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Notes -
It's Different When We Do It
I'm against Libs of TikTok cancelling random poor workers for not knowing when to shut up. But this article makes a case for it.
First, the author makes a case that "Normie Bloodlust" is common and never punished. Think of people expressing hope that a rapist is raped in prison. I don't think the author believes that this behavior is good, per se, just common and usually unpunished.
He then goes on to say that "there’s nothing unfair, and certainly nothing unconstitutional, about facing social opprobrium for unpopular speech and behavior." He seems to support that sort of cancellation, whichever side of the aisle it is coming from.
But then he argues that the Right has been facing a different, unfair type of cancellation:
The last interesting point he makes is that:
I think he makes some good points though I disagree with the conclusion that it is fine and dandy for the Right to cancel struggling zero-influence people for saying things that were normal to say two weeks ago.
I don't think it was normal, even two weeks ago, to actually call for Trump to be assassinated, and yeah, you might have faced consequences for it (or not, depending on how your boss feels). That's why this celebration of victory is premature, nothing has really changed. Many individuals on the left have overreached and gotten burned, but nobody is going to get fired merely for supporting Biden, let alone for being gay or black or trans. The rules, written and unwritten, about what you can or can't say at work, are still written or unwritten and enforced or unenforced by the same fat liberal white women.
There was some recent Supreme Court decision about the President not being liable for "official acts", which resulted in progressives tripping over themselves to suggest Biden orders an assassination on Trump. None of them got fired as far as I know. I have no idea where the idea that this was not normal is coming from, it almost feels like there's a need to pretend that nothing ever changes, and therefore the status quo is how it has always been.
I don't have any particular concerns over the way most people raised this. It was a standard "parade of horribles", where you try to come up with the most extreme 'hypos' (in the legal lingo) to push an interpretation as far as it can go in order to see if that's really an interpretation that you can live with. This one is pretty extreme, because the President's powers in this area are pretty plausibly vast. We saw somewhat similar language pushing on "assassinate a US citizen" around the al-Awlaki business. The President's war powers are among the most dangerous powers given to anyone in the country; they sort of have to be. We want a President Lincoln to be able to order the killing of rebel soldiers and leaders, even on US soil, in cases of genuine rebellion. How to draw lines is hard, and frankly, we probably still haven't managed to lay out any lines with real conceptual clarity; it might just not be possible to do so a priori. I'm pretty fine with people at least considering different scenarios in order to argue that we need to be careful in how we draw the lines as a separate thing from, "Whelp, if we're going to draw the line where you want to draw it, President Biden actually should order Seal Team Six to assassinate Trump." Probably some blowhards on reddit actually said the latter thing, but most relatively serious folks (to the extent there are many left) were doing the more sensible thing.
Believing that the president should order a hit squad on Trump implies that Trump is such a danger that that's required. Claiming that he's that dangerous encourages violence from everyone, not just from a government raiding party.
I wouldn't have this kind of problem with someone asserting that Trump should be arrested and given the death penalty after a fair trial, but not many people will say that, precisely because that doesn't imply that he needs to be killed by any means possible.
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I don't mind blowhards blowing hard, my point is that something has changed over the past two weeks. While a lot of people are still making edgy jokes, some of them are getting got, which didn't happen before. I don't even know if it's a good thing (beyond some unpleasant people getting a taste of their own medicine), I just think it's weird to insist that nothing has changed.
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