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Jul 23
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I like this perspective and wish there was more of it.

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Jul 23
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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I didn't call you a bad person, I just speculated that you're also a massive drain on society.

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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.

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Are you daft, you can't kick holes in the wall or easily remove pipes in an American jail.

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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.

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>"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.

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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.

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Jul 23
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"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.

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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.

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> 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.

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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*

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> 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.

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Ah, so you don't know Harvey Milk was a pederast, huh?

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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

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Wikipedia is quite thoroughly ideologically captured, as one might expect. Look up his relationship with Jack McKinley.

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Isn't that the most famous thing about him?

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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.

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"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."

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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.

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Che Guevara?

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maybe? Treason feels worse than a foreign enemy on foreign soil, plus there was the whole slavery thing.

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>"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.

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Sure, but we live in the United States of America, not the Confederate States of America

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The point is it's not "unambiguous", it's just that history is written by the victors.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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Jul 23
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Jul 23
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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."

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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

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>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.

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> 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".

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> 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.

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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.

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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

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If you do think it's fruitless to work out a consistent view of left and right in a global context, why did you just rely on one in the previous paragraph anyway?

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<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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Jul 23
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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

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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.

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I heard this defense a lot, but how many times has someone successfully sued their workplace because they claim they caught Covid from another employee? It feels more like a rationalization than an explanation.

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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.

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Jul 23
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.)

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I think there's a lot of local variation in how dominant religious culture is.

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"Growing up in an evangelical family" means "in the past, before the left got this powerful".

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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.

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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.

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"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.

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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".

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> 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?

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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.

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On the other hand, there are 350 million people in the United States.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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>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.

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>You have to admit, though, that religion is incredibly censorious in our culture

Do I? What have they censored lately?

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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?

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>If you live in a very religious community, tons of things

I don't. Most people don't. No major American city is like that, not even Salt Lake City.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Or after prison, for a good many lines of work.

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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.

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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.

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How many people have been imprisoned for this stuff in the United States lately?

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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.

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And their family members may also be targeted.

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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.

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"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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.?

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Oh, are we doing the disingenuous thing where if the government refuses to fund something with government money, or if the government refuses to run an event in a government-run facility, or if the government tells its employees what statements they should be issuing on behalf of the government while they're on the job, that's "anti-First Amendment"? That's always fun.

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> 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.

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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.

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Jul 24Edited

"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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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".

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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.

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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.

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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.

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>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?

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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.

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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

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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.

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