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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   39177 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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From my moderator note the last time I posted here, on the subject of the convict Donald Trump.

I'm actually happy to see someone defending the verdict and pushing back on what's clearly a dominant opinion here (this is completely orthogonal to what I personally think of the verdict) and it's unfortunate that the only pushback is coming from someone whose responses can mostly be summarized as "Neener neener."

I have half a mind to post this on a substack because I don't think it will get a fair hearing here. Out of respect for what TheMotte once was, I'll give it a try.

There's a problem with this inability to recognize evil as evil that is endemic here.

A felony is a kind of serious crime.

It means that a person has crossed a certain line of civility. A transgression against the nature of truth.

Trump is a liar. He lied about something to such a serious degree that twelve citizens were firmly convinced that he is guilty.

If you care at all about law and order, at some point you have to stop endorsing the person who attacks law and order.

I've been the victim of an SJW hate mob. It's one of many things that made me comfortable at a place where people were willing to talk about the deficiencies and self-righteous indignation of lefties.

But you, as in you the people here, you the people reading this message, are not better than the SJWs in this specific way: you demonize rather than argue. If someone makes a short argument, that's somehow bad and unfair and against the rules.

How is that supposed to be tolerating disagreement? How is that supposed to be free speech?

Trump is a bad person. And it's time for him to go.

And if you can't accept that, fuck you.

Any forum in which I'm not free to use my speech like this isn't a free speech forum.

I'm a classic 'law and order' conservative and Trump lost me on January 6th.

We have rules in our society, and he broke them. And your grudge against SJWs, which I share, is no justification for avoiding cleaning up your own shit.

Our entire society is predicated on some amount of trust. Some amount of truthfulness. We have laws about campaign finance. We have laws about falsifying business records. We have laws which brand a person a felon if they are a threat to the public order.

TheMotte became a performative space where people were allowed to tell themselves the story that they were 'grey tribe' neutral at the same time they bitterly denied and resistance any news which made their actual side look bad.

My only side is America. My only side is the Constitution. I am against lawlessness and disorder, and though many Democrats are corrupt criminals, and many SJWs are hysteric shit-flinging busybodies, none of that matters if we can't hold Trump accountable.

  • -52

Furthermore,

This is just functionally wrong. Whether dictators are net good is an interesting question.

But they do provide benefits.

No. Not only no, hell no. Not only no, a thousand times no.

Dictators are never good. Open calls for authoritarians are a sign of deeply misplaced idiocy and ignorance.

Our Founding Fathers did not create a bulwark against sheer hellish authoritarianism, they did not rebel against a king just so some shitbrained internet commentators who got hurt by a blue haired person once could lust after the inherently violent nature of a dictatorship.

I reject utterly this uncivilized madness.

All dictatorships are dysfunctional. Anyone who says otherwise is making a partisan and inflammatory claim.

The entire point of rejecting the authoritarian left is to avoid the hell that is a dictator in charge.

  • -24

And I can see that my comments have to be manually approved. Good God. The moderation here is simply bad.

  • -30

And if you can't accept that, fuck you.

The demand to be able to curse anyone who disagrees with you with nothing to throttle you isn't really supporting the pro- "classic 'law-and-order' conservative" and anti- "demonize rather than argue" stance you're claiming here. The moderation here is correctly identifying some of your posts as bad, even when agreeing with your conclusions, because it actually is pro-order and pro-argument and anti-demonization.

Singapore would disagree.

All dictatorships are dysfunctional. Anyone who says otherwise is making a partisan and inflammatory claim.

Was Cincinnatus in the wrong when he briefly became dictator to solve a crisis in Rome? Are there really no scenarios where a dictator has done good?

When people use the word dictator they use it in the modern sense, which is a bunch of military generals subverting supposedly democratic revolutions for their own personal gain and power. This is also how Julius Caesar used it in the waning days of the Roman Republic.

Cincinnatus was a great dictator, just like George Washington was a great general and president. But, we don't call Washington a dictator, because he went out of his way not to become one. A feat not replicated by the various revolutionaries that have given us the modern definition of dictator.

I think for example Pinochet was probably net good for Chile. Salazar may have been a net good for Portugal.

More to the point, the administrative state already exercises near dictatorial powers. Look at what they’ve done to Latin Mass Catholics. Look at what they’ve done with locking up some of their opponents while not locking up their own for the same transgression. Look at what they did to parents at school board meetings?

Look at what they’ve done to Latin Mass Catholics.

They’ve put some on a watch list. Have they done anything else?

No, they haven't even run a surveillance program.

I was shown the internal report from the SSPX. It broadly agrees with the FBI's story- there was a crazy person at a traditional Parish trying to recruit parishioners into a terror attack, the pastor reported him, and the FBI tried to recruit the latin mass community into running sting operations to catch domestic terrorists. "No, we want nothing to do with that" got escalated up to some senior leaderships and a few FBI agents showed up to recruit CI's, stood around awkwardly, and then either went native or left.

This program was stupid, but it was never directed against Latin mass Catholics- it was intended to convince us to use our streetcred with the actual literal far right to infiltrate white supremacist groups for the FBI. When we declined to do so and couldn't be convinced, the FBI gave up.

Interesting! And rather reassuring!

Is there anything published where I can read more about this?

Not in view of the public, although the report from the FBI that was broadly interpreted as an ass-covering exculpatory lying is more-or-less in agreement with what traditional Catholic leadership themselves thought was going on. I mean it cites things like the SPLC but the factual description of the program in the leaked internal memo was "we intend to recruit tradCath CI's who can infiltrate white supremacist groups using their existing street cred with the far right". This didn't happen and was always a dumb idea. But there don't seem to have been any pressure tactics other than requests from regional headquarters, which did the common sense thing and wanted nothing to do with such a program.

This was a convenient rhetorical cudgel for Josh Hawley, but an actual threat to the community- no, not really. TradCaths are too connected to conservatives with actual power to have their first amendment rights blown out of the water- freaking scientology gets theirs respected, and an eccentric sect of the largest religion in the country with two members on the supreme court is somewhat more protected.

That is enough. The whole point of putting someone on a watch list is designed to discourage the relevant group. There is zero reason to put LMC on a watchlist. It is evil.

Dictators have a long history of being great. It all depends on the world you find yourself in and the situation of those to be governed.

Now I think a Republic was correct for the people of the early United States this is not the situation most countries find themselves in. The most extreme form of Democracy probably won’t work in sub-Saharan Africa. War time Ukraine is likely better with less democracy.

Of course I can fairly obviously state that you yourself are not in favor of Democracy. I’ve yet to meet one person in favor of one world government where the votes of Africa, China, India would absolutely crush the votes from the people of western governments. The more you think about Democracy the more you realize it’s not the core American feature and never could be.

Agreed. The core American principle was respect for property rights and general freedom with a Republican government designed to protect those rights. See the eleventh amendment.

I’m not convinced that every instance of Autocracy is pure unadulterated evil. There are great emperors in history. The emperor of Japan managed to turn a backward medieval civilization into a state able to go toe to toe with world powers. Peter the Great built Russia into a civilization. Augustus Caesar brought peace to Rome. There were great rulers in China as well.

The vast majority end up bad. But at the same time, democracy has done some bad things as well. Democracy nuked Hiroshima. Democracy installed Hitler. Democracy dumped metric tons of Napalm over Vietnam.

I don’t think, at the end of the day, the exact form of the government matters nearly as much as the character and intelligence of the people running the government. No society run by the kinds of people our current democracy is putting in power is going to do well simply because they’re not the kinds of people capable of leadership, integrity and intellectual agility. Do you honestly believe that Biden or Trump are capable of modernizing American systems to the needs of the 21st century and the challenges of AI? I’m not convinced either one can set up a router without help. I don’t think they’re that intellectually curious (even before Biden’s debate performance).

I think it's good to separate the principle from the instances. One can theorize or perhaps identify an absolute autocrat who is "good" by some standard. The principle of dictatorships, and therefore the act of ever advocating for any dictator to be installed in any nation, is 100% bad. This is one of the many issues I have with Yarvin and Yarvinism.

Dictators in the literal sense are a perfectly acceptable solution to pressing existential problems.

Temporary absolute monarchy to solve a specific crisis such as war is a political tradition so successful most republican regimes feature a clause for it.

Washington was essentially a dictator. Lincoln was unquestionably one. FDR was one in all but name.

Dictatorship isn't just a common tradition. It's a common American tradition.

What you are railing against is tyranny, not dictatorship.

I agree with much of what you say here in a general sense (minus the use of the vitriol aimed at everyone here; I agree with it but I wouldn't say it, because incivility is pointless), but I think it's also fair to say that it's kind of a "meh" case. He paid off a porn star so that disclosure of his affair with her wouldn't hurt his electoral odds, and the payments were deceptively labeled as legal services payments to hide the fact that it was hush money.

This is bad, but: 1) Trump has done so much worse stuff that it's hard for me to care that much about this. Sure, if Biden or Obama did this then the right would talk about it every day for a decade, but that's in part because it would be their biggest known scandal. Relative to the rest of Trump, it's basically a blip. And 2) it feels tough for me to evoke the vibe of "felony" when picturing this case.

It feels a little like the example in Scott's noncentral fallacy post:

Suppose someone wants to build a statue honoring Martin Luther King Jr. for his nonviolent resistance to racism. An opponent of the statue objects: "But Martin Luther King was a criminal!"

Any historian can confirm this is correct. A criminal is technically someone who breaks the law, and King knowingly broke a law against peaceful anti-segregation protest - hence his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail.

But in this case calling Martin Luther King a criminal is the noncentral. The archetypal criminal is a mugger or bank robber. He is driven only by greed, preys on the innocent, and weakens the fabric of society. Since we don't like these things, calling someone a "criminal" naturally lowers our opinion of them.

The opponent is saying "Because you don't like criminals, and Martin Luther King is a criminal, you should stop liking Martin Luther King."

It's ironic because I think (in an informal sense) being a criminal is central to who Trump is and I think comparing him to MLK is absurd, but I also think there's a lot of "people don't like criminals, Trump is now technically a criminal and a felon, so we will now call him that every time we mention him forever" going on here. I wish the trials would move forward for anything related to the "alternative electors" plot or at least the classified documents case. Then I'd feel much more comfortable with this.

the convict Donald Trump

Don't you mean the justice-involved individual, Donald Trump? Kidding, kidding. But it really is Russell-conjugations all over the place.

A felony is a kind of serious crime.

And famously our lawbooks are groaning with such a profusion of them that we each, on average, inadvertently commit three each day. Seriously, criminal laws are often rather vague, and great power is entrusted to the hands of prosecutors to not go off the reservation and become little tinpot tyrants, using their awesome powers to for personal grievances. Unfortunately, this often doesn't work.

Moreover, which act works more harm on the commonweal - Donald Trump classifying payments to Stormy Daniels as "legal expenses" in his personal books, or a mob of 34 people ransacking a convenience store like a swarm of locusts? Because the first is a 34-felony indictment and got millions of dollars in legal resources thrown at it. The latter is a 34-misdemeanor nothingburger that ruins people's livelihoods and blights a neighborhood, but goes ignored by the progressive legal system. I'm not going to bitch at anyone who looks at this and concludes that the law is more than a bit of an ass these days.

Trump is a liar. He lied about something to such a serious degree that twelve citizens were firmly convinced that he is guilty.

