lagrangian
6d ago
I'll take the principled stand here. I don't like cancellation of anyone* for passing remarks online (or in person, but especially online).
*: unless acting in an official capacity for their job, or in a role to which your moral standing is central (pastor, maybe teacher).
This all not withstanding that I'd like at least small employers to be able to fire for literally any/no reason. My objection isn't to the firing itself, but to the random selective enforcement caused by crowd sourcing the firing. In the day of LLMs, do you really want someone programmatically reading social media, cross referencing with Linkedin, and contacting employers?
If leftists genuinely believe that he is harmful to the country, and they'd like to celebrate the cessation of that harm - even by glibly conflating the harm with the man himself - let them.
If some day there is signed a peace treaty for the Culture War, I can imagine nothing sweeter than it reading "we, the undersigned, agree to disagree."
Afaik the main quote was:
This seems remarkably inoffensive to me. Even if it's factually incorrect - and it's not clear to me we even know yet - how is this bannable? What am I missing here? I can't find further statements from him that are worse, not that I can imagine what would be sufficient for me to support his banning.
I watched a Charlie Kirk video. Gotta say, don't like the guy. I was hoping the vibe would be "patient Mottizen explains things" or "Scott Alexander", but it was much closer to "Steven Crowder." Is he chiller in other videos?
I was particularly galled by the amount of appeals to religion (the resurrection of Christ is the most well documented fact in history, so Christianity is true, so its morals are correct) and abortion is bad.
Even worse, the use of blatantly untrue "facts" that I have trouble believing he could have not fact checked, as much as they were relevant to his soap boxes. E.g. the claim that no abortions are ever medically necessary for the health of the mother. Worse, he slimily hedged by saying this was "according to some gynecologists, I don't know if it's true, but they're experts."
This leaves me, as often, in the weird position of standing on my meta level principles despite their being in conflict with the object level. I dislike Kirk and his methods, but like (many) of his principles. I dislike Kimmel, full stop (I assume - I won't claim to have watched him much. I'm extrapolating from Colbert/Stewart, who are insufferable as of late.). But, I want Kimmel on air, and no one fired over Kirk. I really don't want the US going to the way of Europe, or worse, on free speech.
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