained trans activists on Twitter who don't read beyond the title (if that), the author was eventually driven underground.
Link: https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/2020-01-15-fall-isexuallyidentifyasanattackhelicopter.html.
> there’s apparently still a norm against assassinating politicians
I wonder why, to be honest. It seems to me like this bizarre cargo-culting. Like everybody is suddenly supposed to transform into a Tree-Hugging Hippie saying "EVERYTHING IS,,, LIKE,,, CONNECTED MAN". Are all the people so upset and panicked about wishing death for Trump really deriving this from first principles, would they be equally horrified at (say) wishing death to Putin or the Saudi royal family or some South American president they have never heard of?
If Trump himself said something to the effect of "I can kill anybody I want to with no consequences" and his audience cheered like it was the best orgasm they had in their life, why the sudden and queer insistence on providing the very, bizarrely strong norm of "I will never wish death upon you" to someone who never even had enough brain cells to grasp the dictionary definition of "Norm"? I'm as always perplexed. America has a strong and long tradition of assassinating politicians in other countries that the saga of assassination attempts against Castro is a whole fucking universe of meme lore.
Trump's shooter did nothing wrong except not wielding the weapon accurately enough, and everybody who finds this sentiment so intolerable that it invites summary immediate dismissal is buckling under an immense amount of peer pressure.
As a Right-wing accelerationist I endorse your last paragraph.
Do you want the Thirty Years War? Because this is how you get the Thirty Years War.
Yeah. This. Trump is an avatar of right wing discontent. If he dies by assassination, that discontent might just spill over into widespread political violence. Not good.
If you don’t like Trump, convince his supporters not to vote for him. Don’t try and jail him or kill him. Those who think that would be a good solution really don’t understand MAGA.
A pity Trump doesn't just _retire_, like Biden did.
May they _both_ play on the beach with their grandkids or greatgrandkids as the case may be.
The GOP could choose a candidate who _didn't_ suggest looking into injecting disinfectant.
Hmm... Trump being Trump - what about _bribing_ him to retire?
If Trump got a heart attack the day before the assassination attempt and died in the hospital, do you really think his supporters would just be chill with it and move on? They would most likely start attacking doctors and nurses because they vote majority Democrat while having 2 or 3 conspiracy theories floating around about how Trump was intentionally targeted by the jab or the medical establishment and this is all the Democrats' fault. Trump has been signal boosting support for political violence to his base nonstop, from the comments of the second amendment people taking care of Hillary, to mocking Paul Pelosi getting attacked, to lying about the 2020 election being stolen and that his supporters needed to fight to get their country back, to retruthing for military tribunals to be held against Liz Cheney... these antics only get worse as he lives and accumulates more support from paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys and radicalizes his supporters to the point where they're chanting to hang Mike Pence.
Do you think Trump supporters could be brought around with reasoned debate?
No, I think their views on things like vaccines or election fraud have been successfully countered by even sitting Republican politicians, but there is still e.g. widespread antivax sentiment among them even though Trump was responsible for Operation Warpspeed and endorsed the covid vaccine. Many Trump supporters are effectively operating at the Alex Jones intellectual level where they remain incorrigible in the face of evidence (Giulliani testifying in court that he lied about election fraud had no effect on the Trump supporters who were convinced the election was stolen). Allowing Trump to continue solidifying this voting block and potentially getting them into parts of the military spells much more disaster for the US than civil unrest following a successful assassination - although granted there is much more volatility in what could happen after a short and destructive event like a successful assassination or heart attack rather than gradual transformation of the US into a military dictatorship. I think the latter is likely to be worse, but if an assassination attempt leads to e.g. civil war that would probably be worse. I also don't think anybody can channel Trump supporters like Trump does, so having him out of the picture would be a great blow to the voting block, although of course the crazies would remain, just less organized.
Interesting. I see this attitude a lot on the left where the only possible reason to vote for Trump must be stupidity or misinformation.
I personally support Trump and hope he wins, although I agree that vaccines work and the 2020 election was legitimate.
Could be WWI instead. Yeah, Yeah, Trump isn't an archduke...
The ruling elite, for obvious reasons, prefer all killing be restricted to the lower classes, and denounce political assassination out of naked self-interest. Most people who don't benefit from this norm simply echo the positions of those who do.
When is it morally acceptable to kill someone? Disagreeing with them politically seems like too low of a bar.
Good question. I'm annoyed at the conformist rush to condemn Trump's would-have-been-killer not because I disagree in principle that killing people we disagree with is barbaric and no way to build/maintain a society, but because:
(1) Trump in particular is a low-value human that absolutely no one is capable of missing if their life depended on it. He's the archetypical "Unsympathetic Victim" that gets killed by the sympathetic character in shows like CSI and NCIS and the audience forgives and even cheers for the sympathetic character.
(2) Even if somebody were to decide for themselves that killing Trump would have been net bad, they don't have to stumble on their own 2 feet to broadcast this for all the world to see. "Killing is bad" is not a particularly original message, and bending over backwards to broadcast it in this particular case just signals that the broadcaster value Trump's life in particular and not the abstract principle of the sanctity of life.
(3) Trump, in his former official capacity as US president, is an industrial mass-murderer. This is not unique to Trump, but googling "Trump drone strikes", for example, yields this wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._drone_strikes) which shows Trump didn't miss the opportunity to prove himself as the boneless pile of organic trash that he is:
>> In October 2017, Trump abolished the Obama-era approval system in favor of a looser, decentralized approach, which gave the military and CIA officials the discretion to decide to launch drone strikes against targets without White House approval. This policy reduced accountability for drone strikes.
>> On July 1, 2016, President Barack Obama signed an executive order requiring annual accounting of civilian and enemy casualties in U.S. drone strikes outside war zones [...] However [...] President Donald Trump designated large areas in Yemen and Somalia to be "areas of active hostilities," thus exempting them from disclosure. The Trump administration also ignored the 2017 and 2018 deadlines for an annual accounting, and on March 6, 2019, Trump issued an order revoking the requirement.
So he's an extra hard-working piece of shit, beyond even the necessary amount of "Piece of Shitness" that the title of US President would require.
For all of those reasons and possibly more that I'm too lazy to articulate, I think that the rule "Killing is bad unless the target is in the exception list" and adding Trump and Trump-like insects as entries in the exceptions list is basically a good compromise. I think that "Acts like Trump" is a very good and unambiguous exception condition that would almost never harm a good person.
I do recognize that it's pragmatic to pretend sometimes that you're upset by things that you aren't really upset by, I'm just annoyed at the sheer frequency of ordinary non-politician people doing this, in sheer mindless imitation of politicians.
Did it occur to you at all that reasoning identical to your #1 could place you on some other crazy person's list?
I'm having a hard time reconciling your views in this comment with the strong stance you have taken that the deaths in Gaza are a moral tragedy. Surely from the point of view of Israel it would be justified to think of Hamas as consisting of low-value humans that no one will miss, and that killing Hamas (and whatever civilians get in the way) is net-good.
When we discussed the Gaza situation previously I took you for someone with strong moral principles against war and against killing, even in the face of utilitarian concerns such as the harm Hamas causes to the people living in Gaza and to the world in general. Yet here you posit that it's alright to kill people if you think their death will be good "on net" or if you consider the people you are killing "insects", "unsympathetic victims", or "boneless piles of organic trash". If killing is only bad if your target isn't on the exception list, then why is Israel killing Gazans bad? Clearly they're on Israel's exception list, if they have one.
Fair question. Consistency is what makes and breaks moral positions, and holding people to it is ultimately a sign of respect.
The answer is in something you went over way too quickly:
> and whatever civilians get in the way
This is it; this is the answer that you overlook way too quickly. It's the whole key.
Killing Trump is not bad because it can be done surgically, with 0 casualties other than Trump (who, I argue, isn't a "casualty" at all). This reminds me: I have wrongly said that Trump's shooter did nothing wrong, I retract that. He did one major crime: he murdered an innocent man. That man was "collateral damage", to use the favorite word of Israel's defenders, but I would still have supported trialing the shooter on charges of murder, if he survived.
In contrast, the fanciful goal of "destroying Hamas" already resulted in something like 2% of Gazans dead, and even if you indulge in the often-insincere concerns about Hamas falsifying the records and mixing civilian with military deaths and so on and so forth, the low end is still 1% of Gazans dead, and as high as 10% or 15% in the future from the effects of starvation, unclean water, destroyed hospitals, and so on. Polio is the latest disease to strike Gaza due to overflowing sewage water, the only one that Israel gave a shit about (but only to vaccinate IDF personnel, naturally) because it's infectious and tenacious.
There is no way in this whole universe that Hamas could have killed 25K innocent people unless they camped in the streets with AK-47s and actively hunted unarmed Gazans. But with the help of Israel, Hamas did. Israel doesn't give a shit because no Gazan is ever innocent in the Israeli mainstream playbook. Hamas doesn't give a shit because the martyrs are playing football with Allah now or something like that. The world is now worse and have less life and more death, all due to the seemingly innocent act of trying to kill murderers.
In summary: Trump (and all politicians who directly or indirectly kill people) are valid targets of assassination because assassination by its very nature is surgical, in fact it's an often-presented alternative to wars like the one in Gaza. But a whole war can't be surgical.
> Yet here you posit that it's alright to kill people if you think their death will be good "on net"
Utilitarianism in matters of death and justice is complex, but I don't think I made that argument at all (which is not the same thing as either agreeing or disagreeing with it), ctrl-F for "on net" yields only your usage of it.
Here's the argument again, presented in maximum clarity and honesty:
(1) I don't like when any living thing dies. [1]
(2) This means we sometimes have to kill living things, as living things paradoxically kill other living things.
(3) But only if killing the killer will not result in other, non-killing living things being killed.
(4) Trump is a living thing that kills other living things, and who can be killed without any other living things being killed, therefore we should try to kill him, or at the very least not express disapproval at those who try to kill him.
(5) Hamas is a collection of living things that kill other living things, but which -
empirically - have proven to be so difficult to kill in a war that a war killed 1% to 1.5% of the innocent population of the place they control with them not killed yet and with no end in sight, and therefore we shouldn't try (yet) to kill Hamas (with war).
I have now said "Killing" and "Kill" so many times that it has a weird taste in my mouth, you know the feeling, but I believe that I have made myself very clear, as clear as I could.
