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10 years later, the moment is here. What will you do, even if just quietly to yourself in your heart?
This was bad when the left was doing it. It's bad when the right is doing it. The institutional left deserves it but the victims of policies like this are ordinary people, not the institution.
That means they are targeting the correct people.
Do you know something the rest of us don't about the woman LoTT got fired?
Rush Limbaugh targeting the specific individuals who were targeting him, feels like a somewhat reasonable and proportional response. What did this random Home Depot employee do to anyone? How is she the correct target? What did she actually do except say some distasteful things online?
These are the exact arguments that were trotted out in defense of people like the okay sign guy that got fired, and they fell on deaf ears. For 10 years.
Why should these arguments be seriously considered now that the shoe is on the other foot?
I agree that cancelling random people is really, really bad for society. But it seems insane to me to expect the side that's been on the receiving end for a decade to listen to these arguments.
The problem with decentralized cancellation is that no one person controls it. I've found cancellation distasteful for years, even as a relatively left-of-center person, and there's no Pope of Cancel Culture I can appeal to to make things stop. I'm not even on most social media platforms, and even when I'm on them I've cultivated a very separate little bubble, so I have literally no say in what anyone on "my side" does.
I think short of laws with teeth protecting the jobs of randos, or the big platforms adopting policies that would reduce cancellation, I can't see this changing. And unfortunately, the incentives of the attention economy mean that most big platforms like the angry froth of cancellation, and many states have at-will employment, and probably don't have much will to approach cancellation from this angle.
You say the arguments "fell on deaf ears", but who were the ears that could hear and could possibly do anything about this?
I think we're actually in agreement about all of this; the deaf ears belonged to the unprincipled blue-tinted cancellation mobs which, as you point out, had no central authority to push in any particular direction.
I'm mostly just riffing on the futility of appealing to reason, compassion, or MAD here, when the unprincipled red-tinted would-be cancellation mobs have been watching this play out for a decade and know that the strategy is very effective. I don't think this is a solvable problem in the short term either.
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