The evidence in the case was highly publicized, and other fellow citizens are fully capable of disagreeing on the proper conclusion to be drawn. This isn't a new or controversial point. It's not a defection against the commonweal to argue that Sacco & Vanzetti or the Rosenberg were actually innocent, or on the other side that OJ or Alec Baldwin are actually guilty.

If you care at all about law and order, at some point you have to stop endorsing the person who attacks law and order.

There's law and order, and then there's law and order. I'd actually argue that Trumpian tendencies are much closer to the original understanding of the term, given Trump's hostility to public disorder.

which act works more harm on the commonweal - Donald Trump classifying payments to Stormy Daniels as "legal expenses" in his personal books, or a mob of 34 people ransacking a convenience store like a swarm of locusts?

Definitely the one where the mob goes into the government building to try and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

Stable institutions of power transfer and robust checks and balances against those who would hijack that are among the only thing that prevents us from sliding into third world style governmental dysfunction.

Someone who would throw wrenches into that system to try to make it malfunction is a “bad person” like the OP claim, and one of the bigger societal risks out there. It’s a much more important case than a street felon.

Definitely the one where the mob goes into the government building to try and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

Unfortunately that's not what he was convicted for.

This may be news to you, but society did not collapse overnight when the halls of power were threatened. There were no repeat attempts. Everybody eventually went home and retreated back to grumbling from their keyboards and patiently waited 4 more years for their next shot. You may argue that the consequent ill will towards Democrats was therefore misplaced and avoidable, but that sentiment was generalizable towards their entire party both before and after J6. It's baked in.

As bad as J6 was and could have been, watching various leftist riots and harassment campaigns treated with pillows while they spill their anger and hostility onto their fellow citizens did more to damage my trust in institutions than any march on the capitol. Your sacred system means fuck-all to me if it's not going to protect me and mine from street felons.

Sure I can definitely agree that the fact that the attempt to overthrow the peaceful transfer of power eventually fizzled out was a good thing.

Society doesn’t tend to collapse from this sort of thing, so I wouldn’t be surprised at that point. The majority of countries in the world today probably lack a tradition of peaceful transfer of power to varying degrees. But once you interrupt that process, it’s hard to put it back together.

I highly prefer to just vote rather than “I take power illegitimately then you take power illegitimately then…”

He lied about something to such a serious degree

Marking paying his lawyer to execute a NDA as legal expenses? That lie? This seems to me to be "three felonies a day"ing Trump. Making a mockery of what should be serious and impactful crimes.

fuck you

Message received. Follow your hostile meta-contrarian opinion or get internet-yelled-at.

Oh, dear.

I entirely agree that Trump is bad, and that there are people on the Motte who post many terribly stupid ideas. With apologies to my fellow posters, I believe that many of you are gravely wrong on many important issues, and that in some specific cases, you are not merely wrong, but wrong in a way that strikes me as, well, stupid. Foolish. Something you should know better than.

However, the difference is that I'm not demanding consensus in a hostile and frankly rude way. Do I agree with you on the object-level issue? Yes. Why don't I act like you? A few reasons. Firstly, there's a meta-level on which I think that people are owed a measure of civility regardless of their ideas. Secondly, likewise on the meta-level, I don't come to the Motte to canvass support for my politics, and I would roundly encourage everybody else to adopt the same attitude. That's not what this place is for, so I don't come here to do it. Thirdly, insofar as I do want to effectively advocate for my politics and convince people of them, I don't believe that fierce demands like this would be effective. How do you convince dedicated Trumpists to change their minds? Not by yelling swear words at them, certainly.

Do I agree with you on the object-level issue? Yes.

I think there's one clear nonsense point there, which is the connection drawn between "Trump found guilty" and "Trump is bad". Under the circumstances, Trump being found guilty should be a null update about his character. There are many excellent reasons to hate the guy, but this one - i.e. "if you can find a kangaroo court to convict someone of a crime, that makes him evil" - is obviously bananas; even divine command theory has question marks on it, and this moral precept amounts in practice to "tyrant command theory".

Hm, I'll grant that's true. The Trump conviction did not alter my opinion of Trump in any substantial way - he was bad before and he continues to be bad. I have no very strong view on whether or not he is guilty of falsifying campaign records - that case could have gone either way and it would have made no material difference to my voting intentions, or what would be my voting intentions were I an American citizen.

But you, as in you the people here, you the people reading this message, are not better than the SJWs in this specific way: you demonize rather than argue.

Why am I expected to argue with this? This is, literally, not an argument.

Your entire post is based on some kind of appeal to emotion, or rhetoric, or whatever, it's a definitional problem, it's probably just bait, because it's actually a very simple idea to anyone who isn't rationalizing-whatever. Just because something is named a felony, or a woman, or low inflation, or whatever doesn't make it so. 12 people voted guilty, OK, mistakes and unjust verdicts don't exist, nothing about this persecution is illegitimate, I'm supposed to, what now? Not vote for Trump because that's moral? Sure, whatever, I'll do whatever you want because the magic words have been invoked. I guess that's what arguing is. I think I'd rather jerk off.

"You, the people here," "we hold Trump accountable," I don't know what you're talking about. "I'm a classic conservative," what does this mean? These are all just empty categories.

Judges do not get to decide who is evil. And you have failed to parse "accountability" as the ruling elite crushing it's opposition.

Trump could actually be much worse than he is (and there is a LOT of room) and people would still support him, and be right to do so if he is their only champion.

Appealing to law, to rules, to civility is a luxury only afforded to those who are beyond politics because they have already won. The rest have to actually fight to get what they want.

You want things to be as they were 20 years ago, you want to live in a mostly united society where the people who share your beliefs have won and there is no need to fight.

You don't live in that. Liberalism is dead. Make peace with it and take new sides or become a weird pariah like those who were still soviet communists after 1991.

There is no alternative. The world you thought you lived in does not exist anymore.

I'm a classic 'law and order' conservative and Trump lost me on January 6th.

Which action of his? Organizing a rally in the capital city of the polity he resides? Giving a speech at said rally? Encouraging his attendees of said rally to peacefully march to the most legitimate building to protest around in the capital city of our republic?

Trump certainly did not organize the incompetent security lines. He was not in charge of the police force that managed to let an unarmed crowd of humans sac the equivalent of an 19th century fort by checks notes walking around erratically.

We have laws which brand a person a felon if they are a threat to the public order.

We used to have such laws, and still do. They are what we properly consider felonies: Murder, burglary, embezzlement. Trump didn't do any of those things, he wrote a thing was expense type A, and the prosecutor thought it was expense type B. Neither that, nor campaign finance laws (themselves an assault on our freedom) are proof of a threat to the public order. Rather. The person making such an argument is said threat.

campaign finance laws

Didn't federal prosecutors consider Trump's actions and determined he didn't violate Federal campaign finance laws? Or at least didn't bother charging him.

Yes, but that doesn't mean I can't rail against them anyways.

Trump is a liar. He lied about something to such a serious degree that twelve citizens were firmly convinced that he is guilty.

He (or one of his accountants) labeled a payment for an NDA as a legal expense. If that's somehow a felony then either the law making it such is terrible, or the jury instructions were terrible, or both. That's before you get into the time travel aspect of this (Trump's mislabeling of a payment made in 2017 was in furtherance of another alleged crime, that being unlawfully interfering in the 2016 presidential election).

There were many other things wrong with the NY trial. But where it falls flat is that an election isn’t a purity test. Are we to believe Biden isn’t a liar? Are we to believe the democrats—of the summer of love ilk—are exemplars of law and order? Hell, what reason does OP have to believe the process in NY was fair?

A felony is a kind of serious crime.

Indeed, and yet I find the "crime" that Trump has been convicted of is not serious. It's not a felony. I don't think it's even a crime, except when combined with the horror of having won a national election as a non-Democrat.

Would you please explain which felony law Trump is supposed to have broken? And when exactly was he convicted of it?

There's a problem with this inability to recognize evil as evil that is endemic here.

A felony is a kind of serious crime.

A felony is words on a page. I don't let the Word of God bypass my moral reasoning (I'm not a very good Catholic), and I definitely won't let the US Criminal Code bypass it either.

Let me turn the question back on you: If/when Trump successfully appeals that verdict, will your moral judgment change? He literally would not be a felon, and you are placing a lot of importance on that. Assuming that his felony-free status wouldn't change your mind, why would you think that his felony-convicted status would change anyone else's?

For a lighter story about how the law can be misaligned with morality, see this article:

And even though it might be the morally right thing to do, Der said breaking into a car is still considered property damage, which is a criminal offence — even if the person's intention is to save a pet.

There's a certain debate strategy that gets on my nerves. I'm sure there's a formal term for it, but I call it a "prohibition on reason".

I see it here, with "felon = evil". I saw it during the pandemic, where public health measures were treated the same as risk factors ("The virus knows if you're sitting or standing, so it's only safe to sit unmasked in a restaurant"). I saw it in cancellation campaigns where an activist NGO is treated as infallible ("The 'okay' handsign is a white supremacist dogwhistle. The trucker should be fired.")

where public health measures were treated the same as risk factors ("The virus knows if you're sitting or standing, so it's only safe to sit unmasked in a restaurant")

As an aside, this sort of argument by ridicule can be used against any Schelling point rule meant to identify an easy cutoff point between two undesirable extremes (see also the old "she was only 17 years and 364 days old, you monster" jab). Clearly the intent was to make people wear masks as much as possible, except when incompatible with other desiderata like being able to consume food in a public setting; what do you think would have been a better rule to settle this trade-off without causing uncertainty and enabling a lot more disruptive haggling?

As for people like OP, who fail a sort of "guardian-guarded distinction" and transfer some of the sanctity of the things a rule or law is intended to defend against onto the rule or law itself (or conversely treat violators of the law as instances of the bad thing the law was meant to prevent), I understand your annoyance but it's also easy to see how they are part of the grease that makes our society run. Their existence protects against sliding into the sort of illegible system where the written rules are never the actual rules, enabling corruption and causing friction everywhere.

Clearly the intent was to make people wear masks as much as possible, except when incompatible with other desiderata like being able to consume food in a public setting; what do you think would have been a better rule to settle this trade-off without causing uncertainty and enabling a lot more disruptive haggling?

"You should wear a mask except when predominently engaged in activities that require being maskless". Eating takes up most of one's time in a restaurant.

As for people like OP, ... Their existence protects against sliding into the sort of illegible system where the written rules are never the actual rules, enabling corruption and causing friction everywhere.

Trump's prosecution was already a case where the written rules aren't the actual rules, because people are not usually prosecuted for his crime. The OP was being a concern troll, not trying to follow a universal rule.

"You should wear a mask except when predominently engaged in activities that require being maskless". Eating takes up most of one's time in a restaurant.

But then you would get people trying to lawyer "predominantly", walk around with food in hands or just pockets to avoid wearing masks (lots of people, myself included, already did this seated), ...; also there is an argument that when walking around you cover more ground (germs don't fully disperse in dining settings, cf. those norovirus outbreak analyses where correlation with seat distance is seen).

OP was being a concern troll

Doesn't mesh with my understanding of that term, and OP seems to be my political near mirror image. Boomercons hating Trump for breaking rules and decorum seems consistent.

OP is almost certainly not a boomercon and her writing style is a near exact match for rdrama's favorite reddit mod Bardfinn or ex-Mottizen Impassionata.

If it was safe enough to eat in a restaurant sans mask, it was safe enough to walk into the restaurant without a mask and around the restaurant without a mask. There is no trade off in that scenario.