I didn't choose this contradictory universe where life kills and eats and rapes life, but I have to live in it and any beliefs I choose to hold must reflect this universe fundamental nature however minimally. There is an optimal amount of killing and it's not zero, it's a strawman of pacifism to believe that the pacifist opposes any killing whatsoever. Putin, Trump, Egypt's Al-Sisi, Saudi Arabia's Ibn Salman, etc..., are unambiguous, unapologetic, scum, a collective mark of shame on humanity. Killing them without killing anybody else is the highest honor any pacifist could obtain. If you can't kill them, then at least incite killing them. If you can't incite killing them, then cheer when somebody else incites or try to kill them. If nothing else, don't condemn attempts to kill them.
[1] (This is a weird value, if somebody values less suffering, the cessation of all sentient life and the world reverting to lifeless, or at least Peter-Watts-like forms of life is good. But in practice I find myself also reluctant to support killing - even mercifully - sentient, pain-feeling life to decrease their suffering, and I find myself wanting all forms of life to continue. Values are complicated and contradictory, and this is completely okay because the world is complicated and contradictory.)
Regarding point 3, I don't understand the comment "it’s hard to find a definition where most Democrats support cancel culture and most Republicans oppose it." Q23 shows ~68% of Democrats are in favor of deplatforming with 10% opposed, compared to ~28% in favor and ~44% opposed for Republicans. Similarly for Q24. I would say those results pretty clearly indicate Democrats favor cancel culture while republicans oppose it. Q6 and Q20 show Democrats are split on the issue while republicans strongly oppose limits on free speech and artist cancellation.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with the premise, I'm just saying the polling results presented here don't support it.
Scott is pulling a "not really lying" here. What he said is carefully worded. It's literally true that most Republicans don't oppose it. After all, "most" means more than 50% and only 44% oppose it.
And as you've observed, these polls do mean that Democrats favor it and Republicans oppose it, which is what people really want to know. But that's not the way Scott phrased it.
> vengeance
> brohelpme.jpg
that seems to strong a word, I shared that image
Vengeance implies inflicting a specific, hostile, negative action on a specific group in a specific response. During corona my idealism died, and Im letting a general prosocial habit lapse due to vibes.
I.e. saving a drowning child vs not giving all money for children in africa; isn't evil its just disagreeing with unbounded utilitarianism.
One big question here is "How do we fight the nazis?". I see 3 possible scenarios:
- We always fight the nazis early. Cancel culture will exist because everyone thinks they're fighting the nazis. We modulate a bit on whether we're cancelling a lot or a little, but it'll always be there. The nazis still show up once in a while, but less frequently than if we didn't.
- We never fight the nazis early. Maybe if we were nice to the germans and didn't oppress them too much after WWI we wouldn't get nazism. Nazism comes from the reaction to cancel culture!
- We never fight the nazis early, they still show up. When they start invading Poland with tanks then we can fight them. Before that we get the benefit that most of the time they weren't really nazis and we didn't have to live through cancel culture.
(1) assumes that cancel culture has actually been effective at preventing the rise of the far right this time round and I'm not seeing it: Trump is going to be president, Farage is an MP, RN is at the gates in France. Don't most historians believe something like (2) I.e the treaty of versailles was too punitive? Doing the Marshall plan in the 20s could have saved everyone a lot of bother.
No one listens to the Nazis until the economy is destroyed and society is in chaos, and then the people listen to anyone who can promise a return to normalcy.
More realistically, you are missing part 1 which is, "how do we identify Nazis?" Which is a skill the American left has absolutely zero ability to do.
I'm posting this for the record. I'm one of the few on this thread who has a moral right to respond to this post, since my husband and I are among the "cancelled." I'll describe below what exactly we went through in 2021-22. But before starting into that, I'll say this: Scott is 100% right. I don't wish our experience on our worst enemies. The whole reason that our co-workers and co-academics were spineless enough to cancel us was that so few of them embraced "the ancient Saxon right to plainly speak one’s mind." The solution isn't to whittle the numbers further. Everyone should have the right -- and the spine to back it up on behalf of other people.
Here's what happened. In 2021 when the mRNA covid shots first rolled out in the US, we were planning to get them. But we were in Canada, which was 3-6 months behind the rest of the world. During the months of waiting, we watched as family & friends in the States (who had all been perfectly fine during Covid itself) got the mRNA and booster, suddenly got sick with mysteriously bad Covid, sometimes even ended up in the hospital, and in one case died on a respirator.
That got us asking questions. We tapped into the emerging research on the mRNA shots. It was all inconsistent in terms of whether the shots were safe or effective, and there were high-profile immunologists saying that mass injections weren't a good idea. Byram Bridle here in Canada, one of the leading mRNA developers, specifically argued there was a risk of "antibody-dependent enhancement," which means that a shot protects a person for a very short time but then dramatically increases the likelihood of a severe case later. Apparently coronaviruses in general have antibody-dependent enhancement tendencies, which is partly why there's never been a successful vaccine for the common cold.
There was other research indicating that the mRNA had cardiac side effects, especially for people <40. In fact, the only demographic where the benefits of the shot outweighed the risks (if I recall correctly) was for people 80+ or otherwise immunocompromised. I can't recall the numbers exactly, but that's what we were reading at the time.
Let me underscore that this was all early research and the studies were contradictory. You'd think that, given how experimental the mRNA shots were, everybody would be talking openly about the pros and cons. You know, let's have a folk moot or Althing in the public square. The more everyone argues, the more everyone points out problems with everyone else, everyone has to modify their views on at least something, and then truth springs up like a flame between them.
That didn't happen. Bridle and the other academics we were following suddenly got kicked out of their labs, suspended, or fired. They got "fact-checked" in the public media and accused of spreading "misinformation" -- without any discussion of the scientific research they were looking at. Then the mandates in Canada came down. Let me emphasize that the mandates came down *in proportion as* questions were emerging about the mRNA risks. It's not like there was a solid consensus and therefore the government decided to enforce something perfectly agreed-upon. The research was the Wild West. But the government was totally Orwellian. Suddenly academics and health care workers who didn't comply got fired. Even social media posts questioning the mRNA got censored and shadow-banned.
Then my husband's school decided to enforce the vax mandate. This wasn't a big, impersonal school. It was a little school with like 5 staff and no classes running in the building. My husband was the only one raising questions about the mRNA. There were weeks of polite but increasingly pressure-driven emails between him and his supervisor. Eventually, management told him they simply had to comply with the mandate. It was either resign or be fired, so my husband resigned.
In desperation, I tried emailing our academic contacts personally to voice our concerns about the mRNA and the human right to medical choice. One tenured prof furiously told me never to contact him again. (He had tenure. I was working as an underpaid contract teacher.) Even one of the more sympathetic profs told me he just wasn't going to talk to me about the shots. Instead, he sent me a link to the Atlantic. (Hey, look! The Atlantic says the shots are safe and effective. So why be so stubborn?)
The job cancellation upended our lives. My husband had a humanities PhD and was working in academic administration because there were no humanities jobs. It was the middle of the pandemic, so most businesses in Canada were either closed or recovering. Any other office-type job *also* required the mRNA. So there was little to fall back on. He very luckily got a job in timber-frame construction in rural Ontario, thanks to a small community of Mennonites who took him to their hearts. We moved on short notice in the middle of winter, and we got the last available apartment in the new town. It didn't have a dishwasher, so I still spend an hour a day doing dishes. (Lol, sometimes the small things annoy you the most!)
The troubles didn't end there. The media barrage was constant. We were alternately stupid vs maliciously misleading, but we were always selfish, anti-science, antisocial superspreaders who were willing and able to kill your Grandma. (For the record, my husband and I never got sick during the entire 2020-2022 period.) We were barred from most restaurants in Canada. We were barred from getting on trains or planes. We were barred from crossing the border to visit family in the US. Polls showed that most Canadians thought we should pay fines. Around 25% thought we should be in jail or concentration camps.
Then the Trucker's Protest came. The government wanted to vax-mandate the truckers (you know, the guys who sit alone literally all day). People finally woke up and donated to the protests. But then came the hacking and doxxing of the donors. The government froze people's bank accounts for donating like $20. We didn't personally know people whose money was frozen, but we did know people who donated and then had to be afraid it would be.
Let me emphasize again that we don't wish this on our worst enemies. I'm not saying this to make anyone feel bad. I'm saying this so people can vicariously see our "lived experience," and thus hopefully refuse to do it to other people ever again.
Honestly, though, the worst part about this whole saga hasn't been what happened to us. It's the dribs and drabs of bad news that keep dropping... from people who got the mRNA. We have an elderly friend with neurological problems that worsened immediately after the vax. An inlaw's elderly family member died. The father of one of my teaching colleagues, as well as my high school principal, died from severe covid after getting the booster. Both were otherwise healthy 50/60-year-olds. One of my students had an uncle in his 30s/40s who suddenly dropped dead while running. Another student, among my best and brightest, got one dose of the mRNA, immediately developed swelling in the feet and legs, and now has rheumatoid arthritis. It cripples her so badly that she can't even do online school work during the flare-ups.
Just to be clear, I'm not blaming anyone in particular for this. I'm not saying "You're an evil person for getting the mRNA or asking other people to." I just want everyone to realize how much better off we'd all be right now if there had been real free speech during 2020-22. What's done is done. It's in God's hands now how to bring good out of it. It's in our hands whether or not to repeat it.
My vote is with Scott's. Whoever is currently up or down, let's stop the cancellations. Scott's ideas at the end of this post look like a great start.
Jesus Christ. I’m sorry that happened to you and your family.
Thank God, he is the Christ. He knows what he's doing, so I can't complain too much. But in the moment, it was quite stressful. Thanks so much for reading. For the longest time we had to be careful who we talked to. It means a lot to finally be heard.
That was a horrible experience. I am so sorry that this happened to you. Thank you for telling us about it.
Thanks, Jeff! :)
I mean Jeffrey! Sorry for the spontaneous abbreviation... I know two Jeffs and did it automatically. Oops!
That's fine! Best wishes to you!
It sounds like you had a really unpleasant experience, but I don't think you were "cancelled."
Refusing vaccination is an action, not just speech, that in certain situations might justify restrictions, like being barred from restaurants, trains, and planes (and sometimes even getting forced to leave the job, depends on the specifics). Not as a punishment or a means of control, but due to straightforward practical considerations. In my opinion, the early days of Covid surely gave rise to such circumstances.
It's probably best not to go into this topic right now, so I'll just say that on the one hand I do agree that some people and policies went overboard, turning everything into a ridiculous signaling game. But on the other hand, I also strongly believe that the early reaction to the epidemic wasn't nearly strong enough, given the magnitude of the potential risks and Knightian uncertainties we faced at that time.
Yes, it's too bad we didn't weld shut the doors of people's homes so they were forced to quarantine. Or build concentration camps to isolate the filthy unvaccinated. China and Australia really made the rest of the world look bad.
