Jiro
18hr ago
You are being excessively literal. Can you link to some people actually saying such things, instead of paraphrasing them?
Jiro
19hr ago
Nobody's been able to give me a compelling response to why we should accept what the Right is doing now
So exactly what explanations have you heard that you don't find compelling?
Some have tried to claim that the Right’s version of cancel culture is different in some vague way that makes these statements not hypocritical, e.g. it’s OK to cancel someone if they’re “celebrating the death” of someone, but I generally find these arguments unpersuasive.
Your whole post could have been reduced to just that single sentence. Of course if you're going to handwave the differences and not really address them, then there are no differences that matter. That's pretty much tautological!
That's also why you had to claim that initiating violence and responding with violence is a type of acceptable hypocrisy. If you said that it isn't hypocrisy, that would be because the two situations are different, even if they are both violence. If differences don't matter, the only choice is to put them in the same category and call it hypocrisy.
Jiro
1d ago
Mereological nihilists deny the existence of testicles because they deny the existence of compound physical objects in general... Eliminative materialists deny the existence of beliefs, so they would deny that anyone believes that they are a man or a woman....
... and mereological nihilists and eliminative materialists have negligible relevance to any actually existing argument about this subject. Certainly below the lizardman constant.
"I don't think you would get any disagreement on" doesn't mean "literally 0.0000 percent disagreement".
Jiro
3d ago
From the point of view of Progressivism, Kirk was profoundly harmful to society.
I think you responded to the wrong post.
But anyway, it's not "did he do bad things" or "did he cause harm". Everyone thinks their political opponents do bad things! It's that he did things that are acceptable ways of spreading ideas in a democracy. Whether these things are harmful is irrelevant here.
US troops also were in full control of Japan
The point is that they could only do this because they were in full control. Israel cannot do this, because they don't have full control over Gaza.
if there's a sufficient amount of food going in to Gaza, food riots don't happen. Because, you know, people have enough food.
That doesn't follow. Food that goes into Gaza freely would just be taken by Hamas. Hamas would then offer it only to people who follow their orders, up to and including becoming suicide bombers so their family gets fed.
Jiro
3d ago
They wouldn't do it to spite Israel, they would do it because having control over the food supply means having control over the people.
Jiro
3d ago
Hamas has done plenty of things that are terrible optics already. The media just refuses to publicize them.
Even sending rockets into Israel was terrible optics, but Hamas got away with it.
Non-violent is overrated. Activists try to pretend that nonviolent is the same thing as nonharmful, and have invented very clever ways to harm people for a cause without being "violent".
Also, nonviolence harms everyone because a lot of nonviolence depends on taking advantage of other people's reluctance to use violence to prevent harm. That encourages violence in society and is a form of destroying the commons. It also involves media manipulation, which is a fancy word for lying (which is of course a nonviolent act).
Remember that debanking Covid protestors in Canada was an act of nonviolence. (Actually, so is debanking anyone.)
Jiro
3d ago
Charlie Kirk's actions that the left didn't like were speeches and political activism--the kind of things that we are supposed to accept as part of a free society even if we don't agree with them. Lenin, Mao, Joseph Rosenbaum, and George Floyd's actions that the right (or anyone) didn't like were not.
Jiro
3d ago
This doesn't help. There's no amount of food that Hamas can't realistically take. There's an amount that they can't realistically eat themselves, but they'd just take it and destroy the amount they can't eat.
Jiro
3d ago
US/British troops post-war were in full control of Germany, so they didn't have to deal with Nazis who would forcibly take the food when they tried distributing food to German civilians.
Jiro
4d ago
So what, the IDF machine-guns them to avoid crowd crushes???
What do you suggest the IDF do instead? Let them take all the food?
The takeaway for most is still that "my opposition deserves to die for their crimes" and it does endanger the target, just not as much as an unqualified call for violence.
"Does, but not as much" is a massive understatement. Someone who wants Joe Biden put on trial won't lead to anyone hurting Joe Biden. Someone who wants right-wingers to be assassinated increases the chance of people assassinating right-wingers. These things are significantly unalike to the point where putting them in the same category is sophistry.