What does "safe enough" mean? COVID had a transmission rate that was far from "approach infected person -> you get infected immediately 100%", so the appropriate mental model is that there is some positive correlation between time length of exposure and likelihood of transmission. If you believe masks reduce the likelihood of transmission while you wear them, then wearing a mask half of the time is strictly better than never wearing a mask, and wearing a mask always is strictly better than either. However, if you wear a mask 100% of the time, you can't eat. There's your tradeoff.

All the ended up being unimportant as the end point of the pandemic was everyone gets some natural immunity.

The big difference between the entire town locks themselves in a basement and plays twister for 48 hours and everyone always maintains 6’ of difference is the twister playing people all get covid the first week and the 6’ people it takes 3 months for the entire town to be infected.

(Of course there were reasons to delay infection early for hospital capacity and waiting for vaccines but the true end point was everyone gets it)

The question whether COVID rules like this particular one are reasonable ways to implement a particular goal (reduce transmission rate) given particular assumptions (masks work, ...) is orthogonal to the question of whether the goal and the assumptions are sound, and I doubt we'll get much out of relitigating the latter here for the gorillionth time. It is possible for COVID policy to be misguided, masks to be ineffectual, and the restaurant masking policy to be reasonable (as in sensible given its proponents' beliefs) yet susceptible to the sort of anti-arbitrary-cutoff zinger that the poster above posted, simultaneously.

You are sitting in a room full of patrons. They are eating and drinking and talking. The idea that a mask worn while going to the bathroom would have any meaningful impact on concentration of virus is fanciful.

It still takes time (and time you are moving around, covering more area), so under the assumptions that believers make it might well reduce transmission risk per visit by like 10%. Do you have any proposals other than just "you don't have to wear masks in restaurants", which is reasonable if you believe they don't do anything anyway but clearly not a solution to the "what easy rule can maximise mask wearing while allowing people to eat" problem that the rule-setters were trying to solve? What you are doing seems analogous to someone who believes air travel is evil and unnecessary asserting that plane designers are stupid for putting wings on planes because they could save materials if they didn't.

It still takes time (and time you are moving around, covering more area), so under the assumptions that believers make it might well reduce transmission risk per visit by like 10%.

The base rate of people having Covid at all is very low, this was true even during the height of the pandemic, especially if they show no symptoms. The reduction in transmission from masks is also very low, even if worn correctly(they won't be). Wearing a mask only part time reduces this further. If you multiply all these low probabilities together you get an absurdly low probability.

The whole thing was security theatre. That 10% reduction sounds like a lot until you realize the base rate is .01 and no one is actually following the protocol enough to actually reduce it by 10%, more like 1%

Do you have any proposals other than just "you don't have to wear masks in restaurants"

"Takeout only"?

Outside seating only if dining in.

Not the person you're talking to, but I think "restaurants are closed" would have been a reasonable policy. So would "you don't have to wear masks". It's the halfway point of "wear a mask but not the 90% of the time you're at your table" which I found ridiculous.

Scott (PBUH) referred to this as the Noncentral Fallacy and furthermore dubbed it the worst argument in the world

That's not quite it, but it's related. If I look back at the canon, the closest ones I can find are Epistemic Learned Helplessness and Semantic Stopsigns.

People don't want to evaluate the merits of some particular case because it's quite complex (Trump bad? Covid's transmissibility and risks? White supremacist messaging?). They find a simple and authoritative answer to one small aspect of it (Convicted! The Health Ministry said you can X! The NGO said OK is a symbol!), and then not only do they stop looking at the issues, they try to impose that same stopping point on me as well. The counterarguments are simple and the inadequacy of those claims is (IMO) obvious, but they're still heresy.

Do you have anything here? Anything at all, besides some vitriol?

A felony is a kind of serious crime.

Is it now? Suppose you're going to an airport. Your flight is canceled and the next one's not for a few hours, so you drive over to the nearest bar. You have some food, a few beers, head outside to have a smoke and realize you don't have a lighter with you, so you snag a couple of packs of matches from the bar (which still gives them out) and have a smoke before driving back to the airport and getting on your flight. What crimes have you committed? Well, DUI, but that's possibly just a misdemeanor. But also you've violated 49 USC 5124 by knowingly carrying TWO packs of matches aboard the aircraft; only one is allowed. Thats a felony carrying up to 5 years in prison. That's how serious a felony is in this day and age.

I'm a classic 'law and order' conservative and Trump lost me on January 6th.

You're not fooling anyone.

Replying to your top-level, though I did read the follow-ons.

So, BLUF, you're banned. Good-bye.

Now, working from the bottom up: Yes, your posts have (had) to be manually approved, because you are an infrequent poster who posts angry rants that get heavily downvoted, hence you were stuck in the new user filter like everyone else. Had you made any effort to be a reasonable participant, that wouldn't have happened, but instead, your posts sat in the new user filter while we mods discussed "Should we just remove this angry drunken rant, or approve it and then ban him, or what?" (Spoiler: we decided the latter.)

You should have reread that mod note of mine you quoted above, because I was trying to steer you in the direction of actual productive engagement.

"Trump bad" is a perfectly valid opinion (and contrary to what you seem to think, it is not unique or even that rare here on the Motte).

"Trump bad and everyone who thinks differently is bad fuck you" is not.

You're a classic law and order conservative who loves America and the Constitution? Good for you. Wish you'd been able to express yourself without over-the-top rage and contempt, because it would have been good to have a little more of that, some more diversity of thought.

So why did I ban you, if we wanted more diversity of thought? Because someone who only seems to be able to participate by raging at his enemies isn't actually contributing anything. We've had your type before (usually, though, they are Impassionatas or Marxbros or other leftists), who are so implacably convinced of their objective and provable correctness and righteousness that they are literally incapable of good faith engagement because everything to them is a scissor statement.

Any forum in which I'm not free to use my speech like this isn't a free speech forum.

There is almost no forum that is a "free speech forum" in the sense that you get to say literally anything you want. Such forums rapidly turn into shitshows and there is a reason people generally prefer moderated forums, no matter how much they disagree over how the moderation should work (usually, "ban more of my enemies and let me say anything I want," but so it goes). This is a free speech forum in the sense that we don't ban any views. No one gets banned for having the wrong opinion or having unthinkable thoughts or unpalatable beliefs. Instead, they get banned because instead of wanting to talk and actually hear what other people think, they just want to dump shits on the floor, or pour gasoline and light a match, or shit on the floor and then pour gasoline over it and light a match.

And that's what your post is doing. What exactly do you think anyone who supports Trump (or even, not necessarily supports him, but thinks he's maybe not the most damaging person in US history) is supposed to say to your rant? Do you think they would have any expectation that calmly explaining why they support Trump would get anything more than another round of angry "fuck you"s and "repent sinner"s?

So you got your shot off, and now you're banned, because you're an angry ranter who got warned four times and banned twice for doing the same thing.

TheMotte became a performative space where people were allowed to tell themselves the story that they were 'grey tribe' neutral at the same time they bitterly denied and resistance any news which made their actual side look bad.

Only some people here call themselves "gray tribe." There are leftists and rightists and moderates here and people who don't neatly fit into any particular label. No matter how much critics try to insist this place is all a bunch of Trump-apologist red tribers (when they aren't screaming at us for being too accommodating to Blue Tribe sensibilities or being converged by Da Joos or whatever), it's not, and your anti-Trump arguments would have been welcome here, except what you tried to do was enforce consensus. Like, literally your entire post was an argument that we should all get on the same page about how bad Trump is. You can go somewhere else looking to force everyone into agreement with your position or browbeating those who won't, but if you actually want to participate here, you have to do so accepting that people are not going to agree with you and you need to deal with them, civilly.

Thanks for explaining the full thought process behind the moderation. I was confused by his comment that his comments were in moderator jail.

No response to my previous comment, plus this—yeah, definitely a troll.

Didn’t we just reclassify illegal immigrants into legal immigrants. Asylum seekers are technically “legal” though hugely abusing the system.

Anyway, looking him up, I found a recent article he wrote entitled It All Comes Down to Race. I read it carefully, twice, and I'd like to engage this community because I don't know any other place where this can be critically discussed.

You aren't aware of anywhere else on the internet that allows criticism of white nationalism? Seems fishy...

To be very fair, critical discussion of a position is different from criticizing the position and often the latter looks nothing like the former.

True, but this guy is/was just presenting a bunch of taboo links, and then criticizing them. Never really defended taboo. Surely there is some Kos / SRS / sneerclub dedicated to this important work. These attempts are in a bind between actually advocating for taboo versus hiding effectively.

Elsewhere it'd just be called racist and booed, and at best picked apart in bad faith. Here, it'll be picked apart in neutral-ish faith.

I genuinely don't think there are all that many places that allow both white nationalism and criticism of white nationalism, especially within a liberal conversational framework. DSL maybe, as another rat fork.

In any case, illegal immigrants are just small portion of the total immigrant population.

This might have been true 4 years ago but things have changed

But one of the responses got me thinking about national identity in a way I never had before.

I guess this troll is farming us for racist screen shots. But why bother? Just send people links to SecureSignal's user profile and skip the "innocently just found out that white nationalism exists, what do you guys think?"

Is this that poster who makes ambiguous posts related to white nationalism and we can’t tell what his motivation is, and then they delete their account? Why don’t you just plainly state your motivation. Then people will reply at length and in good faith. No, you didn’t go from making a teary-eyed post about your parents to reading an Amren article. I genuinely can’t tell in which direction you are trying to persuade people. If you’re trying to shill people into reading Amren there are better ways; if you are trying to argue against white nationalism, why don’t you do that without the subterfuge and fibbing? If you are some activist or whatever who hates where nationalism you can just post that and be honest, that would be an acceptable post and then there could be a debate.

Your sources do not say what you think they say. What you call “path to citizenship” actually says “path for some illegal immigrants”. (Well yeah, did he graduate from MIT or something?). Your anti-immigration point mixes up legal and illegal migration, and the increase is anti-legal migration is complex and multifaceted. Being sympathetic to illegal immigrants is totally irrelevant to any policy, you can be sympathetic to those who must be punished because justice demands it. Then you ignore compounded demographic change when you mention the “low” level of illegal migration.

In practice, I just don't think most Americans want to separate from their neighbors and friends to create a white ethnostate

The more serious question is whether a reasonable white American who is fully informed on the matter would agree with such a proposal. If you show a reasonable white American (1) global demographic trends, (2) the views of their ancestors, (3) crime data, (4) genetic differences, what would they say then? The unique problem today is that if trends continue, white people will simply die out as a population with any global influence. If you tell a white person that only white people are going to be replaced in the countries they founded, whereas Africa remains African and Asia remains Asian, what would the say? They have a strong evolutionary instinct as a mammal to not want their unique genetic group to be replaced by foreigners. That’s a primitively persuasive political argument, we can literally imagine Hunter Gatherers being motivated by the same concern. At an evolutionary level, knowing that your group is going to be replaced saps motivation to do anything. There is no longer a reason to live or build anything permanent or useful, knowing that it will be handed over to other groups and your own progeny will be replaced.

My post about my family's immigration situation didn't go down well. In retrospect, that makes sense given how scatterbrained it was. But one of the responses got me thinking about national identity in a way I never had before. In turn, it got me reading a lot of posts on this website and I came across a back and forth about white nationalism, which then led to the cited

No. You've been doing this schtick for years. Roll an alt, adopt a naïve persona, oh hey, check out all these white nationalist articles I've just happened to stumble across in a crazy random happenstance!