Lol, I appreciate the humor. It's getting easier to laugh about in retrospect. :)
No hard feelings, Omar. We heard lots like this as we were in the pressure cooker. You're right that there are two different rights here: free speech and medical autonomy (esp. to refuse experimental medicine). My point is that these rights don't walk apart. People who abandon one under pressure will abandon the other, and in this case, the first led to the second. The reason you think some cancellations may have been OK is that you were told that the mRNA was safe and effective. Imagine how your views would be different if more doctors had been free to publicly say otherwise.
To put this in perspective: A recent book review on ACX was about prion diseases, including Creuzfeldt-Jakob Disease (the human form of mad cow). Countries totally freak out if one of their citizens suddenly gets the disease, and they ban meat supplies from other countries that have a case or two. But the covid injections to date have caused 26 cases of spontaneous CJD. (Covid-19 is thought to have caused around 5, though the cases I've looked at didn't say whether the patient was vaxxed, so the vax might have been the culprit there too.) Both covid & the shots can cause CJD because of the spike protein, which is amplified in the mRNA.
Many of the doctors we were following in 2021 (who got cancelled) were warning about the mRNA spike protein. A few even predicted prion diseases like CJD, since apparently it was well known that experiments with mRNA transfer could have weird and unforeseen effects. That's why many doctors & researchers were voicing concerns about widespread use vs targeted treatments (e.g., for populations over 80). But then they got cancelled, and everyone else shut up for fear of losing their licenses.
This was a minor issue compared to the cardiac problems. Those are now fairly well known. But there again, the doctors who first voiced concerns were sacked, and everyone else fell into line.
Imagine how your views on medical choice would be different if more of those doctors had been free to speak their minds. "The mRNA is experimental, it will take 10 years to see if it's safe or effective, and we don't recommend it for mass injections."
--------
Link to peer-reviewed study of 26 CJD cases attributed to the covid shots:
https://ijvtpr.com/index.php/IJVTPR/article/view/66
Early paper cautioning against protein problems with the mRNA, including CJD:
https://dpbh.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/dpbhnvgov/content/Boards/BOH/Meetings/2021/SENEFF~1.PDF
Good post, but if it's important to figure out what we mean by cancel culture, then those historical examples are a problem. They're terrible!
Surely the deal with cancellation is that it's chattering-class pressure which provokes institutional censure: you get fired, your book contract gets cancelled, etcetera. I guess that _extreme_ institutional censure (you get set on fire) still counts, but only if it's in response to the mob. The institution in these cases is reactive, and bows to the pressure.
Diocletian, Akhenaten and the priests of Amun all had direct control of the relevant institutions, and were all plainly exercising power in pursuit of their own projects. The policies of the first and last probably won plenty of chattering class support, but it's hard to imagine any of these guys really cared.
I guess Socrates kind of counts, it's just that in that case the institution was coextensive with the mob.
All excellent stuff Scott. I'm particularly taken with your section 7 so, in my overwhelmingly-lefty contexts both personal and professional, prepare to be plagiarized without mercy.
But all of this is spot-on. And I am very far from the only lefty lifer who sees things that way now and looks back at the last couple decades with some shame and/or humility.
Sadly there are also lots who do not -- but that tide has been shifting in recent years thankfully. It's a tide not a wind gust, and we're talking about human beings not robots, so this sort of macro-level cultural stuff does not change directions suddenly or quickly.
But it does shift, and that directional arrow did at least flatten out I would say no later than 2021. (2020's public madnesses were a collective spasm or tantrum not a new level-setting.)
"If you think FDR was a "centrist", you might be really far to the left (or getting your views from there)." What you say is a wide spread opinion. But it is historically wrong. At the time, many of FDR signature laws passed with large majorities and support from both parties.
Trying to apply left- or right-coding onto century old politics is absurd. Our race relations would be considered extreme to the left. Our economic policy, with wage controls completely outside the Overton window, would also be so weird.
I'm sure someone pointed this out, but your point about the polls are weakened a bit by the actual percentages there. Say for a moment we remove the neither agree nor disagree responses to focus on the question of what opinions do people have when they have a strong opinion - The majority of Democrats favor the anti-free speech side.
The reason to abstain from using these tactics is that's it's undignified and weak to get so hurt by someone else's opinion.
How does this jive with “tit for tat with forgiveness” as the optimum strategy in an integrated prisoners’ dilemma?
You seem to be advocating “forgiveness” without ever giving the “tit”.
Who are you negotiating with?
There are two amorphous blobs. Who in the other side can signal to you that they're not doing tit any more?
For what it’s worth, I’m advancing this because it seemed like the obvious objection and I would have expected Scott of all people to consider the game theory explanations.
You make a somewhat fair point that these are amorphous blobs, not clearly defined rational actors with clearly segregated iterations.
On the other hand, I think you misunderstand “tit for tat with forgiveness”. You don’t need the other side to “signal” that they will stop defecting - when they do cooperate, you also cooperate. If they always cooperate, you will always cooperate.
“Forgiveness” is just added to occasionally respond to defection with cooperation, in order to break two pure tit-for-tat players out of a defection loop.
Excellent comment, though I would advocate for the right's "tat" to not involve cancelation. Free speech is an absolute good and the left eroded it. Let the right earn goodwill points by scrupulously restoring it. Besides, the rights' ideas are better and so they will preferentially benefit by restoring norms of honest communication and vigorous debate. No, the right should exact retribution by systematically exposing the lies of the left and mercilessly humiliating them for them. "Stand up here and justify BLM now that you no longer have the power to deplatform me by calling me racist. Let's see how well thought-out your ideology is now. Oh, it was all based on innumeracy and implicit anti-white racism? How interesting!"
Agree. My hope for the future is for the intelligent people now to flock to the right wing. The Vivek Ramaswamys, Chris Rufos, JD Vances and Elon Musks of the world can shine a light of truth - if people are ready to listen.
From Wikipedia:
> "Tit for tat with forgiveness" is a similar attempt to escape the death spiral. When the opponent defects, a player employing this strategy will occasionally cooperate on the next move anyway.
Oooh! And in addition to my comment above, this seems like an apropos moment for a Shakespearean sonnet.
Sonnet 94
They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
Or if we're in the mire of "well they started it first", some Yeats:
The Great Day
Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
This is great. How have I never seen this before from Yeats? "Hurrah" indeed!
>If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught you that. It obviously hasn’t, so try a different strategy.
This proves too much; it could be used against any strategy that involves retaliatory force. "If bombing Nagasaki could teach Japan not to attack you, bombing Pearl Harbor would have taught you not to attack Japan. It obviously hasn’t, so try a different strategy."
The US didn't declare war on Japan "to teach them how it feels when you get bombed so you stop doing it."
There was also a plausible endgame: the emperor's surrender.
Based on some of the top-level comments on this post, I'd say we could all use a reminder about how reporting bias and media filters work.
Never, ever forget the "and why do you believe it?" after the "what do you believe?"
This all sounds exactly like calls for "ceasing violence from all sides". Which is all great and nice, in theory, and a complete disaster in practice. First, terrorists attack, then the defense services go after the terrorists, and then the well meaning people cry "cease violence from all sides immediately! oh btw and yes, terrorists are bad, we totally condemn them, but everybody must cease violence right now!" Which is great for terrorists, because they have already done their violence, and they are not going to cease anything, because they don't give a hoot about what the well-meaning people think about them, but the defense against terrorists is now two orders of magnitude harder, because how exactly are you supposed to defend against them without using violence?
And yes, I know all the argument about "other side" and so on - but as there are two sides of violence, there must be two sides to cessation of violence, otherwise it's not peace, it's unconditional surrender and annihilation. If we want cancellations to stop, we need both sides to want to stop it, and especially the side that started it (or, ramped it up several orders of magnitude) should come out and call their own side to stop it. Not to call other side to stop it because "it hurts innocent people" (which they had zero care about when they were doing it), not "both sides", but specifically, unequivocally and only their side must stop it. No ifs, no buts, no coconuts - just don't do it anymore. Then they can have a chance that the other side will believe they are serious about stopping it. Until that happens - and it definitely didn't happen, except maybe in Scott's blog which doesn't seem to be as influential in this matter as I'd personally like - calling the right to stop their revenge for what has been done to them for decades now is not only going to work, it is going to be viewed - and justifiably - as a tactical weapon designed to hurt them even more.
And yes, I know the answer to this would be "but nobody is going to do it, so what, the alternative is eternal war of total destruction?" Well, the thing is the right has been living in the war of total destruction for decades now (look up how many right-wing people - especially openly right-wing, and especially ones that don't have to fight off a torrent cancellation attempts daily - exist in academia, entertainment, major MSM, etc.). Would it be better if it worked both ways? Maybe not, but it certainly would be more fair and just.
> they won’t cancel Rachel Maddow or Kamala Harris. They’ll get some WSJ writer who puts too few exclamation points after “MAGA!!!!”
Sorry, given that people that are being cancelled now are those who explicitly, publicly and gleefully wish a violent death to a person whose guilt is to represent opposing political views, this is not very convincing. So far 100% of the cancellations for insufficient purity and saying the wrong word once and it being taken out of context are coming from the left. Call me when it gets at least to 80%, I won't be holding my breath though.
I think the Kamala thing in 2020 should be understood primarily as party unification. Biden did the same thing with Bernie and AOC, and it's very likely he managed to achieve as much as he did by having a party that (apart from Manchin) *acted* almost shockingly unified even though they ideologically weren't.
I agree. We can talk about qualifications all we want, but it comes down to Which Political Clique with it's 3,000 Political Appointments do we want in power the next four years.
Britain is more nimble because they only have a few hundred appointments.
Rule #4 in Rules for Radicals: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."
Agreed. People shouldn't be deplatformed they should be defeated. The reason the woke seek to deplatform is that they are objectively wrong about most things and so can't win a fair debate, which is exactly why they rely so heavily on attacking the other side's character: racist, sexist, transphobic. They have nothing else because their ideas are bad.
If the right wants their victory to have a lasting impact then they need to defeat the ideas instead of banishing the people. Fortunately they can do that because their ideas are better. Don't cancel the woke double-trans intersectional nonbinary lunatic! Put zym front and center and very calmly debate zym. Let the world watch as ze sputters in rage and indignation. Eventually ze'll run out of insults. Then you can say "thank you sir that will be all."
Or maybe, just maybe, it's because the other side is racist, sexist, and transphobic. Eg, they enjoy grabbing them by the pussy, and think any women that isn't pregnant and possibly barefoot is a "childless cat lady" who clearly shouldn't be out here making decisions, or any of the dozens/hundreds of other highly public statements made infront of cameras one could fish out of the memory hole.