And you seem to agree that Kirk "literally [advocated] for violence"?
Assuming that the Biden quote is correct, only in a noncentral way. If state violence counts, everyone on themotte has literally advocated for violence.
Jiro
5d ago
The difference is that a lone shooter has a chance of shooting Biden, but a lone shooter has no chance of putting Biden on trial for treason. Advocating state action is literally advocating for violence, but it's not advocating for the kind of violence that a vigilante can do, so it doesn't endanger the target in the same way.
Jiro
5d ago
Also there’s the fun phenomenon of GOP officials fearing right wing violence.
Your links are spin. They are deliberately mixing up fear of "retaliation" (meaning standard politician stuff), Internet death threats of the type every celebrity gets, genuine death threats that are not from right-wingers, and maybe something that actually qualifies but is cherry picked.
Jiro
5d ago
I occasionally donate to GiveDirectly because I believe in their premise: that the administrative efficiency of just distributing cash directly is so high that enabling the occasional bad behavior is outweighed by all the good behavior it promotes and bureaucratic behavior it avoids.
Widely distributing cash changes the incentives. Cash works precisely because giving it out is rare and thus people are not incentivized to behave badly in a way enabled by it.
Jiro
6d ago
If that was true, I could call trans people by any pronoun I want and face no problems for it.
Jiro
6d ago
Granted, not extra-judicial violence, so
This is like the Monty Python sketch about non-illegal robbery. Granted, they're not actually doing the thing people are complaining about, but....
You have to go through a pretty substantial amount of double checking for a conviction.
"The law makes it possible to charge a lot of innocent people, but it's okay because the system will probably use discretion and not put them in jail" is a recipe for tyranny.
The usual scenario is where the government wants to get you anyway, either because they hate the actually-legal things you're doing, because some prosecutor or cop knows in his heart without evidence that you're guilty of some crime, or because finding you guilty will cover their asses after some kind of mistake, or because it would be good publicity to catch a criminal. Then the double-checking miraculously vanishes. Three felonies a day is a little exaggerated, but it only takes one felony to ruin your life.
Jiro
7d ago
also wasn't fired (he resigned)
Being constructively fired counts as being fired. So does being blacklisted or constructively blacklisted.
suppose Damore had made unambiguously fireable remarks to a fellow employee over his lunch break.
His lunch break is outside his job; actions in his lunch break are not performance of job duties.
Like, hypothetical: someone makes a film disparaging MLK Jr (or whoever; it doesn't really matter). Outraged social media mobs lobby to have showings pulled and the director and producer blacklisted. Under your criteria, this would not be cancellation.
It would not be cancellation if they pulled showings of this particular movie. If they tried to get him removed from producing anything, even movies unrelated to MLK, it would be cancellation. Each movie counts separately, even if you could phrase it as saying he has a single job to make movies.
Jiro
8d ago
He didn't say they weren't very religious, he said they weren't very Christian. Obviously the "Creator" refers to God. But not to the Christian God.
Jiro
8d ago
I've seen the people on Discord.
The pendulum has maybe slowed a bit. It certainly hasn't reversed direction.
Also, it may look like the pendulum has reversed because people are being publically called out for supporting assassination, but that isn't the pendulum reversing. It never was acceptable to support assassination, it's just that supporting assassination was about the only case left where the right kept enough influence to object.
The equivalent to "banning a movie for the contents of the movie itself", for people, is "firing someone from his job for things said in his role in his job"--writers publishing books that say bad things, politicians making speeches that say bad things, celebrities saying things during publicity for their films, professors teaching bad things in their class, etc. None of your examples are like that and thus are not excluded by my definition.
Damore posted things in a forum at his job, but posting there wasn't part of his job duties. (And even if it had been, he had been assured that he could speak freely.)
Being arrested and being ticketed are not supposed to be deterrents at all. Actual deterrents are administered after a conviction.
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