No one is fooled, you are immediately and obviously recognizable the instant the link spam starts.

Banned for egregious obnoxiousness.

Thank you for your service.

10 years later, the moment is here. What will you do, even if just quietly to yourself in your heart?

I think it would be just for every person cheering this on to get a visit at their own workplace from someone with a camera harassing them over their own internet posts.

If "justice" means becoming a victim of something you cheered for to happen to others, does that mean someone who cheers for Trump to get murdered, deserves to get murdered?

No. Rules are different for politicians. You're asking for an incredible amount of power over people's lives, the flip side of that is those people get to say mean things about you.

If that person campaigns for President, yes.

You mean like that side did and cheered on for years? In addition to the various examples SteveKirk presented, there was the tumblr described here. The example given there is a truck driver who got fired for posting the N-word on Facebook.

For years, the right pleaded for justice, mercy, or sometimes (as with the "OK" sign nonsense) just sanity. The response from the left, and from the so-called neutral institutions that duly fired people when the left complained about them, was "No". It is no surprise, nor in any way unwarranted, when no sympathy is provided when the shoe is momentarily on the other foot.

Yes, they all deserve each other. Eventually they'll end up in Hell and spend eternity applying arbitrary tortures to members of the other 'side', not even remembering why there are sides in the first place.

More seriously. Neither really accomplish anything. You note that the shoe is 'momentarily' on the other foot, it's not like this little outburst will make future cancellations less likely! It might if one targeted people with cultural power on the left, but they aren't!

Semi-relatedly, I think a post thinking how the attitude towards the 'racial reckoning' has significantly soured on the center-left, putting it in the context of history. 2020 was hardly the first progressive "excess" that was later disavowed as too exuberant. What comes next?

You note that the shoe is 'momentarily' on the other foot, it's not like this little outburst will make future cancellations less likely!

That's no longer a possibility.

It might if one targeted people with cultural power on the left, but they aren't!

They're not reachable. The right doesn't have anything like the arbitrary cancel power of the left. They're just taking advantage of the fact that the assassination shifted calling for Trump's death out of the Overton window for a little while.

The people who could have stopped cancellation are those who carried them out while claiming not to be partisan. Employers, talent agents, advertisers, book publishers, venues, etc. They did not, and it's too late now; if they stop cancellations by the right they are only proving themselves partisan, not cooling the temperature.

That happened. For years. They fired a man because his father said the "N word" before he was born. They hunted down an electrician because someone took a creepshot of him cracking his knuckles in a way that looked vaguely like the "ok" gesture. CNN doxxed a random guy who made a meme mocking Biden, nothing to do with death threats. They went after kids for riding scooters on gay crosswalks. The New York Times published a fawning article about doxxing high schoolers to "hold them accountable" for singing along to rap music by getting them expelled from colleges they'd gotten into.
A school principal was fired for saying "I firmly believe black lives matter, but I do not agree with the coercive measures taken to get this point across.". A football player got fired because his wife called rioters disgusting.

And nobody had a problem with this insane ideological frenzy. They did nothing but cheer it on triumphantly for years. And now they're vaguely embarrassed about it they want us to forget about it without so much as an apology. Without even giving that electrician his job back.
Anyone freaking out now should be ashamed of themselves.

When leftists have to hide under pseudonyms just to support Biden, we can talk. I think that would be pretty just. Maybe do that for 50 years and see what the score is.

To quote a poster who for some reason hasn't weighed in on this particular issue: "it would be vastly preferable if this could be dealt with voluntarily with no coercion by state or society. Yet that does not seem to be the position we are in"

I have no interest in talk of "sides". You have no evidence that this lady specifically was in any way involved in any of those events. She is not an avatar of leftism, she's not an organizer of online mobs, she's just some cashier at home depot. Punishing her for what some people she doesn't know did to someone else she doesn't know is grotesque.

I'm not talking about her. I'm talking about the people upset at her being fired who supported doing far worse to people in 2020.
And what you, specifically, supported doing to anti-lockdown protesters.

Good. There should be consequences for advocating for political violence. It has ever been thus, and some social consequences are better than being (literally) tarred and feathered.

This isn't even a problem as far as free speech is concerned. The Gestapo didn't kick down her door and drag her off to a reeducation camp, a private corporation fired her because it thought her opinion beyond the pale. Free speech doesn't guarantee that you can say whatever you want to whoever you want without consequence.

As an aside, this is hilarious considering that less than a week ago people (@Jiro et al.) were still pulling the LoTT is a powerless private citizen compared to the checks notes cathedral juggernaut that is Social Text. At some point the fig leaf of 'punching up' just isn't going to work anymore when LoTT is getting people fired like that.

There is definitely a motte and bailey going on between just moms in basements and very important and very noble journalism.

I don't actually follow LoTT all that closely, so the above is my general understanding, and I stand by for correction. That being said, I don't see it.

LoTT is, in fact, a mom in a basement, is she not? She aggregates publicly available information, and the overwhelming majority of the information she aggregates is both obviously real and speaks entirely for itself. Trace demonstrated that you can, with a moderate amount of effort, feed her false information that she will repeat, because she doesn't actually check all that carefully. The problem with that critique is that it doesn't seem to generalize; when he made the post, I considered a response of simply pulling random items from her feed for the next couple weeks, and checking one by one whether they were legit, on the expectation that they would be. If I were to do that, what outcome would you bet on? Compare that to Social Text, or Progressive Academia generally. Okay, we know the Sokal Squared articles were bogus; are you actually confident that the rest of their content was significantly more reliable?

What is the actual critique here? LoTT is a shitposter, and receives low trust. On the other hand, her output is optimized to be extremely effective despite that low trust. The overwhelming majority of her content is posting public receipts, and her vulnerability to hoaxing doesn't significantly undermine the reliability of those receipts, because you can generally click through and see the actual record for yourself. She is valued by Reds because she provides a fire-hose of solid evidence that is highly inconvenient for the Progressive narrative. She shows up here because stuff she has actually found has led to significant cultural disputes a number of times. I don't trust her for analysis or for picking my stocks. I trust her that her link to a facebook comment goes to facebook, especially since it's trivial to check myself. Is that foolishness on my part? If so, where does my foolishness actually cash out? What foolish predictions or positions actually result? How does this foolishness compare to people who, say, genuinely believe that Trump was a Russian plant, or that the Hunter laptop was fake news?

I don't have to believe that she is a Very Important And Very Noble Journalist to think that the information she aggregates is timely and relevant in many cases. My basic critique of Trace's hoax isn't that he hoaxed her, which to my mind is entirely fair game; it's that he seems to think that the hoax discredits the rest of her information in some way. That because he fooled her, I should now discount an archive link to comments on facebook or a CNN clip on CNN's own servers because she's the one that handed it to me. At least, that's how the Trace's criticism comes across, and this seems similar.

@Chrisprattalpharaptor posits that it's absurd to claim that LoTT has less social influence that Social Text, and presumably the Academic consensus it represents. I think there's a reasonably clear line from that academic consensus to the operating interpretations of Federal law and HR policy. Would you disagree?

LoTT, on the other hand, operates by exploiting coordination failures within Blue Tribe. Blues in one place deny a thing exists, Blues in another place are publicly doing that thing, LoTT provides reciepts. The Blues who denied the thing was happening are shamed, and turn against the Blues who embarrassed them, or else are forced to pivot publicly. Reds benefit either way, but why should this be objectionable? You can say that she's nutpicking, but that has to be balanced against ubiquitous Blue denials that the nuts exist at all, and then there's the further problem of isolated demands for rigor.

  • I think LoTT is reliable enough that information she provides should be taken seriously.
  • I think LoTT is in fact much less powerful than the Academic consensus, to the degree that the comparison above is laughable.
  • I think LoTT generally provides a valuable service to the media ecosystem.

Which of these statements seem indefensible to you? If there's a motte and bailey here, where is it?

  • I agree that she is generally reliable in the sense that “the media rarely lies.” That is, if she reports something, it would probably be corroborated by following the links.
  • I think she is much less powerful than the academic consensus. I think the same about entities like Social Text which, despite taking part in that ecosystem, have little to no ability to steer it.
  • I disagree that her service is particularly valuable. What it provides is almost entirely toxoplasma, entertainment via righteous anger. This isn’t remotely unique; I’d say the same about a large swath of social media as well as the modal media hit-piece.

The bailey I observed after Trace’s piece goes like this: LoTT is performing a valuable service. Therefore, it is right and proper that she be awarded with money, prestige, weird political appointments, et cetera. Prominent in this bailey are claims that she is very definitely an a “media/news company”, “probably the top journalist in the country”.

When faced with criticism—such as a dumb hoax—supporters retreat to the motte. She has less money/prestige/power than the NYT, so she cannot be expected to keep up with their standards.

The other thing about journalists is that they like to at least maintain some sort of pretense of 'professional ethics' -- I would expect a credentialed journalist to have taken multiple courses on this, and be aware of pitfalls and procedures. No such course exists for Twitter users at any level, up to and including the owner of the place.

Hoaxing the NYT would be notable for the same reasons The Rape On Campus story out of Rolling Stone was notable. There are supposed to be fact checkers, multiple sources, teams of lawyers, etc vetting a story. There is supposed to be a rigorous institution in play here… Convincing a twitter anon, even a popular one, of a hoax is Kiwifarms material. It's giving your uncle a facebook chain letter.

You can see the excluded middle. Professional standards would be unreasonable, so the standard evaporates entirely. At the same time, supporters don’t want to give up on the legitimacy of having a serious journalist fighting the good fight. Swapping real news stories at the water cooler is normal; quoting Twitter randos is cringe.

It looks like Social Text is still chugging along. Yet the only time I’ve ever heard about it has been in the context of a twenty-year-old hoax. Anyone who tries to convince an outsider that it’s prestigious is going to have a hard time. I think that’s a correct judgment.

I disagree. People have always made crude and violent comments in small scale conversations. As the Internet has grown, the chatter that once took place in a tavern or next to a fireplace now happens where billions of people can see it. This may be ill-advised, but it's what we have, and it's what we should design norms around. I don't think we should get people fired for saying 'i hate n***ers and k*kes' or 'we should kill all landlords', nor should we for this. An explicit reason, given by the Supreme Court among others, for not making support for political violence is illegal is that abstract support for violence inevitably comes along with justified political grievances, and I think that's a similarly good reason to not make it a social taboo punishable by excommunication. The First Amendment and freedom broadly correspond to values about how society should be, not just procedures the government must follow. It's perfectly legal for me to be unpersoned by everyone I know for supporting Trump, and not served by every business, but that's still, I would think, bad.

LoTT isn't powerless. But she is less powerful than, say, the New York Times or Washington Post, and doesn't have the resources of such organizations.

Claiming that someone is less powerful than someone else doesn't make them powerless.

But you weren't comparing LoTT to the New York Times or the Washington Post, were you?

It's implicit. A number of people made the comparison, and there were more on the old thread.

I don't think this is exactly a pendulum swinging back. I think if an assassination attempt against Trump had happened in 2020, people'd still be fired for saying it should've happened. 'killing the president is bad' is a very strong political norm that is fairly independent of anti-racism or rape c. If the attempt had been on Biden instead (which might've been possible, the shooter searched for both trump and biden and trump had a rally near his home), we'd see something similar.