You know the saying: not every (R) has a white hood in the closet, but every white hood apriciater is an (R).
Oh man do you even know what you're going to do with yourself when your magic words (racist! sexist! transphobe!) stop working?
lol, right? I have been called an “alt-right white supremacist” for arguing that racism should be defined as discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexuality or religion. Apparently living by the words of Martin Luther King and trying to treat everyone as individuals and being race-blind is bad now, you have to be “anti-racist.” Good God.
Yeah I think the culture has collectively gotten sick of people screaming 'racism'. Thank God.
As nearly as I can tell, the Woke have overused and broadened "racist" so much that when they call someone "racist", it is effectively equivalent to calling them "human".
I mean, I'm just observing the things you do and say and correctly identifying them, mostly. I know you don't care, because if you cared you would be different.
So the “you” you are using here applies specifically to Wanda? Because I can’t find anything racist, sexist or transphobic in her statements. Or are you smearing her by implication, in that people on the same political side as her sometimes say racist things?
Because I could use that argument too, you know. “You” (left-wingers!) killed tens of millions of Chinese in the Cultural Revolution. How dare you.
Or maybe, just maybe, what you label as racism, sexism, and transphobia is actually the rational apprehension of reality. Maybe blacks are killed more often by police because they commit far more violent crime. Maybe blacks lag in every educational and wealth attainment metric because they have genetically lower IQs and a terrible culture. Maybe transgenders are simply mentally ill people who have been duped by the social contagion of an incoherent philosophy. Maybe women earn less because they work less hard and are underrepresented in high-IQ cohorts because their IQ distribution has a lower variance.
Soon the power of your insulting labels will fade and you will be forced to confront these possibilities in open debate. I hope for your sake that you're ready.
I have, and who knew: conservatives lose any debate where they aren't allowed to mute their interlocutor or scream loud enough nobody can hear anything else.
You'd think people would learn from a couple hundred years of history, but alas.
What exactly are you claiming here? Conservatives have been wrong in every argument they’ve advanced over the past two hundred years?
Do you think Reagan was wrong when he argued with Mondale that high taxes were stifling the economy? Reagan subsequently won the presidency, reduced taxes, and guided America out of the stagflation of the 70s
Do you think Malcolm Muggeridge was wrong when he told the English public that Stalin’s policies were starving millions in the Ukraine, and was lambasted by left wing communists and fellow travellers?
Please elaborate on this “conservatives lose every debate” thesis you have here
Conservatives can be right about events, or specific policies, or facts; but conservative ideology produces a model of the world that can't stand up to interactions with reality.
That's why even if regan managed to spend his way out of stagflation; his reforms long term have lead to the collapse of the middle class and the financialization induced fragility we see today.
This is because his understanding of the way the world was fundamentally flawed, even if he had the facts right.
I’ve heard this idea before from lefties (that the Reagan era reforms are the original sin that caused inequality to increase) and it doesn’t stack up - it conveniently ignores just how bad the economy was in the 70s and how Reagan pulled us out of a recession. Also, much like Trump’s China tariffs, if the reforms were bad, why didn’t the left change them when they got into government? No, the real reason for inequality increasing is corruption in DC and regulatory capture - it’s not the rich, it’s the powerful.
Anyway, you’ve changed your line from “conservatives are literally always wrong” to “conservatives are sometimes right, but their ideology is wrong.” Again, this needs clarification. Which part of conservative ideology? Low taxes, small government, strong military and police, tough on crime? Is the ideology of Nayib Bukele flawed, even though his tough on crime approach in El Salvador has led to 90+% reductions in violent crime and soaring approval ratings?
You should continue this debate with myself and Wanda! I think it would be very educational for all involved :)
You start shoveling sand, and I will also start shoveling sand, and we'll see who gets bored first.
I do feel like the point of a debate is for the onlookers. I know you are extremely unlikely to change your mind
If by “cancelation” we mean “Twitter mobs get a random nobody fired for a bad Tweet”, then the major issue is that this punishment is a) extremely randomly applied (going viral is usually a matter of chance) and b) almost always disproportionate.
So it’s strictly bad as a means of deterrence and lesson-teaching, even if you believe such speech should be deterred. (The better option is to make punishment near-certain, but also proportionately applied. E.g. Scott’s SSC moderation)
The Home Depot thing illustrates an intriguing difference between the U.S. and Scandinavia.
In Scandinavia, it's much easier to be convicted in court for "hate" speech, but also much harder to be fired from your job for it.
>The fact that your enemies are just as sure as you are should make you less sure.
No. If my enemy is some maniac talking about how I have children locked in my basement or I’m secretly a member of the KKK, their confidence shouldn’t affect my certainty one way or another. I should expect to constantly hear incredibly confident people because the incredibly confident are the ones who speak up most often. This principle only applies if I trust my enemies to be thoughtful and well calibrated, but it’s wrong to expect that to apply in politics.
A few thoughts. Was a time when it was advisable to not say the first thing that pops into your mind, particularly if it's emotionally driven, because it could have repercussions. Believe it or not, "cancel culture" has been around forever, whether it was termed shamed or ostracized. If the internet advises anything it's give it a minute before you say something.
But if you're saying it to get thumbs ups and "likes" from the like-minded in your silo, then take what comes. Acting shocked when you get called on posting something YOU KNOW will provoke a reaction is in and of itself, a performance. If some people stop paying attention to you: it's the price you pay.
As for work, yeah, your personal opinions should be separate, but unless you're running for president or are in a leadership position in a political party, don't think you'll be treated the same.
It's always been that way! And the idea that the 1st amendment give you thee right to say anything without repercussions is nonsense.
I also don't buy that somehow left whining about the right really has any real effect on them, with some exceptions-the entertainment business (it's its own ecosystem). The same is true with right whining about the left. Anymore, they don't exist in the same common sphere.
Lastly, don't discredit or ignore plain old decency. It's actually ok to be a decent person and respectful of others.
To a European observer the problem Scott points to, stems from too weak US employee protection.
If the US had employment protection legislation on par with (many/most) European countries, employers could not fire you just because of one unfortunate tweet. (You might get a warning, but not more.) Neither the woke-brigade nor the MAGA-brigade can get you fired for a single unfortunate tweet or public statement even if they bomb your employer & social media accounts with negative tweets and emails.
Meaning that people on both the left and right in Europe usually dare to say what they really feel, also outside of the privacy of the ballot box.
To conclude, it could make US political discourse more healthy if both the left and the right would see the public benefit of better employment protection.
No because that comes with an even greater cost: you make terrible people unfireable. Of the many reasons that the US economy consistently outperforms those of European nations, one certainly is our use of at-will employment. The workplace is for being productive. If you want to take care of losers, let the government do that.
Employment protection comes in many degrees. You are wrong if you think the only two options are either not being able to fire an employee at all, or being able to fire an employee without having to give any reason besides your arbitrary will.
Agreed. Fortunately I don't think that.
Our economy is still better than yours and that's in part because we have a less regulated workplace. And we do it with a population that's 13% black. That's like winning a marathon while wearing ankle weights.
I am glad you are not a monocausalist.
Apart from that, see my comment to Gbdub.
Functionally, in a society with lawyers, it’s very hard to implement anything in between “you can be fired at any time for almost any reason” and “firing anyone is a painful and costly process that ensures that no one gets fired for anything short of actual crimes”.
“At will employment” with strong norms against “arbitrary firing” is probably the most efficient, and honestly is the general rule at a lot of places (even without lawyers getting involved, recruiting and training a replacement is expensive). But cancel culture (and pre civil rights, racism culture) cause that norm to break.
Well...lawyers are thick on the ground also in Europe and people get fired all the time. Since labor laws allow employers to fire people for many reasons besides actual crimes. So it depends on what the laws actually states are valid reasons.
(European labor laws are different in this regard - usually labor protection laws are stronger in Southern Europe than in Northern Europe. And so perhaps are US state-specific laws?)
I think your last paragraph is right. Cancel culture, supercharged by social media, has broken the informal norm against arbitrary dismissal. And that is why you need some legislation now, which you did not need (to the same extent) before the advent of social media. Here is the argument: Thanks to the rise of social media since the early 2000s, "cancel culture" is much easier to organize now, and bring hell to employers who do not immediately fire an employee that has made some unfortunate remark on X/twitter (or has been filmed on a mobile phone while making an unfortunate remark in private, that someone then uploads on social media).
...the result is collective irrationality: Employers must fire employees they would like to keep. Employees must live in fear of saying anything controversial, since there is always a risk that some internet mob will use it to destroy their livelihood.
Notice that labor laws do not have to be tweaked much to have a desired effect. Some paragraph to the effect that "employers cannot fire employees for a single remark made on a social media platform, or made public by others on a social media platform", would help. That would give employers a legitimate excuse when the internet mob descends on them: "Eh, we would love to fire that light-skinned female employee of ours that was filmed looking scared when a darker-skinned male approached her in a public park & told him to go away. But unfortunately the law does not allow us to do that".
Basically agreed. I was thinking of something similar, but relying to extent on a kind of "community standards" in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/some-practical-considerations-before/comment/63153343
I have a suggestion for distinguishing what is sufficiently in the mainstream to be actively protected, while still (probably) excluding e.g. calls for assassination (not sure where the Hamas support would fall today).
I suggest that anything that is agreed to by 25% of the population is a sufficiently mainstream view that it be protected. This is set far enough above the "lizardman constant" (typically 4%) to not protect really extreme views (which I hope covers the assassination case), but far enough below 50% so this isn't just ceding all discussion to tyranny of the majority.
...
I think legal protection is both necessary and might even put some backbone in firms that would otherwise cave to X-Twitter mobs. "No, we can't fire <employee> disagreeing on the minimum wage hike. It's _illegal_."
Excellent comment but IMO the proper solution to this problem is not more regulation but less. Twitter mob cancelations almost always involve marginalized minorities and the reason companies are so quick to respond is because they're scared of discrimination lawsuits. This is all downstream of the legal notion of 'protected class' in civil rights law. When people are no longer able to routinely extract large settlements for nebulous claims of a "hostile workplace" or "disparate treatment" then the power of the Twitter mob will vanish.
Preventing employers from firing people for what they write or say on their own time, not while acting as an official capacity as an employee, would go a long way at pulling cancellation's fangs. That wouldn't prevent firing for incompetence or similar work-related problems. I think that such a law (much though I hate adding a new law) would be worth it.