I think framing this as striking back against the left's cancel culture power, fighting fire with fire, is confused for that reason among others. This isn't training a muscle you can use to cancel trans activists or anti-white DEI racists. Nor will punishing random cashiers for saying things like this make it less likely popular progressive twitter users will say things you dislike. Cancelling a popular twitter user or celebrity is very different from cancelling a random old woman. It kinda feels like PUSHING BACK, it sorta feels like the same sort of thing as cancelling a beloved actor or tech CEO, but it really isn't

What will I do? Probably nothing more than perhaps consider writing a comment here. This whole business is pretty far afield of my personal priorities for action.

What comes to mind from the discussion? Well, frankly, I just read the discussion below about dress codes before I read this, and what comes to mind is that there are, perhaps, some connections to be made. I haven't fleshed out those connections thoroughly, but I see a haze around them. What are the interests in preserving dress/speech codes? Are they individually beneficial to various actors? Are there coordination problems getting in the way of 'better' equilibria? I know people poke at game theory downthread, but I think the core insight is not to just shut up and calculate, but rather to just investigate the interplay between disparate motivations and incentives. A mathematical version may or may not be a suitable abstraction.

Moreover, I see connections in that a variety of folks are trying to do some implicit inference, which seems to me to require a significant amount of the same reasoning that is necessary for a game theoretic approach. That is, they would like to infer something about the 'type' or 'quality' of the players, be it a single parameter like "trust level" or something else. But to do so, it seems necessary to situate those parameters within the context of the incentives/game being played, because only then can the parameters be correlated to the behavioral strategies which are observed.

It may be that some Blues think that the US would be better off if Trump was dead. But it's a nasty thought, and the kind that shouldn't be expressed.

At the same time, it's very silly for Reds to get so up in arms about political civility and politeness. Of course it is inappropriate to openly fantasize about the death of your enemies, but this is something that Sam Hyde (affectionately quoted in this thread) has been doing for years now. This notion that "now the gloves are coming off, it's different this time" is just not true. People will whip themselves into a frenzy, take some scalps, and then waste their breath explaining to others how it wasn't really their fault, the guy had it coming, whatever whatever. It's tedious and pathetic, particularly when their idea of "wielding power" is snitching on people to their boss. That's the plan, is it - call the manager? That's not wielding power, that's begging actual power to intervene on your side.

This "golden opportunity" will fade. Some libs will get fired. Most will not. Of the eighty million Americans that voted for Biden, maybe you'll get four hundred of the most replaceable and impulsive, and most of them will just walk effortlessly into new jobs. Maybe libs will be a little bit more careful with their speech in the future and not saying obviously outrageous things. Is that what you want? For libs to be nicer to you?

The issue with conservatives is not that they're cruel. You need to be capable of cruelty. Enforcing laws is cruel. War is cruel. Borders are cruel. It's that they're petty. This cruelty is not in service of anything but resentment that the libs got away with it for so long.

Of course it is inappropriate to openly fantasize about the death of your enemies, but this is something that Sam Hyde (affectionately quoted in this thread) has been doing for years now. This notion that "now the gloves are coming off, it's different this time" is just not true.

There are always rule breakers, if there weren't laws and norms wouldn't be needed. But Sam Hyde lost his show on Adult Swim, so being too offensive having as a possible consequence your career taking a hit, is a norm which Mr. Hyde's example strengthens the existence of.

Sam Hyde's career is calling for political violence. He said he wanted to kill Hasan Piker in real life. His most famous quote is about shooting journalists. He got his career started off of sketches about stabbing bankers in the face.

I wouldn't say that the issue is hypocrisy. It's that I still don't really get what this is supposed to result in. Does Sam Hyde want strong norms against endorsing political violence? No, probably not. If that's the case, why punish people for violating this norm you don't care about?

This is so obvious a point that I wonder why it gets glossed over so much.

Yes, you have people on both sides of the aisle expressing violent fantasies and urges. The difference is that for a long time one side would lose their jobs, their status, their opportunities, and their protections. And not just them, but anybody who could be considered adjacent to those sentiments. Not even worth mentioning all the nonviolent expressions that got similar treatment. If you shoved some Sam Hyde quotes in front of an 'honorable Republican', they would reflexively denounce it, and maybe throw in a preemptive but unnecessary condemnation of white supremacy for good measure. There's /pol/, which isn't nothing, but it's also a bunch of faceless assholes who cant be held accountable and whose power level is overstated.

This is all before a POTUS candidate got shot. While I have some respect for the attempts to dissuade people against revenge, I have not been convinced that that said revenge isn't the smart, productive, and deserved play. Moreso, I don't know how you skip this step and go straight to Peace and Unity. There's a gap in this thinking that some expect to just sort out on its own, but I don't see the mechanism or the reciprocity required for it to work.

And when I compare the Left's body count to the Right's today... the suggestion to relent seems facially ridiculous? To my awareness, we have a Home Depot employee, an asshole streamer immolating himself and his surrounding bridges, and a member of a joke band pulling a Kathy Griffin (as in, largely punished by his peers, not external Rightoid forces). Not because of pronoun faux pas, or slips of the tongue, or statements that could be maliciously and dishonestly interpreted, but because they cheered on the death of Trump and/or Comperatore. These are the bridges too far? Really?

I don't believe in God or Heaven. More power to the folks with a strong Christian ethos or equivalent and the lines they wish to hold. I think holding these people over the piranha pit is ugly but necessary. And I'm prepared to accept that I likely won't see a quarter of the just desserts that would make this even remotely symmetrical. That's fine. I'm not greedy.

Why, for any reason, would you want to be symmetrical with the left, or even think it's possible to be symmetrical with the left?

I already stated in my post that I don't expect to ever be symmetrical with the left. Nor do I particularly want to be.

I'll admit that 'vengeance' is on my mind, although I don't believe it to be petty. Nor am I acting on it, unless shrugging at LibsOfTiktok antics counts. Perhaps admitting that undercuts any further point point I try to make. But the most sober, serious take I can muster is this:

There will be no possibility of progress on this until the left gets a bit of this in their bloodstream, and their safe little clouds get punctured. They're gonna need to get sick a bit before they truly appreciate what a healthy body is. Because right now they're still in La La Land to my eyes. A blob that wants to go to the mattresses over Dead Trump jokes after a decade of pearl-clutching about so much weak shit is not a good partner for reform, and I expect them to resume maximum hostilities when they feel free enough to do so.

And if that doesn't work, so be it. I don't know what else comes next. We're not drowning in optimal choices here.

The revenge is petty in that, by your own admission, it is insufficient. It is like Dostoevsky's mouse:

"To come at last to the deed itself, to the very act of revenge. Apart from the one fundamental nastiness the luckless mouse succeeds in creating around it so many other nastinesses in the form of doubts and questions, adds to the one question so many unsettled questions that there inevitably works up around it a sort of fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of the contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action who stand solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it till their healthy sides ache. Of course the only thing left for it is to dismiss all that with a wave of its paw, and, with a smile of assumed contempt in which it does not even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its mouse-hole. There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite. For forty years together it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most ignominious details, and every time will add, of itself, details still more ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting itself with its own imagination. It will itself be ashamed of its imaginings, but yet it will recall it all, it will go over and over every detail, it will invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things might happen, and will forgive nothing. Maybe it will begin to revenge itself, too, but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind the stove, incognito, without believing either in its own right to vengeance, or in the success of its revenge, knowing that from all its efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom it revenges itself, while he, I daresay, will not even scratch himself. On its deathbed it will recall it all over again, with interest accumulated over all the years and ..."

Again, it's one thing to be cruel. It's another to be petty, or to seek revenge without even really believing in the justice or satisfaction of it.

I'm not sure it's insufficient. Rolling over and playing nice certainly would be. Time will tell.

I stated my justifications and where I hope they end up, and you seem to think I actually don't believe them. Despite me having just written them out for you. Fine.

You yourself admitted that you don't think you will ever have parity, that you are relying on Blue Tribe organisations to keep their members in line, that you are personally doing absolutely nothing to further this. So, even if you're absolutely right in your principles and in your belief that maybe the left need to have the fear of god put in them (which I agree with), you are doing absolutely nothing to realise that, and not even talking about things that might realise that (like say, a change to the law). If this is you being mean, what can I say - I don't think the left has cause to panic, though they might do so anyway.

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I’d just like to add that the Christian ethos is forgiving people for sinning against you if they repent of their sin. We’re also to love our enemies and do good to those who spitefully use us.

But that’s also in context of our relationship with God, who forgave us without demanding any cost other than repentance. We’re also to be gentle as lambs but wise as serpents, and that means not being idiots in the ways of the world.

This "golden opportunity" will fade. Some libs will get fired. Most will not. Of the eighty million Americans that voted for Biden, maybe you'll get four hundred of the most replaceable and impulsive, and most of them will just walk effortlessly into new jobs

I don't want people to start going after Blue jobs, but my impression of this sort of "wet blanket" arguments is that they're only being made when the other side is over the target.

This cruelty is not in service of anything but resentment that the libs got away with it for so long.

This sounds incoherent to me. If it's petty, and it's no big deal that the libs got away with it for so long, then they shouldn't be upset about this happening to them either.

I don't know if I've ever said it about the left but I've definitely had the thought before. What can I say - I can't prove I'm a perfectly even minded person to the satisfaction of a hostile stranger online.

I don't think people should be upset, but I also don't think that sadistic glee is appropriate either.

Free Speech is a spook, an incoherent concept that collapses the very instant it drifts outside the bounds of a rigidly-coherent values environment. To the extent that it has significant meaning, it has never been tried, and to the extent that it has been tried, it has had no significant meaning.

That being said, I see no actual value gained from taking these scalps. Let me speak plainly: I am confident that somewhere between a large plurality and an outright majority of Blues are sad that the assassin missed. If I'm correct in that assessment, it seems to me that the reality of modal Blue opinion is orders of magnitude more important than any aesthetic "norm" secured by enforcing a taboo on celebration of lethal political violence. Canceling people over their personal endorsement of political murder is not actually going to change the modal Blue opinion; all it does is help Blue Tribe as a whole hide the reality of that modal opinion, by coaching them through the entirely inconsequential and pointlessly pro forma rituals of "norms." Speech is information. Blue Tribe is leaking information, and the net result of these cancelation efforts is to help them stem the leakage. I would vastly prefer for people to speak and be heard honestly, so that we can more clearly see where we stand.

That being said, if we're going to do the comparison game, it would be better to be specific about the objects of comparison. I remember a working-class hispanic nobody getting fired for making the OK sign. Is that a good comparison to this? If not, which specific cancelation would be a better one? I remember a lot of people being cancelled for speaking or yelling the N-word in public; I also remember those people not actually getting a defense from the right. Would cases like that be a better comparison?

Free Speech is a spook, an incoherent concept that collapses the very instant it drifts outside the bounds of a rigidly-coherent values environment. To the extent that it has significant meaning, it has never been tried, and to the extent that it has been tried, it has had no significant meaning.

Can you elaborate?

I have quite a number of times before. Which point would you like elaborated in this instance?

Free Speech is a spook, an incoherent concept that collapses the very instant it drifts outside the bounds of a rigidly-coherent values environment.

Plausibly so. One area that is grossly lacking any remotely suitable theory is one of character development, especially on a large scale such that it could produce any sort of a coherent values environment (not even necessarily a rigid one). To even think about such a project descends into questions of things like deterrence/rehabilitation and perhaps even free will, itself. One tension I observe is that when the left/communists engaged in large-scale projects of "character development" (given that it is a type of character that many in this forum would think is bad/harmful), many folks are pretty okay with believing that it can, indeed, be relatively successful in producing a coherent values environment (perhaps one that is, indeed, rigid).

That is to say, it is perhaps all well and good to have a heuristic rule where one looks at the population which is considering adopting a norm of free speech and concluding, "If such a population has sufficiently coherent values, a norm of free speech is potentially plausible/possibly beneficial, but if it does not, then it is not." But the core problem is somewhat upstream of that, and it is one that we have almost no clue concerning how it works. There are likely, indeed, almost surely, some feedback loops back upstream, but it becomes an even more impossible task to perform any analysis on such feedback without any conception whatsoever of how the thing it's feeding back into works.

Here is how I try to make the concept of Free Speech coherent, at least for this narrow topic. Free Speech needs to be a graded concept, with levels of speech.

Let us set up a little context. Mr Red-one exercises his first level right to free speech. Mr Blue-two beats up Mr Red-one and boasts about it. Mr Red-one decides to stay quiet. That is a clear infringement of Mr Red-one's right to free speech.

Mr Red-three exercises his first level right to free speech. Mr Blue-four says "You had better shut your trap, or you will get a beating, like Mr Red-one." This is second level speech. Is it covered and protected by the concept of free speech? Mr Red-five makes a public fuss about what Mr Blue-four said, trying to persuade Mr Blue-four's employer to dismiss him. This is third level speech. First level is political policy discussion. Second level is using speech to deprive others of their first level speech rights. Third level is using speech to deprive others of their second level speech rights.

I think it is coherent to say

  • First level good
  • Second level bad
  • Third level good again

Could we say that the first and second level are both good? I see this as the incoherence that @FCfromSSC is concerned about. Some people think that free speech absolutism requires us to uphold second level speech. But that has it backwards. Since second level speech rights trash first level speech rights, upholding second level rights is going soft on free speech. There is a real conflict, but we have to uphold the first level and therefore we must disparage the second level.

What of the complication of saying that the third level is back to being good again? It really is a complication. It might be neater superficially to say that the third level is also bad. But that is to make the mistake of the lazy school teacher who doesn't make the effort to find out who is the bully and who is the victim that hit back. The first level is the one that we are trying to defend, so we object to the second level, but consistency leads to a ripple effect, with the third level good again, least we go soft on our objection to the second level, and end up weak in our defense of the first level.

This is naked sophistry. Surely your opponents could as easily find supposed examples of Trump engaging in second level speech (uh-oh no-no bad), which would make calling for his assassination third level speech (Real American Defended Free Speech) and trying to get assassination fans fired fourth level speech (??????????).

You have accurately described the problem, but there is no ruleset available to us that can actually enforce correct outcomes in the face of widespread personal bias. Every point in the sequence you describe requires subjective judgement and line-drawing. This can work if you have coherent values, and it won't work if you don't, but it is the coherent values that are the load-bearing element in any case. We might as well be honest and say "We believe speech should be free so long as it isn't too objectionable". That would be both easier to understand and considerably more honest, lacking only the gloss of self-righteous, unearned piety.

“Free Speech is a spook, an incoherent concept that collapses the very instant it drifts outside the bounds of a rigidly coherent values environment”

I’ve been saying this for a few years. Free speech is a fiction once speech becomes a real threat to the power.

The young in America had been taken in by Hamas thought. For the Jews does it make sense to suppress the speech or let it continue to spread? And Holocaust 2 occurs. It’s unquestionable that you suppress speech in that situation.

If you have a culture that is 80-90% heavily supported and secure in its power then free speech is a nice thing. Having 10-20% of weirdos in the population talk about other ideas isn’t a threat to the regime.

I realized a while ago that I supported Pinochet. His economic regime made Chile the richest country in the region. His regime faced a legitimate communists threat.

If my choice is suppress free speech or my country becomes a communists hell hole then it’s an easy decision for me.

My thoughts on firing HD lady are changing today. I guess people like her vote and provide cover for the elites. Perhaps it’s a good thing to get the message to people like her what is the appropriate way to think by firing a couple foot soldiers.

Wanted to write basically the same thing but you beat me to it. Free speech make sense in prosperous and stable liberal democracy because its enemies are mostly harmless. You can't say the same about Weimar republic.

The issue with the Weimar Republic was not the liberals.

Free speech make sense in prosperous and stable liberal democracy because its enemies are mostly harmless.

The United States was not prosperous and stable in its early years, free speech made sense in a heavily indebted country experiencing periodic tax rebellions, Indian raids, slave uprisings (and the perceived powder keg of a Haitian style slave uprising), and the threat of further war from Britain.

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.

If I were thinking of targetting someone, I'd be more concerned with whether he could target me back, not whether he could target random people not me. Punish the guilty, spare the innocent.

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?

What did this random Home Depot employee do to anyone?

Is Donald J. Trump not a member of "anyone"? Why is it fair game to celebrate his near demise? Does he not have feelings, instinct of self-preservation? Is he not human? How would you feel if someone felt sad you were a victim of attempted murder, and not murder full stop?

What did she actually do except say some distasteful things online?

Injustices happen every second, and the alleged injustice she suffered, is lesser than the one she wished upon a man much greater than herself.

Donald J. Trump is a celebrity and a politician. While I think it is ugly behavior to celebrate anyone's death or near death, I would expect anyone above a certain level of fame to have to deal with a whole spectrum of ugly behavior and have thick skin about it at this point. I don't know why people feel the need to deputize themselves to avenge Trump for this slight against him.

I also cannot emphasize enough that I haven't seen this woman's actual tweets. I don't rule out that she didn't post a bit of dark humor, which I think would be more defensible than literally and sincerely saying she wished Trump was dead.

Injustices happen every second, and the alleged injustice she suffered, is lesser than the one she wished upon a man much greater than herself.

Whatever she supposedly wished upon him, she had no power to enact it, and there is almost 0 chance that Trump saw what she wrote, or thought about it for more than a second.

It is certainly a shame for people to wish suffering upon others, but it is no crime, and in any case it is beyond your reach. You are not, ever, going to force everyone else to love Trump as much as you do, or to have a heart as free of sin as yours.

It is certainly a shame for people to wish suffering upon others, but it is no crime

Is the implicit argument here that there shouldn't be negative social consequences for things that aren't crimes?

Because then we have to re-do a lot of the last 50 years.

In what sense could negative social consequences be reliably enforced, if not codified into written rules, litigated by experts on those rules and then enforced? How could those rules be enforced if they didn't establish legitimacy among the general population through some kind of democratic input?

I am not forcing you to stay in this timeline.

So, let's say Bob cheats on Alice. Alice divorces Bob. That's a fairly significant social consequence, and quite the negative one.

However, adultery isn't a crime in basically any modern society. No crime occurred. So is this illegitimate?

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.

I think short of laws with teeth protecting the jobs of randos, or the big platforms adopting policies that would reduce cancellation

The big platforms have had no shortage of notable policy changes and enforcements.

Add to that the media and its narratives around harassment. They are absolutely willing to make online harassment a national issue, and have done so repeatedly over the last decade, more or less exclusively when the harassment could be framed as Red on Blue. Blue on Red harassment, on the other hand, has been deliberately facilitated by these same outlets and individuals.

So that's two obvious plausible options.

Okay, but again there's no one to appeal to? If news media turns a blind eye whenever one tribe is doing something, what power do I have to stop it, even if I dislike it? I don't have a megaphone, I don't have any power.

Again, it seems like people here on the Motte are saying, "It's about time we had the power to cancel people - it's been 10 years of one-sided cancellations, and our repeated requests for stopping have been denied!", and I'm just in the position where I feel like people are trying to control Cthulhu or something, and justifying it because of the impossible-to-control eldritch horror on the other side. Don't summon up what you can't put down and all that.

Ending cancellation is a coordination problem, and coordination problems are notoriously hard to solve. The Right now having a better ability to cancel is good for the purposes of "revenge", but I don't actually think it gets us any closer to an equilibrium where the incentive structures are set up to properly mitigate the worst aspects of human tribalism. Parts of the internet sometimes make me wonder if we don't need a Hobbesian Leviathan of some kind to force people to get along online. The more powerful the state, the stronger free speech protections can be, because the less it matters what the people actually think.

CEO of Cloudflare had ears, and a sense of self-awareness to know he was opening pandora's box when he made his move against Stormfront. Apple and Amazon had ears when they were pulling Confederate and other RW imagery from their stores. ACLU could have maintained its usual tone instead of landsliding into progressive ideals. And am I to presume that heads of Google and Facebook were never availed of these concerns?

The rabble is hard to control, yes. And yet various captains of industry, historied organizations, and formerly libertanian-ish techbros either bent the knee, got fully on board, or played along out of fear of looking x-ist. A platform like Twitter can stuff its Trust & Safety Board with all stripes of feminist, POC, and LGBTQ advocates with nary a conservative in sight, and nobody on the inside recognizes how fucked up this is. It is impossible for me to believe that there was nobody in a position to listen to these concerns. They were indeed heard, and considered either naive, old-fashioned, or even dangerous.

These 'leaders' had every opportunity to stand athwart their mobs, wait them out, and go back to selling sneakers to Republicans. They passed it up. And I think it's worth remembering that a lot of this turn was occurring before Trump stepped off the golden escalator.

Okay, but if your position is that people in power "have ears", then I would ask what power we have to avoid them?

If it's not the Cthulhu of the masses we're trying to wrangle, then it is the power of the Cathedral or whatever right wing power brokers have going on, and we have basically no levers to pull on. There's a certain line of argument around warfare that bombing civilians doesn't make sense, because it doesn't directly hurt the military or the people in power who are isolated from the consequences. I think that cancellation works largely the same way. The vast, vast majority of people who are successfully cancelled are random people no one has ever heard of. A rich and powerful enough celebrity is relatively shielded from dire consequences, as evidenced by people like J.K. Rowling.

So if we live in a multipolar society propped up by capitalism making a small number of people almost untouchably powerful, and the powerful people are the only part of cancel culture that can be reasoned with, we're fucked. What levers do we have to affect the CEO of Cloudflare, against the heads of organizations, against private social media corporations?

I again come back to the idea that laws of some kind would be necessary to end cancel culture, and that's a massive coordination problem in its own right. Not to mention that it is unlikely to actually happen if neither side ends up taking a principled stance and supporting an end to cancel culture. A lot of the reactions here on the Motte seem to show that people would be happier with cancel culture as long as their side can get in on it too. What politician do you vote for if you want an end to cancel culture in that environment? What tangible steps can the sane people on both sides who oppose cancel culture no matter who's doing it take?

Fwiw, I would be interested in seeing codified protections for whatever is considered 'abhorrent speech' in any given year. Maybe I'd eventually be a little disgusted by the extent of the leeway in practice, but I can swallow that bitter pill if I think everybody is getting a reasonable share of the security blanket.

I just don't see how we get from here to there without reminding people across the board that they actually have skin in this game too. Something needs to actually force people to the table to avoid an exchange of WMDs, and the only path I see is to make people sweat a bit. And while you may not be able to claim a CEOs scalp this week, you can give them a light preview of where the winds will be blowing soon enough. Fortunately, there's Trump and his incoming admin to handle some of that.