This is probably the pragmatic if imperfect answer. I would prefer to fix the problem further upstream by rectifying the incentive structure. The power source for all the cancel mob stuff is the legal notion of protected class. Companies fear discrimination lawsuits so they do whatever the mob wants. The right thing to do is to take the legal club away from the unruly mob, though of course that's probably politically impossible.
Many Thanks!
>The power source for all the cancel mob stuff is the legal notion of protected class.
I agree that that is a large chunk of it, but I think there are others. Consider how, during Covid, both the lab-leak theory and examination of vaccine side effects were treated, not as questions to be discussed, but as near blasphemy. Similar things happen with climate models.
Yeah but 2020 was a moral panic unique in recent history. If the bad parts of civil rights hadn't let progressives slowly coordinate political and legal pressure over 30 years then I don't think 2020 would have ever happened. 'Protected class' gives the Identitarians a pretty big cudgel and my view is that most of the recent political turmoil is 100% downstream of that.
Many Thanks! I think that _most_ of it is indeed downstream of identity politics.
And, yes, 2020-2021 was several different kinds of panics, a moral panic amongst them. Over a million dead makes this understandable. But I still think that the Woke have turned quite a few things into unquestionable dogma. E.g. the climate models still have on the order of +-50% uncertainties (and possibly worse) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77RobHGXR5I . And this gets concealed in "2029 is the final tipping point!" or similar dogma. Some of the medical questions about trans surgery and drugs seem to have turned into a 50:50 mix of dogmatic assertion of uncertain information and identity politics.
> If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught *you* that. It obviously hasn’t, so try a different strategy.
I don't think this makes sense? The argument being made by the people you quoted is that they already know cancellation is wrong, but it is necessary due to an ends justify the means mentality. And that this makes them different from the left, who don't believe that cancellation is wrong at all.
On that note, you present 5 survey questions to demonstrate that the left was not united behind cancel culture. But out of those 5 questions, 2 of them show democrats being strongly in favor of cancel culture, 2 of them show them about 50/50 split, and 1 of them shows them in favor of abstract free speech norms.
Perhaps this could reasonably be evidence that "less than half of Democrats wholeheartedly support cancel culture", but that seems like moving the goalposts. The whole point of cancel culture is that it allows a vocal minority to intimidate everyone else into silence due to lack of common knowledge. All you need is for the majority to be ambivalent at first, and then to be too scared to speak up after it gets going, which is exactly what happened. Sure, maybe ~50% of Democrats answer "cancel culture is a bad thing" on surveys, but the fraction who made any attempt to stop what was happening (even just "refusing to fire someone being cancelled") was vastly smaller.
Bad guys hurt people for reasons like money, evil guys hurt people for fun. Do you posit that ignoring the very small minority of evil people, pretending they don't exist, leads to more accurate thinking than overestimating their population? I'm not arguing, it's an interesting idea, just making sure I heard you right.
A minor point (if that) on VP selection. The idea that it has mostly been based on political prowess or intelltgence or popularity is a fantasy.
Mike Pence, Dan Quayle, John Garner, Alben Barkley, and other such utter mediocrities and in Truman's first term there wasn't even a VP. Some of the comments around President's Biden choice make it appear like Fields Medalists were routinely picked as VP.
Fair, but the likelihood that Biden was choosing not merely a running mate but a successor was much higher than normal. (Most VPs are either a sop to a critical state or party subgroup. Dan Quayle may have been a human shield - “do you really want to shoot me and end up with THAT guy?”)
True, but before Harris it wasn't ever explicitly stated by the presidential candidate that the VP would be chosen based on their skin colour and gender or even because they'd help win important states. At the least, the presidential candidate themselves could say it's because they're experienced or talented or whatever even though no one really believes it.
This is hilarious. I've glanced through what is now most of its way to a thousand comments, and other than me I haven't noticed a single person from those Scott Siskind is supposedly addressing here. And my enthusiasm for hurting the other side in any way, ANY way, will not be dampened by this lame rhetoric.
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.
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.
Do you remember what happened not in a children's story, but to the real life Carthage?
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.
Fields? I was talking about none of their texts remaining, because we're talking about a culture war. For now.
I apriciate the self felation, but the right has no ideas of merit, no real beliefs that stand up to five minutes of scrutiny. That's why the entire program of the right is populist monkey brain bait and screeching about the left; nothing of substance that engages with reality at any point.
That's why shame is the only weapon that works against the right: if your opponent's main problem is that (((THEY))) put fluoride in the water to make everyone trans/ every human in DC has been murdered twice by illegals/ global warming is a chinese hoax, what do you say to that? What is the response to someone who won't believe their lying eyes?
Laughing at them, because they are beclowned.
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?
I support these terms. Do it, justfor thispost. Fair fight in the marketplace of ideas.
He won't. It's just some dumb 15 year old kid.
Go for it, I guess. Show me what you got. Give me something real spicy.
> 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.
You will never be part of your death squad, but you may wind up in their sights.
We'll see.
You won't.
The mobile version of the title is "Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy..." so I'm somewhat disappointed by this subject matter.
You might want to look into what Jefferson and Madison actually did. I think you've got a somewhat kumbaya version of it.
Your four suggestions for what to do are great, but they remind me of my late brother-in-law, who used to say the key to great bowling is actually really simple: “no open frames”; every turn should be either a strike or a spare!
Also, you kind of gave the game away with “you mostly get the critical mass necessary for cancellation in very leftist institutions, and most people in very leftist institutions are leftists.”
Your point about the poll questions is mostly saved by the huge representation of “no opinion”. If you exclude those as “not voting”, the Democratic balance is much more damning.
You know, shame is an age old way to send the social signal that something is inappropriate. I say publicly calling for murder (or lamenting its failure) is shameful and should in turn be called out publicly. Publicly. Same for rape or torture, etc. Trying to figure out why we wouldn’t call it out. If the Home Depot Lady was a right winger baying for violence against Kamala: publicize and ostracize. This shouldn’t be a political litmus test. If you publicly call for murder you have stepped out of line and need a sharp public correction.
I think it might be reasonable for Home Depot to fire someone who says they believe a presidential nominee and former president should be assassinated, if they say that *in a Home Depot, during their shift, while wearing a Home Depot uniform.* It's insane to suggest an employer doesn't have that right. People can call for assassinations on their own time.
"Me am make rule against cancel culture"
"You am play Gods!!!"
"Me no play Gods, asshole!!!"
<clubbing>
"We am cancel you!!!"
"ME AM PLAY GODS!!!"
I think we need to create a first amendment tech for this now
My thought is that people who are fired for legal speech should be compensated by 10 weeks pay, funded by a fine on the primary platform where the cancel mob organized
We can't fine the companies themselves except in specially obvious breaches of respect for speech as the incentive would become to start vetting potential hires according to their past speech
Scott, do you still consider yourself a liberal?
From the left, I will continue to apply social pressure as hard as a can wherever I can, so I don't try to cancel people or join mobs. Cancelling doesn't work, shaming does.
Sneering at conservatives works 1000% times better than cancelling, because most conservative ideas are easy to sneer and nobody likes being mocked and sneered at. You can't build up moral force because everyone laughed at your clown shoes.
I wouldn't say this if I thought it would actually convince anyone, but enough people with real clout on the right have no self control and will absolutely fail to hide their power level given the chance.
So: I beg the right, I plead with the right: Please, cancel away. Cancel as hard as you can.
I’m pretty sure that sneering is actually counter productive outside the bubble.
Very odd to equivocate people mad about attempted murder with those mad that their sexual fetish isn't being acknowledged as a biological category.
Scott quotes a bunch of nobody substackers as representatives of mainstream right-wing thought, as though they are a counterweight to left-wing "cancellation" at the highest levels of power.
The following simple truths remain:
1. Norms can be enforced by government, else by culture, else they will wither away.
2. "Don't assassinate people" is a very different sort of norm from "Call that man in a dress 'Tina'".
Do people on the right really believe that only *now* do they have the power to cancel people on the left for their left-leaning views?
Wasn't there that woman who was fired for flipping off Trump's motorcade a few years ago? And that Christian professor who was suspended for saying that Christians and Muslims believe in the same g-d? And that professor of public health a few months ago who was suspended for allegedly speaking critically about Lieutenant Governor Patrick's policies in relation to the opioid epidemic, or that journalism professor at the same university whose hiring was derailed due to conservative backlash?
And those are just high profile cases off the top of my head.
I live in small town Texas, near even smaller Texas towns (probably the kind of towns that the song "Try That in a Small Town" was about, and also the kind of towns that propelled that song to #1 of the Billboard Hot 100) and I've felt like the threat of cancel culture from the right has been present in these parts forever.
I certainly am very wary of letting my neighbours learn about any of my more left-leaning religious/political views. One of my friends who's lived here longer than me told me that the first time they invited some of their kids' friends over, the kids' friends' parents came over first (without the kids) to have a conversation with them and told them they were glad to find that they were normal people and not "atheists or pedophiles". This was in the context of why I should join their church, so people will be less likely to suspect me of being an atheist or pedophile.
This person is Chinese (like grew up in China surrounded by very kind and loving people who were nonreligious) so they didn't judge me for being nonreligious, but the very strong implication there was that others would. And I see no reason not to believe him. When I was trying to find a real estate agent to help with the purchase of a house, every single agent, in an attempt to get me to trust them, opened with which church they went to, and how involved they were in church, and how they always took their kids to church;... so yeah, I don't let anyone know I'm nonreligious.
Also, I do think I'm not the only one scared to speak out about left leaning views. My area is actually not actually deep red--more than 25% voted for Biden in 2020, but you sure wouldn't know it if you looked around--nothing but Trump flags everywhere. And you wouldn't hear from those Biden voters at any of the neighbourhood gatherings.
Maybe the Biden voters just don't care as much about politics, but I don't know, I'd expect at least to see the occasional pride flag or something. I think people not wanting to invite trouble has to be part of it. I mean, given the popularity of the song Try That in a Small Town, who would want to try that in a small town?
I haven't read 1004 comments and so apologize if this is redundant, but your point 4 doesn't quite work as stated. The right-wing complaint about the left was specifically about cancellation behavior, whereas your hypothetical left-wing complaint about the right had no specificity to the act of cancellation. There is no parallel.
Also, the Thirty Years War leading to notions of tolerance and pluralism and eventually informing the liberal thought that inspired the founding of the United States is a counterexample to your overall argument. If the Protestants hadn't struck back in kind at the Catholics, I doubt that the eventual understanding of tolerance and pluralism among Catholcis would have ever been accepted. And vice versa.
Right but now that we've fought the 30 Years' War we don't really need to fight it again to determine it's a bad idea, right?