I don't consider people like HD lady to be innocent civilians, although I do feel bad for her. I think these are people who volunteered for the fight, and are now having regrets that a mortar landed in their foxhole. In many a sense, this is ugly, unfair, and not quite hitting the target. But in what I see as a war between roughly two mass psychologies, the ultimate goal is to reprogram the opponent's consensus. That angle of attack can be opened from anywhere. Remember that the death of a fentanyl junkie sent a wide and powerful message that upended US society for years and brought forth new standards everybody had to live with.

How is she the correct target?

She is absolutely the correct target because she is the foot-soldier of this conflict. If random normies are afraid of getting shit-canned over anti-Trump takes, instead of the last ten years, then that's progress for my side.

I don't fucking care about this woman, at all, in any way. She means nothing to me, but the sympathy for her disgusts me. I'm trying to deport fifty million people in four years, I don't have time to bitch and moan about one old white woman losing her retail job for tasteless comments.

What did she actually do except say some distasteful things online?

She did it with no expectation of consequences. That needed to change. She should have known beforehand that there would be consequences, but she had learned otherwise through example.

This was bad when the left was doing it. It's bad when the right is doing it

You've got two its there. The point of my comment https://www.themotte.org/post/1077/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/230745?context=8#context is that, in context, the two its are referring to different things.

Watch out for double its. I think that you will find that many of the comments that you disagree with have double its and the source of the disagreement is that that author of the original comment assumes that it is both obvious what it is, and obvious that both its are talking about the same thing.

Sic semper bellum

While big institutions occasionally get hit, cancel culture has always been mostly hitting individuals, and this lady was by no means guiltless.

While big institutions occasionally get hit, cancel culture has always been mostly hitting individuals, and this lady was by no means guiltless.

What was she guilty of? Saying some mean things?

If she was announcing a serious plan to harm the president, then she should be prosecuted for her attempted murder. But if all she did was openly wish death on a political rival, then I think that shows a lack of decorum but is hardly worth her getting fired over.

I'm sure most people who see a given politician as an obstacle to their desired political outcomes have entertained the idea that the world would be better if that politician would die peacefully of natural causes, and I don't think that feeling bleeding over into violent situations is strange. I think pearl clutching and acting shocked when people darkly joke about a near miss being a hit instead is a bit silly. Is it everyone's first week on the internet or something?

but is hardly worth her getting fired over.

Oh no it's worth it. It's worth it in a sort of escalating frenzy, you want her to be made example of, you also want this to continue and build in fervent scale and spread throughout the memeplex.

Imma echo netstack- you should at least edit a paragraph describing the situation into your OP.

On the topic, meh. This woman is my enemy. Getting a cashier fired is a dirty business, but she’d do the same to me if she could, so I can’t condemn it too hard.

I'll say out loud in real life that it's wrong to apply cancel culture to the proletariat. That getting people poorer than you fired is wrong.

I would be happy if we developed a norm that a person trying to get some private figure fired for saying a dumb thing was taken as a good reason for the person to be fired themselves.

I think almost all of us, here, would. But I don't see how we go from the current situation to that norm coming out of a decade of opposite-valence random cancellations, and immediate calls for a detente come off as absurdly out-of-touch with ground reality to me in that context.

To me, it seems like there has to be some kind of intermediate step. I don't know what that would look like.

I'm happy to do it loudly: going after some Home Depot wannabe edgelord is pretty low, and I want nothing to do with it.

But tell me why taking this stance doesn't give me the "I am a man of principle" warm fuzzies I always thought I'd get, when this day comes.

If it doesn't, then maybe you were never invested too much in actually being a man of principle?

So you're only a man of principle, if following your principles makes you feel good? Interesting take.

In Ben Stein's voice: "Oh dear. Looks like a another member of the Leopards Eating People's Faces party got their face eaten by a leop... oh, wait, no, it was a mountain lion. I guess that is somewhat surprising. I am so shocked."

I would like to absolutely echo and affirm in the strongest terms the "I don't give one flying fuck that these people are now getting served their own dog food." camp.

These people gaslit, threatened, and manipulated the entire country's (corporate and otherwise) power structure and much of its (stupid) citizenry into processing anodyne statements like "All lives matter." and "It's okay to be White." as "hate speech" and have gotten plenty of average people fired for uttering them over the past years (even and especially when they didn't really understand the broader implications of them, as the cruelty was the point), and we're supposed to shed tears over them experiencing the same thing for wishing death on the people's choice (per polls) to be the next actually democratically-elected leader of the country (something that is actually objectively "hate speech", that is, speech driven by and clearly, unambiguously expressing hateful desires towards somebody else)? They even got people fired just for using the "OK" hand sign, again even and especially random people who were obviously not even close to hardcore online right-wingers but clearly just clueless grillpillers who probably couldn't tell you the latest online memes from five years ago (also again because the cruelty was the point).

And that's even only the surface level of the most obviously unfairly prosecuted "offenses" by even a totally politically neutral standard. Say kids shouldn't be "temporarily" chemically castrated? Say your entire culture, heritage, and often direct living environment shouldn't be razed to the ground by millions of imported third-worlders to capture the electoral system and give rich Jews cheap labor? Say the entire world shouldn't have paused in breathless, hysterical mourning over a felonious drug addict and porn star who threatened pregnant women without a care causing himself an overdose in the presence of a cop? Say that thousands of mostly blacks burning, looting, and murdering isn't actually "mostly peaceful" and that it's hypocritical in any case when everyone else is being advised to stringently avoid so much as going to church or getting a haircut because of a slightly worse version of the cold running around (but don't you dare call it a Chinese cold, even though it came from China)? These people who pointed out the Emperor's nudity directly got it way worse, social execution being generally the lightest penalty at best.

So my village gets constantly raided by violent, sociopathic marauders for basically at least a decade, and now I'm supposed to cry for them because a few of my neighbors finally put some arrows inside of some of them instead? Fuck that. "Oh, but she's not really some high-level marauder or anything! In fact, she has no real control over them or anything much at all. She just supported them and cheered them on as they slaughtered your people! Show her mercy!" I don't give a shit. We didn't start this war (Remember how desperately right-wingers and wokeism critics pleaded during for example the early part of Gamergate to keep matters like hiring and firing apolitical?), but given that it was forcibly brought to our doorstep, I see not one good damn reason why we shouldn't fight it just as vigorously as them.

"But how do you know she supported any of that cancellation stuff anyway?" I know there's a 95%+ chance she's a left-winger if she was cheering for Trump's death. (Even most of the "Zion Don" type right-wingers that I've seen who have criticized him heavily in the past for not being hardcore enough (like me) have had to admit that he handled being shot like a true G and express some hope that literally almost getting assassinated in cold blood by his opponents makes him clean up his act a bit and actually try to do a bit more of... well, anything during his second term.) And if she's a left-winger, then there's a 95%+ chance that the notion of "cancel culture" or people being fired/punished for their political views/statements has been a not infrequent target of her sneering mockery since at least the Trump era. "Oh noes, poor widdle wight-wing baby went /r/byebyejob for literally calling for the genocide of trans children [Translation: Again, not supporting their chemical castration]! So sad! :(" We've all read thousands of these types of posts online (which doesn't even account for the assuredly much greater utterances of similar sentiments out loud/in person), plenty of them almost certainly made by bitter probably sexless fat old almost-certainly-feminist-aligned/identified crones just like her. Welp, not so funny now, is it bitch?

(Note: Humorously enough, searching /r/byebyejob on Reddit for "Home Depot" only gets you "Motel 6 and Home Depot drop ad agency after its founder calls ad ‘too Black’", nothing about this cashier. How furiously do you wanna bet the basement jannies there deleted those posts and banned their posters? "It's not /r/byebyejob when it happens to us! Then it's fascism!" Womp womp.)

So this lady losing her job, if she goes into despair, if she becomes homeless, if she kills herself... So what? Thousands of "average" lefties like her every day upvote content on sites like Reddit wishing for the same exact things and worse to happen to people like me. So no, her fate is not my problem. In fact, I actively wish whatever the worst fate was that any average right-wing person has ever suffered over being economically/socially/etc. attacked/"canceled" for their views on her and every other person like her. Karma's a bitch too, but for at least this one brief shining moment in time, she's our bitch now. And she's a bad bitch. So therefore I will do exactly what left-wingers have proclaimed to do for years with the resultant tears: collect them in a novelty slogan mug and drink them while telling their producers to cry harder. Boo hoo. :(

And while any of you can wring your hands in response to this over how "uncivil", "antagonistic", "uncharitable", or whatever alleged bullshit I'm being (and maybe I am to some degree, not that I care one bit, because again the targets richly deserve it), what you can't do if you're being honest is pretend that I'm not simply mirroring the exact same energy that's been projected about this issue from the left for again basically at least a decade now. (But no, that doesn't mean I'm going to fall for any "Well then aren't you just like them!? Horseshoe theory!" concern trolling either. In war (keeping in mind we're posting in the Culture War Roundup thread), bullets flying towards my side are bad, but the same bullets flying towards my opponents are good. That's how it's always worked. That doesn't mean that everybody who has ever used a bullet is the same.)

So /r/byebyejob! Hope it was worth it sweetie. :)

PS: Here's Sam Hyde making a similar argument in response to John Carmack complaining about the same thing if you prefer to hear it from an e-celeb. And he's right too.

This post breaks a whole bunch of rules. You've had a couple warnings and temp-bans last year, but it's been a while and you got an AAQC recently. On the other hand, you pretty clearly know that this sort of foaming-at-the-mouth rant doesn't fly here. You are waging the culture war, not discussing it.

Take a couple days off, cool down, and come back with something other than tribal rage to contribute.

Honestly, it’s also a completely different and worse thing to me. I’m not maga in the least and I’ll absolutely say that if this woman worked for me, I’d fire her simply because she’s cheering on murder. We live in an age of active shooters and I’m not going to keep someone around who sees the solution to a difference of opinion in a gun. Add in the liability that would result from not removing her (if there’s an employee active shooter, any decent lawyer would put this video and the fact that you knew and did nothing about it at the center of the liability case. It shows that threats of violence are tolerated in your workplace) and it’s an absolute slam dunk of a good firing.

We live in an age of active shooters and I’m not going to keep someone around who sees the solution to a difference of opinion in a gun.

Isn't the media constantly telling people that Trump is a once in a generation threat to our democracy? If one of the basic justifications for the 2nd Amendment is being able to overthrow corrupt governments, or prevent the rise of tyrants, then I fail to see how this is out of line with that basic philosophy, at least in the mind of person doing it. They wouldn't see it as a mere "difference of opinion."

Honestly, I'm someone who is able to sympathize with both the sentiment that political violence is bad and destabilizing and should generally be avoided, and the general idea that gun rights are justified as a remedy for tyranny or oppression, though preferably as a matter of last resort. To use a relatively neutral example of the second kind of violence that I find acceptable, I'd point to the 1954 United States capitol shooting by Puerto Rican nationalists. Puerto Ricans don't have representation in Congress, and can't vote for President, so I think that some of them violently attacking the politicians responsible for their undemocratic state is somewhat justified. There is at least a line of argument that it will at least possibly make Puerto Rico enough of a thorn in the politicians' sides to make them have more autonomy or better conditions, even if they remain a de facto colony of the United States.

The problem I have is that there's always going to be differences of opinion among a citizenry. I bet a lot of Puerto Ricans in 1954 thought that violence was tactically the wrong move, or fully condemned both the tactics and motives of the Puerto Rican nationalists who shot at Congress. Who, then, gets to decide when the use of lethal force is justified to fight oppression?