People forget, which is why we have the problem today.
Catholics would have had to face the dilemmas inherent in the Chinese Rites Controversy even without the Reformation.
The Classical Liberal response to this is, of course, the line from A Man For All Seasons:
(which should be at this YouTube Clip, but I can't verify it because YouTube is apparently broken right now... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk )
That sounds good, very 60s liberal, but overlooks the inconvenient fact that Thomas Moore burned a few Protestants in his time...
And the points are not too different - Woke, after all, would like to claim the benefit of law AFTER they have (one way or another) changed law to their view of the world, but until then they'll claim to serve a higher cause.
So I don't know.
I'd like to live in a world where people don't do this sort of thing. But history also seems to suggest that the ONLY way people stop doing this is be being forced to experience the Apocalypse.
Which makes me think that the right behaving this way is, in the grand scheme of things, in the cause of higher humanity, correct.
This won't stop some people doing this as gleeful vengeance. But perhaps the time for the adults to step in and tone it down is, as the first quote stated, after the left have had a strong taste of their own medicine, and no earlier than that.
If we can revert to civility solely by having a few hundred people cancelled, resulting in both sides realizing what's at stake, well that's not great; but it's a whole lot better than what happens when people forget civility and move on to the next steps -- street demonstrations, street fighting, political violence, assassinations, civil war, ...
What happens when the devil is already at the door, and the law is no shield, but his instrument?
Well that was of course the point of my
"
That sounds good, very 60s liberal, but overlooks the inconvenient fact that Thomas Moore burned a few Protestants in his time...
And the points are not too different - Woke, after all, would like to claim the benefit of law AFTER they have (one way or another) changed law to their view of the world, but until then they'll claim to serve a higher cause.
So I don't know.
"
"If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught you that."
(Seeing people I sympathize with) being on the receiving end of cancellation, did not teach me that cancellation was "bad". I already knew that. What it taught me, is that cancellation is a terrible and powerful weapon that actually works and doesn't magically work only for the good guys, so that it would be a good idea if we had a global norm that says we shoudn't do that.
If we can get the left to believe that same thing, then everybody is in favor of a global norm against cancelling people, and we all win. But every arms control treaty that ever mattered, came about because people on both sides had and were willing to use the sort of arms in question. Absent that, it's just mice voting to bell the cat.
Maybe there's some other way to convince the left that they should support a global norm against cancellation. But the ideas you offer in the last section, are things that I don't see happening and I don't expect to happen in any big way, and they're things I can't really cause to happen even locally. So if I find myself in a position to aim a bit of cancellation at a deserving target on the left, you haven't given me much reason to refrain. Sorry.
"Nobody learns anything useful from being persecuted"
That's a somewhat pithy statement that seems to have passed unexamined. People learn plenty from persecution. Not least of which are tactics to avoid and mitigate said persecution, which I'm sure at least the persecuted consider quite useful. What I'm understanding the thrust of that statement to be is that "there are lots of things you simply can't teach through persecution". Such as it can't reliably teach people what is right and wrong, much like spanking a child doesn't magically teach them a moral framework for how what they did was wrong. Which is fair and by general consensus true, persecution may not teach a moral lesson, but it does still teach people a self-interest lesson that there is a cost in suffering to be paid for certain actions. Much like jail or corporal punishment, I think few of its advocates expect the direct result to be greater internalized moral enlightenment.
But as long as there exist even intangible personal benefits for committing offenses upon other people's liberty and person, then a self-interest based deterrent is wise and likely a net good by encouraging society uplifting behavior in the fraction of the population who are greatly more motivated by self-interest than any moral reasoning or communal duty. To make the ratio of offenses committed to those actually caught and punished a significant deterrent to self-interest, those offenses need to be prosecuted with a vigor inversely proportional to the difficulty of making the punishment stick. That will inevitably lead to what is effectively persecution of those punished more by unfortunate circumstance rather than overall malicious personal agency, but trading a fraction of suffering for a fraction of that fraction should still be a benefit. On an interpersonal level you don't need to be that crude, you can build a holistic picture of someone's behavior and determine if they deserve leniency over any single incident. But you can't scale that up to a societal level where information on people's character is unavailable or easily forged.
It's true of real world interactions that once you experience a certain level of commitment to force you will find it trumps everything but an equal commitment to force by someone else. Violence is one of the fundamental units of human negotiation, because once you're physically incapacitated you have no say in what comes next. It should be understood that many even seemingly non-violent negotiations, especially between strangers, are often just obfuscation of that fact by mutual societal agreement, typically for overall net benefit to all parties.
But once that mutual agreement is broken by one party seeking material gain, then the other party needs to be willing and able to return violence in equal or greater measure so that sitting back down at the negotiating table becomes the materially rational choice. There will always be some number of people with no natural inclination towards peaceful coexistence unless it materially benefits them, so even those who desire a peaceful existence must understand the necessity of demonstrating a communal ability to enact such effective retribution that peace becomes a matter of self-interest even for those for whom it's not a matter of principle. And the more you let them damage you before you find the will to retaliate, the less pragmatically able you are of actually forcing the balance to the point where it is in their best interests to stop. Thus waiting for a perfect solution can instead lead to being stuck with an impossible problem instead, so there is a difficult element that gritting your teeth through a hasty and immediately available solution potentially being the best practice in risk management, that can make any tendency towards perfectionism or passivity a contentious point even between erstwhile peers in their moral goals.
Now really the reluctance to commit self-interested violence not a simple binary, even for the worst offenders motivation needed for the first punch is much more significant than follow-up swings. So if you've already survived the first punch it would be foolish to start trying to negotiate them out of punching you again without establishing some means of physically controlling them, or at least making it more difficult for them to successfully punch you again. And since any single punch can be devastating, you'd also be a fool to punch back once and if they don't retreat entirely to wait for them to punch you again before retaliating further. If your understanding is that it is right and fair that you don't get punched again, and you don't have some power differential that lets you clearly overpower them, then you enact your most effective retribution without reprieve until they either surrender or are physically incapacitated. On a group level, if anyone actively cheers one of their own in-group throwing the first punch at you, then they've likely also already crossed that emotional Rubicon, so you can likewise consider them also unlikely to be stopped by anything but at least the threat of equal or greater preemptive violence towards them, indicating that you intend to wait for each of them to strike first is begging to be crippled before you can fight back.
What is certainly not clear is if in the same sense that sufficiently committed physical force -needs- physical force to contain. For the closest purely internet interactions can get to real world force, which is essentially enacting physical force by proxy through doxing, swatting, or mass defamation with the goal of disenfranchisement. If the other party is committed enough, is the best chance you have to ultimately force them to stop anything other than a response in kind?
I think the error here is in seeing this as "one party" and "the other party." This isn't two individuals in a fight or even two armies. It's a bunch of individuals acting in a disorganized fashion. Yes, people see themselves as belonging to factions, but there's actually no commander, no general who can order anyone to fall back for the good of the whole. It's like trying to do MAD by giving the launch codes to the most fanatical civilians on both sides.
In this particular case, it also seems worth noting that Home Depot Lady wasn't canceled for canceling anybody or doxing or swatting anybody. She was canceled for posting. So in what sense is that fighting fire with fire?
Finally, given that we're talking about political debate, I think you overlook the value of persuading fence-sitters through principled argument and taking the high road. I certainly, as someone from the left, have become more open to centrist and even right-wing figures to the degree I see them engaging in civil argument, and less receptive to people on my side to the degree I see them trying to win through sheer bullying.
I started with the individual level to illustrate the principle more easily, I did expand to society level and highlighted at least one practical trade-off that comes with scaling like that and how a certain number of false-positives could still be a net gain. The entire post was more a thesis on the principle of the matter.
As to the specific example. I haven't seen the exact posts but I believe the Home Depot lady was targeted for saying something along that she wishes the assassin hadn't missed and Trump was dead, and haven't seen anyone dispute that. Shortly after an assassination attempt where social media agitation still hasn't been ruled out as and can reasonably be considered one of the potential motivating factors. She cheered for throwing the first punch so to speak.
In which case, whilst it's not as individually effective as doxing or swatting, that can still be considered trying to enact violence through social media by proxy. Which again leads to the question, how do you motivate her not to do that if any of the readily available appeals to moderation plastered on every mainstream media outlet since the shooting haven't already swayed her? Maybe she didn't truly intend for her words to in some small way encourage the future murder of another person, and she just didn't think through or understand the ultimate consequences of her behavior. In which case she's an unfortunate false positive in the process that teaches people not to do that even accidentally. It's not utopian, but it's still better than what we have currently. As Alex said, incremental improvements, it's a reliable approach.
To political debate, as it's used in terms of winning democratic elections, no thanks. Successful political debate is full of manipulation and rhetoric where cloaking a convenient fallacy is more effective than fixing it. I'm not interested in joining any team with unquestionable dogma and I'm not even convinced of a logically consistent left-right political dichotomy, they are a multitude of individual societal approaches generally arbitrarily bundled together. I'm here to debate the simple principle that vengeance applied correctly can be of societal benefit and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
FWIW, I think you've misconstrued Scott's point qua Trump-serious-but-not-literal. He's just pointing out that given clear evidence Team Red is now jonesing for some sweet cancel culture payback from all the preceding persecution by Team Blue it means we clearly have evidence that Team Red didn't learn "anything" from being persecuted (again, because now Team Red wants to retaliate) so flipping the script in the hopes that that'll teach 'em is not logical.
Yes, I would in fact disagree with that.
The "right/left" crapola is one of the most idiotic categorizations ever invented.
Hitler and Stalin had a lot more things in common than they had differences.
Re Section 3, the polling data: For every question, with the possible exception of Q27, for Q6, 20, 23, and 24, for _every_ level of agree/disagree, the Republicans support free speech more than Democrats. There is a real asymmetry here. I don't know how to get the Democrats to return to valuing free speech, but they present a real threat to safe exercise of First Amendment rights.
The data is answering the question “But wasn’t the Left monolithically united behind cancel culture?”
Many Thanks! But the data _also_ answers the question: Is one of the two major parties more protective of free speech than the other? And the data show that the GOP _is_ more protective of free speech.
Actually, to answer a question about the Left, I think the data would have to break down the poll takers into smaller bins. I have seen polls (not on these questions) where poll takers were asked to classify themselves as very conservative/conservative/centrist/liberal/very liberal. It would be interesting to see what the "very liberal" group's answers to these questions would be. Perhaps that would better represent "the Left" (although all of these measurements have problems, not least of which is a one dimensional classification of political preferences).
This is correct, my takeaway was the data establishes sufficient opposition to "cancel culture" among Democrats that tit-for-tat cancellation has a good chance of cancelling someone who themselves opposes cancel culture.
Many Thanks! That is a reasonable conclusion. I don't advocate tit-for-tat cancellation. I would prefer de escalation, which, admittedly is always hard. I _hope_ that it is easier amongst compatriots than internationally. I suggest, as a first step, that anyone being attacked for a view held by more than 25% of the populace (as a rough approximation to "mainstream" or "yes, this _is_ inside the Overton window") be protected legally from firing.
Not a bad idea at all - mind I think we'd all be surprised how much crazy stuff (by any standards) 25% of people believe. UK Employment Tribunal has upheld some conscience rights for workers e.g gender-critical feminists but it's patchy and needs tightening up.
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67934781.amp]
Many Thanks!
> People joke that “cancel culture began with Socrates”, but I don’t buy it. Seen on Wikipedia:
>> [In 1345 BC], Akhenaten … ordered the defacing of Amun's temples throughout Egypt … Archaeological discoveries at [Amarna] show that many ordinary residents of this city chose to gouge or chisel out all references to the god Amun on even minor personal items that they owned, such as commemorative scarabs or make-up pots, perhaps for fear of being accused of having Amunist sympathies.
> When the Priests of Amun came back into power, they took the low road:
>> This culture shift away from traditional religion was reversed after his death. Akhenaten's monuments were dismantled and hidden, his statues were destroyed, and his name excluded from lists of rulers compiled by later pharaohs.
I don't think this is the analogy you want for this essay. When the priests came back into power, they wiped Akhenaten and his aten off of monuments and out of history, and this was a complete success, no one ever repeated his mistake, and the priests held the reins of power, formal and informal, for more than a thousand years afterwards.
It's easy enough to analyze this as a matter of traditional Egyptian culture having infinitely more popular support among Egyptians than one weirdo's weird heresies. I would call that analysis correct. But the clear lesson is that if you're in control, you can solidify that control by suppressing your rivals. The main practical problem with the perspectives you're rebutting here is that the people who want to go on a suppression campaign don't have enough power to make it stick.
Contra, Scott's point with that anecdote is precisely that it was not a "complete success" in the sense that "no one ever repeated his mistake" because the preceding examples are literally other peoples attempting to create Scott's Unfreedom of Conscience again and again across history down to the present day. It's a meta-civilization problem, which can only be productively addressed through "boring incremental progress, ie the only thing that has ever worked". Lots of people want (most people?) want THEIR priests to hold the reins of power for the next 1000 years. Scott is trying to explore how we work on that problem, including how to define it.
> Contra, Scott's point with that anecdote is precisely that it was not a "complete success" in the sense that "no one ever repeated his mistake"
And that point is wrong; that's why this is a bad choice of example on Scott's part.
I think you're arguing that the Priests of Amun got back on top of the scoreboard and then ran out the clock suppressing dissent in their particular civilization, and so that constitutes "ever" for all practical purposes. But Scott's concluding stuff is clearly intended to be even broader in scope, n.b. famine and disease, so "ever" here clearly means human experience as we think of it. Plus the Pharaonic Egyptians didn't Stargate out and leave a bunch of empty ruins. The civilizations that came afterward included literal descendants. So the fact that we're having this dialog at all means that the Priests of Amun's support for Unfreedom of Conscience was not a complete success. What am I not understanding?
<i>I think you're arguing that the Priests of Amun got back on top of the scoreboard and then ran out the clock suppressing dissent in their particular civilization, and so that constitutes "ever" for all practical purposes. But Scott's concluding stuff is clearly intended to be even broader in scope, n.b. famine and disease, so "ever" here clearly means human experience as we think of it.</i>
Maybe, but "Will this strategy solve the problem for literally the whole of the rest of human history?" is an absurdly high criterion for success.
My sense of Scott, and his argument in this post, is that "success" is simply the wrong way to think about issues at this level, and is in fact the root of his criticism of cancel culture: those in power think it will "solve the problem", and it never has. Again, Scott: "Unfreedom of conscience, like famine and plague, has haunted us throughout history and will probably continue to do so. Still, I think the very-long-range trend for all three problems is down, and that hard work by good people can push that forward. This will look like boring incremental progress, ie the only thing that has ever worked."
If cancel culture doesn't exist in 10 years, I expect the cause is more likely to be a convergence on the underlying issues than norms protecting free speech. The convergence doesn't have to be very dramatic to get us away from "flight 92" mode.
"I think this is part of why the Democratic Party is floundering right now. At the risk of getting cancelled myself, it kind of seems like Democrats now wish they’d put a little more of thought into picking a popular/electable VP in 2020 instead of the most diversity-box-ticking person they could find on short notice."
?? Maybe the view is different in California where she was AG, but I've seen nothing but enthusiasm from Democrats/lefties in the online spaces I frequent. Also fundraising is apparently through the roof.
If the right would back off on religious stuff, and the left would admit that many problems of the underclass are not caused by discrimination but by self-destructive behavior possibly caused by big government programs and BOTH agreed to be 25% more fiscally rational/responsible I think we would solve 80% of our problems.
The praise for Ms. Harris is drifting into the cosmic:
I just heard a congresswoman declare she was "ecstatic" over the nomination and prospects for Ms. Harris.
Francis of Assisi could have used her publicist.
I agree with Postcards from Barsoom. The Left hasn't changed their opinion on Cancel Culture: they are simply begging for mercy because they are LOSING the battle they started. It needs to continue until they are either all exterminated, or they agree to a truce.
What would a truce look like? Quite simply, it would involve the Left being willing to sign on to LAWS prohibiting Cancel Culture and treating political opinions as a Protected Class, similar to race, gender, or religion. 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.
People like you Scott, are appeasers, willing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And the reason why you are this way is not because you have bad intentions, or because you're intellectually stupid: it's because you're GULLIBLE and naively believe that your opponents have good intentions even when reality shows otherwise. When you want to see what somebody believes in, don't pay attention to their WORDS, pay attention to their ACTIONS. Until the Left takes ACTION to show that they no longer support Cancel Culture - and is willing to legislate laws to support that principle - then any appeal to empathy from them should be considered nothing more than a delaying tactic until they can get the upper hand.
I loathe Cancel Culture, but it will not go away until there are laws against it. Not social norms: actual LAWS. People like you who have the delusion that social norms are effective are living in a dream world. WAKE UP, SCOTT.
What laws could there be that wouldn’t violate the First Amendment?
I literally just told you: treat political opinions (ie, anything that somebody posts outside of business hours) as a Protected Class. In other words, if you get fired for posting the James Damore memo on your Facebook page after work, that would be treated exactly the same way as if you were fired for being gay and you could legally sue your employer.
Do you know what a Protected Class is and how the laws apply to it? I'm not being sarcastic: I just want to make sure we have the same level of understanding.
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.
Institutions and culture can easily be destroyed or subverted when you control the levers of government. Look how easily Ron Desantis put a big cut in Disney's revenue, for example. Or look at how easily Putin slapped Russia's oligarchs into compliance.
It's obvious to anymore who's paying attention that the Left is no longer as dominant as they were, and they're losing ground rapidly in the Culture War. They're fighting a defensive battle now and they should negotiate a truce while they can, because the terms of truce (if it is even OFFERED later on) are going to be far harsher as the war drags on.
Yes, well - good luck with that fantasy.
The GamerGate thing was a huge own goal for "cancel culture"--it successfully stamped out irl public organizing around the GamerGate name but at the cost of semi-permanently pushing a not-small bunch of people into the orbit of the alt-right who weren't even involved with GamerGate before it got "cancelled". The left were the second biggest losers after the gamer community itself, the right wing laughed all the way to the bank.
Friends? Neighbors? Are you kidding? The librarian is anti-freedom. The 911 dispatcher is anti-equality. Your kid’s teacher hates religion. The janitor steals your culture. Did you hear that? The dog walker said she wants Biden dead. The cat sitter wants Trump tortured. Shhh. Listen. The hairdresser wants to turn your son into your daughter and your daughter’s coach won’t let her become your son. And did you see the flag flying outside the rec center? The statue in the square? The guy from HR wants to end pregnancies and the plumber wants to require them. They all look like us and they smile and hug their kids and act like actual people, but you know better. This is what the enemy looks like and they’re everywhere. The stakes. The stakes have never been so high. Which side are you on? It’s one or the other. For us to win everyone else needs to lose. So fight. What are you waiting for stupid?
I'm all for proceduralism, but there's an asymmetry to acknowledge between the right and the left here. Namely: in the long run the left wins, provided society remains in "thrive" mode and not "survive" mode. (And proceduralism is much of what's keeping it in "thrive" mode!) Left-proceduralists are signing up to keep their hands clean while getting most of the changes they want. Right-proceduralists are signing up to show restraint as the things they love get destroyed. Both are honorable but one takes a lot more character.
As a social conservative, I broadly agree with this. I expect that various shades of leftists would disagree that they are getting most of what they want, though at very least on cultural matters, the long-term trend definitely seems to be leftward (economics is more complicated, but the growth of government spending likewise continues).
But even before we get to Left and Right, you make an excellent point that sticking to procedure is less impressive when procedure generally yields results you like, and more impressive when it yields results you dislike.
Not to be too much of a dick, but I didn't expect "social conservative reinvents systematic racism" to be a post I saw today.
I'm genuinely confused by this comment.
I recognize the basic pattern, but the future may not resemble the recent past.
1. It's possible that, rather than luxury causing peace, peace causes luxury, which then gradually works against peace. [I'm not a fan of categorising people's dreams as ‘luxury beliefs’, but being genuinely comfortable around difference does require some social graces which not everyone has, and those graces become both an object of jealousy and a stick to beat people with].
2. Diminishing returns - in the 90s, my Conservative evangelical headmaster was genuinely excited about Nelson Mandela getting released from prison and becoming president. We didn't keep in touch, but I imagine he was less enthused by gay rights and less enthused still by trans rights. Maybe it's a seamless garment, or maybe the left really is pushing Jones beyond what he can stomach.
3. I see the current alliance between Islam and the left as somewhat unstable. I don't believe it's inevitable that Islam will become the dominant religion in the UK, it's possible Muslims will absorb the same memes that Christians have absorbed, but there doesn't have to be a majority in order for Islam to grow in influence in schools and so on and the left is NOT going to like that.
>3. I see the current alliance between Islam and the left as somewhat unstable.
I think that that is an understatement.
An example from this side of the pond is:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/17/hamtramck-michigan-muslim-council-lgbtq-pride-flags-banned
>“There’s a sense of betrayal,” said the former Hamtramck mayor Karen Majewski, who is Polish American. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.”
Thanks. I'm not surprised it's fraying at the edges even now - mind I think the alliance will be resilient for the time being. You see that Pridestine flag everywhere and a lot of the gay bars refused to show Eurovsision because Israel were in it.
Many Thanks!
>a lot of the gay bars refused to show Eurovsision because Israel were in it.
Charming. I wonder if it occurs to them that failing to distinguish between Israeli civilians (in this case the athletes) and the Israeli military mirrors the complaint they claim to have against the IDF. Unless, of course, the claimed complaint about the IDF is really just a cover for antisemitism.
So, the one country in the Middle East where gay bars are a thing, the one country in the region where it's even legal to *be* gay, is the one that is unwelcome in the gay bars of Europe.
There's got to be some kind of prize for getting a lot of people to march for your cause whom you'd put in jail or kill if they were in your power.
IMO right and left are largely arbitrary coalitions, and it has nothing to do with thrive vs survive (if it did, there'd be no Republicans in the modern US). It's not even really a "liberal" vs "conservative" thing. Democrats want to change some things and keep some things the same, while Republicans want to change other things and keep other things the same.
Not sure how serious we're supposed to take that last paragraph, but I daresay it is an example of recency bias, and possibly ingroup bias toward the current residing civilization. This is partly tongue-in-cheek, but partly serious.
I don't think Scott's advocating for no revenge, at least I do not understand it like that. I am not a believer in "turn the other cheek", because it's really against basic instinct and I don't think it results in net good when advertised as a policy, contrary to forgiveness done after the offense (there it's mixed, dependent on how much it weaken the credibility of actual future retaliation.).
But I read Scott as pleading for no group revenge, which I am also definitely not for (even if it's also an instinct, much weaker though): There is very little sense punishing member of a group for action of other members. Maybe in some very rare cases where the non-perpetrators are actively and repetatively supporting the actions, but certainly not in general, even if the "inactive" members grudgingly express support when asked (that's the group dynamic, where treason cost may be high). It brings very little apart strengthening group dynamic which is a big part of the problem.
People who actively cancelled others before though, even made this a big part of their activities and identity? yes, no issue with retaliation....But it's seldom those ones that are targeted, only random members of the other group...
You're not wrong, for sure. The argument that people only recognize hurt when they feel it is powerful and attractive. It makes rational sense. But you're right that it just makes society more vicious over time. The way forward is to be kind and hold the moral high ground.
We've had a dynamic for at least the past eight years where every time Donald Trump tweets negatively about someone, some portion of his followers issue death threats against that person and their family. Its just that he spends most of his time targeting people in his own political party who won't toe the line. I wonder how you distinguish between this and cancel culture, or between autocratic intimidation and cancel culture, generally.
I said a long time ago that the endgame of cancel culture would be Mutually Assured Destruction, not cowering conservatives.
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
MAD needs the people with the weapons to fear the deterrent. The people doing the snitch tagging on Twitter are overwhelmingly not worried about the deterrent. The LibsOfTikTok lady already got doxxed, including to her employer. The "deterrent" here is that she might notice that prominent cancel-culture types on the left (who mostly don't fear doxxing / cancellation because they're already in the open) continue trying to cancel people on the right. Which isn't really a very powerful deterrent.
I think the Achilles' heel here is the fact that perceived "punching down" is frowned upon.
Even at a geopolitical level, if North Korea shot a nuke at us, we'd catch hell if we nuked NK back enough to wipe it off the map (ignoring radiological effects to NK's neighbors).
To put it another way, destruction of a weaker/less "privileged" entity is perceived as wrong. The downside of that is it gives license to that entity to really misbehave in unaccountable ways.
Unless you are canceling services you don’t use. Then cancel away! <3
Maybe I'm too old school, but I think there is something different between wishing for the assassination of a political rival and a white guy putting on a sombrero. The former is getting close to not actually being legal.
There aren't enough jails to hold everyone who has ever joked about "2nd amendment solutions".
Agreed, jokes and hyperbola are protected speech, imminent threat of violence is not. This case did not rise to the latter test, that's why I said "getting close".
Trying to create a set of rules/standards for cultural ostracization would never work. It's certainly difficult to pin down exactly what is and isn't acceptable to any individual let alone an entire society, but the real issue is it constantly changes. Gay marriage was universally hated until it wasn't, racism was culturally expected until it wasn't. It's easy to dig up a bad tweet from 10 years ago because 10 years ago that wasn't a bad tweet. The volume of news stories about subjects, issues, and conflicts people have never heard of until that very moment is astronomical and everyone forms an opinion based on the signals of their in-group in a matter of minutes. All of a sudden everyone is expected to have an opinion on the latest iteration of the Israel-Palestine conflict when it's thousands of miles away and has no impact on their lives. Even if you could perfectly represent a set of values of society at this moment in time it would be outdated by tomorrow. The world is constantly changing, people are constantly changing, and the rules are constantly changing. People have a desire to have the rules written down so they can clearly understand the rules of the game they are playing. The goal of this game is to get people to like you/not hate you and there are no rules. To be mad that the rules change is just as irrational as thinking all our problems will be solved if only we can eliminate everyone who disagrees with me. Cancel culture is a fundamental feature of humanity, social media just supercharged it and we give it an alliterative name. Establishing standards for institutions and moderation won't stop anyone from feeling they are one indispensable massacre away from solving all our problems.
I know I've complained a lot before about right wingers pretending to care about free speech, cancellation, political violence and persecution etc only to the exact extent that right wingers are the victims rather than the aggressors, so I feel duty-bound to post a mea culpa.
I intend to vote yes on CA Prop 34 despite it violating my principles (bill of attainder, free speech, etc.). Having true principles is hard.
Since part of the commentary has been, naturally enough, around the history of cancellation, I'm interested in this book which has come out, and it's free-access for now - Erasure in Late Antiquity. I'm sharing it widely, see link below! I'm also wondering about the Book Review on 'Real Raw News' being relevant: is revenge fantasy likely to be cathartic, in the sense of purifying through reducing the tendency to actual vengeance?
https://trivent-publishing.eu/home/185-345-erasure-in-late-antiquity.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawERIStleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHf-Jra_Sz-qIIp8zAwzczwOatsVAccPivF0YnrkwaKSVXlsPQH74O6Xmmw_aem_dFq41DQLY2ogrQwjRawSNg#/27-cover-paperback
I want to preface by saying I am super against the vengeance thing.
But I'm a bit confused about the poll results you shared. You maintained
"Unless you really lay on the tribal signifiers, it’s hard to find a definition where most Democrats support cancel culture and most Republicans oppose it!"
But like, *is* it really that hard to find such a definition. I mean, even a very simple three bucket classification (for, neither, against) yields greater than 50% pro cancelation for Democrats and less than 50% pro cancelation for Republicans on q23 and q24.
Which almost literally satisfies the rather stringent standard of "most Democrats support cancel culture and most Republicans oppose it".
Aside from that I'm not sure so stringent a standard would be the correct one even under the assumption that everyone seemingly out for blood were actually purely rational actors in an iterated game behaving with an eye toward minimizing the danger of playing for everyone.
A less stringent standard of "greater degree of willingness to cause a greater degree of harm" seems to me much closer to the perception triggering people's impulse for revenge at a gut level here. And basically ALL of the questions vindicate that perception.
I do also wonder though, you brought up the example of ancient Egypt, where one side got canceled, then the other side came into power and counter-canceled the first one. But then the article just kind of wanders off to the rest of history where the same dynamic plays out in populations and times having no relation to or knowledge of the Egyptian one. Whereas supporting the pacifist position would require a counter-counter-cancelation to occur in that same society.
The data is confusing, but he is answering the question “But wasn’t the Left monolithically united behind cancel culture?” and I think the data does answer that in the negative. Republicans can still be relatively more pro-free speech, the question is what do you do with the next Dem you meet making a bad taste comment online. Are they "fair game" because the Left is monolithically united behind cancel culture? Actually there's a good chance this person is not.
And there's a good chance that guy in the grey uniform you just saw in a Normandy hedgerow isn't any sort of a Nazi, just some conscript who only wants to keep his head down and go home when all this is over. Part of what makes war such a nasty thing is that justice can usually only be delivered wholesale, not retail.
The extent to which Culture War matches Real War is debatable; at least with Culture War we're usually not trying to kill anyone. But the rules of engagement are likely to be ugly regardless.
As someone else pointed out, the poll questions Scott posted already have tribal signifiers added. It would probably be even with neutrally phrased questions.
Wait, your blog headline says "P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B)" and that all the rest is commentary, so why can't you just use that equation to figure out the right answer and just tell everyone? I'm sure they'd listen to you, because they and you are all so rational.
Why aren't the Ten Commandments enough law for all situations?
A little revenge from the Right will do the Left a world of good.
We don’t have to cancel, if we can find some kind of fine/punishment for lying, inciting violence and slandering political opponents. Whatever happened to monetizing campaign rhetoric as campaign contributions, equal time? Problem with using fire to fight fire, they take that fire and then accuse us of the very things we’re emphasizing about them. When you have financial control of the information, the only winners are the ones carrying out the narrative they control.
I think point 2 is a huge understatement. The last round of right wing cancelations was not the Red Scare, it's the one who has been going on since the 80s where any and all criticism of Israel gets one tarred as antisemitic and canceled. See the Guardian comic artist, the St Andrew Dean, Roth's unhiring from Harvard etc. Hell, the right managed to pass *laws* outlawing BDS, what the fuck are they even talking about?
And it's not limited to Israel either. Remember Kaepernick? There has not been a cancelation opportunity the right has passed. Self-congratulating for having a debate about it *now* feels delusional (as it would feel if the left felt high minded for developing some sane elements 4 years after the fact, to be clear).
Point 8 seems the most poignant, especially in conjunction with the facts above. Cancelations are never uni-directional. The right has used its weapons (accusation of antisemitism and unpatriotism) any time it could, oft successfully, but has that made the left's weapons ever weaker? The undoubtedly very satisfying feeling to get a leftist cartoonist fired and tarred for a Bibi caricature did them any good the day after, when it was a rightist cartoonist on the chopping block for some alleged racism?
The right is not the victim here. It's a symmetrical war where you celebrate the other side's losses one day and mourn your own the next. We can reach some sort of peace, or delude ourself that this one strike will win the war for good every single day, forever.
> figuring out what the heck we mean by cancel culture.
And that, is why i wrote this:
https://natewinchester.substack.com/p/definitions-cancel-culture
Don't call it cancel culture. Call it Financial Terrorism.