I understand the basic reality that any government is going to try and shield its political class from violent retaliation. But I also think that the United States is a country founded on a violent revolution grounded in a (at the time) radical ideology, and it is hard to actually draw boundaries of when an attempted revolution or an assassination is acceptable. By definition, if you allow guns into enough peoples hands, you're effectively trusting their individual consciences and judgement to make the call for themselves, regardless of what anyone else thinks. The foundational ideology of our country is that it is worth risking ones own life for an end to tyrannical government, and we're just lucky that almost no one actually thinks this way most of the time.

I’m of the option that violence is an absolute last resort, and I don’t think it should be celebrated. Furthermore, I’m also looking at this from a threat and liability perspective for my own business. There are all kinds of things that if I know about them and don’t take charge of the situation, I’m endangering myself, my employees, my clients, and the business itself. People who celebrate recent violence against any individual is exactly that.

And to me that calculation has very little to do with Trump. It has to do with a person who sees revenge killing as a solution to problems. I’d feel much the same, as I said originally, if she’d made similar statements about an ex, a family member, or a stranger I think it would be a cause for concern because there is some risk that a person thinking in this way might get mad at a client or vender or another employee and bring a weapon to deal with the problem. Adding in the liability of not having it be a cardinal rule that violence and threats of violence will not be tolerated in any form, it’s an easy decision that has nothing to do with the political class, Trump, or any other political opinions. She can dislike Trump all she wants. But that’s not the same thing as saying that Trump deserves to be murdered.

This has been my tack in response to the "we need better marksmen" kind of comments (which I am indeed hearing IRL from various Trump-hating relatives/acquaintances) -- "OK great -- I guess you are not in favour of gun control anymore either, and BTW I also know of some people that could use some shooting".

It actually seems to land with them a bit -- in-person discussions are pretty different from online in this regard though.

The best analogy I've seen about it is imagine you've been in a ringfight against an opponent for a long while. Since the last 10 years after he was handed a reinforced jockstrap by one of his supporters outside the ring he's taken to kicking you in the nuts every time he can, even though technically the "unstated rules" forbid it. The jockstrap means his own nuts are protected though. All this time you've been calling him out and saying that kicking people in the nuts is wrong, however he doesn't listen and does it at every opportunity he gets.

Through age after all these years the jockstrap has recently decayed to the point where it doesn't protect his nuts anymore. After a particularly nasty kicking session he inflicted on you you start kicking him back in the nuts. He suddenly starts howling and calling you a nasty for breaking the unstated rules of the fight and even worse, a hypocrite for saying nut kicking is wrong but then doing it anyway to him.

The issue is that your new behaviour is equally consistent with two different hypotheses: 1) You really are a hypocrite and only were saying nut kicking is wrong because he had a jockstrap and couldn't do it to him yourself before or 2) You truly believe nut kicking is wrong but also believe in "do unto others as they have done unto you" and the former belief for you overrides the second in importance.

Fortunately we have a way to test this. If we introduce a third fighter to the ring who's not related to either of the two we can see if you spontaneously start kicking the new person's nuts or stick to only kicking the nuts of the person who was kicking your nuts before. If the former then you're just a hypocrite while if it's the latter you probably genuinely believe in the wrongness of nut kicking. Translating back into the real world this is equivalent to finding another group that's effectively orthogonal to the standard left-right split and seeing if the attack dogs of the modern right also try and get them cancelled whenever one of them on a different side of an issue says something cancellable.

An example of this might be something like homeopathy: if a committed homeopath says something like "the medical establishment is run by the emissaries of Satan and any right thinking person has a duty towards humanity to kill them" (I'm sure there are crazy homeopaths that do say shit like this) then we can feed these sorts of incidents to non-homeopath right wing attack dogs and see if they try and get the homeopaths cancelled. If so then we can be convinced we just have hypocrites on our hands, if not then maybe they are at least a little respectable.

Any other ideas people may have? This seems like a genuine experiment that can be run.

This is a bit dumb, but I don't think anyone checked to see if that woman endorsed cancel culture before getting her fired, so that fits hypothesis 1 more than hypothesis 2.

Welcome to the Motte!

I can’t tell exactly where you’re going with this, but we discourage links with minimal context or analysis. Would you mind giving your thoughts on the subject?

We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged. I have been thinking a lot about that lately. First - there should be a pound of flesh extracted from the (former) cancelers before offering truce or lasting peace. But I would strongly prefer it to be extracted from the medium profile people of the purple blob that felt invulnerable, and not randos. But yes - some amount of pain should be inflicted. Of course mine crazies are not better than your crazies - so if the right becomes dominant culture I expect the same kind of people on my side to become power crazy thought policers. And I don't to return to the time in which Paris Hilton is forced to apologize that her private sex tape is leaked, in which Janet Jackson is guilty of being undressed by Timberlake on stage and Dixie Chicks gets canceled for calling out unneeded and unjustified wars.

It kinda sucks to be able to have normal conversation only when the pendulum is in the bottom of the swing.

I consider both the left and the right to be equally despicable, so the idea of the right wielding cancel culture annoys me as much as the idea of the left wielding cancel culture. At the end of the day, getting some retail worker fired because she verbally supports killing a politician, but is obviously not actually planning an assassination attempt or anything close to it, is just as bad as getting some retail worker fired because he said an ethnic slur or made a joke about trans people but is not actually doing anything harmful to anyone.

No matter which side does it, there is an ugliness to it. One can see that the canceller is motivated by anger, bloodlust, and sadism, not by any beautiful or noble feelings.

If every American who has ever wished death on a political opponent were to be be fired, I suspect that the economy would collapse. If every person on The Motte who has ever wished death on a political opponent were to stop posting, this place would likely be desolate.

Cancel culture does not reliably work on the rich and powerful. There is a level of fame and wealth which makes a person impossible to cancel for speech alone. Cancel culture that targets people's speech only works on the economically vulnerable. The principle is similar to how a lightly armed insurgent might decide to target a big gathering of the other tribe's ordinary civilians instead of attacking their military bases or the mansions of their rich, which are protected by private security. It is most effective against the people who have the least political power. It bounces off the truly powerful, the only exception being when elites borrow elements from the commoners' cancel culture to use as weapons in their intra-elite fighting - but even when that happens, it is the elites who win. Trump almost certainly isn't going to give you a bag of gold for cancelling somebody who called for his assassination. Jay-Z almost certainly isn't going to sign you to his label for cancelling somebody who used a racial slur. When you wake up the next morning, you'll still have the same house and the same job, unless you are one of the few who can turn being a culture warrior into a steady income - but even that occupation is precarious unless you are one of the very few who make it to true prominence in the attention economy.

Ordinary, economically vulnerable people using cancel culture against each other is like hobos fighting over a can of beans while rich people drive by in fancy cars.

I do not believe this is a charitable take at all. While some people as you describe “ anger, bloodlust, and sadism, not by any beautiful or noble feelings.”

I consider it a viable political strategy. It’s downstream of how states have always been made. You forcefeed your state’s founding memes on school children in your public schools. You force people to learn a common tongue. You promote families by slut shaming and in the past removing from the rest of society the young girls who got pregnant.

Enforcing cultural norms is basic civilization building.

I think some on the left did canceling for fun, but I do think many of them thought what they were doing was for the good of society. I think it’s obvious the right canceling corporations has had a positive effect on society.

I actually saw that and my heart just sank. I can kinda sorta understand an attempt to hold teachers to a higher standard, as they are role models and directly involved in childhood indoctrination, so I think some sort of awareness about having to watch what you say is to some degree expected when you enter the field. Academia it's a little less clear-cut because everyone involved is an adult. Personally I don't like it too much there. Famous people is also a bit of a weird area, because they fundamentally (well, certain categories of them at least) rely on people's opinion for their living, so talking about people's opinions of you seems like more or less fair play. All of these examples have at least some logical connection where there is an awareness of responsibility.

Retail? Please. She even works up front, which is, if not quite the most thankless job in a Home Depot (that belongs to overnight and lot crew), it's most definitely the one where you get the most abuse - from management, customers, everybody. I can't even think of a moral justification other than "I just don't like what they said and want them to be punished." It's not like she said anything at work, it's not that she can't help people or do her job properly, but instead it's using corporations as a weapon against private people. There's no symmetry, no proportionality, and of course no heart. Let's distinguish between the wishes of the heart and the concrete actions that affect others, both on her part and on LoTT's part.

I mean, can anyone defend this in an actual way, or is this just pure feelings venting?

It's not like she said anything at work

She didn't? Admittedly, I keep the volume off and don't have an Xer account, so maybe I misunderstood what the whole thing was about, but it looked like she was at work?

That's because the guy who made the video tracked her down and confronted her at her workplace about her social media post. That was what this was about.

That's what I get for trying to follow Twitter news without an account or speaker, I guess. At least on Youtube the subtitles are pretty legible

She just kept saying “sir I’m at work” as in, let me just do my job please, she didn’t engage but the guy was calling her despicable and naming her from a Facebook screenshot he had

Ah, ok, I guess I misunderstood the link, then.

Ahem

I'm not going to cry about her prospects. Not when shit like this happened.

This wasn't corporations, this was driving a man to suicide through long-term decentralized harassment, condoned and encouraged by the Democrats.

Call me after one of these people is driven to suicide. Maybe I'll be more willing to listen then. Not now, but maybe then.

I feel like your logic is a bit twisted here. It would be one thing if the woman was part of the mob that drove that guy to suicide, but all we know about her is that she was loud about wishing Donald Trump's would-be assassin had been successful. Certainly an ugly sentiment, but completely disconnected from the behavior that drove that bar owner to suicide.

I'm actually a bit confused at you connecting these two separate things the way you did. Like, you're not sad about a random Democrat getting fired for comments she made outside of work, because some different Democrats harassed a guy until he committed suicide? How many Democrats do you think were actually involved in the decentralized harassment of that guy, or the culture of decentralized harassment in general?

According to Pew Research, 27% of US adults use Twitter/X, and 32% of Democrats report using Twitter. My guess is that only a portion of those Democrats are involved in decentralized harassment of any kind. Obviously, I would prefer if no one was involved in decentralized harassment, but it is a bit strange to turn off your empathy for people just because a small minority of Democrats do horrible shit. I bet a small minority of any group do horrible shit, and it would be terrible for everyone if we always held the larger groups they belonged to responsible for that.

Obviously, I would prefer if no one was involved in decentralized harassment, but it is a bit strange to turn off your empathy for people just because a small minority of Democrats do horrible shit. I bet a small minority of any group do horrible shit, and it would be terrible for everyone if we always held the larger groups they belonged to responsible for that.

It is not a small minority, despite you repeating it twice. It's pretty much every single elected politician with any national profile. It's every single major news outlet, even the supposedly Republican leaning outlets. "Small minority" is so far from reality that it's no wonder you can't understand me.

Oh yeah, because cycles of vengeance work so well for everyone involved. /s It's precisely that attitude that is fueling this in the first place, the notion that punishment is the only option, that we as a society and as individuals owe nothing to each other, that duty does not exist, that forgiveness is a sign of weakness. No. No. Forgiveness is a method of strength and leveraging the good traits of humanity. Moral high ground is a corrupt phrase because of the implication, but moral integrity is still a cornerstone for human society and greatness. It's okay to let ourselves emotionally indulge in a moment of "they had it coming," but it's incredibly dangerous as well as morally bankrupt to make it into a guiding principle. And online discourse is not the greatest place to start, but it's a place to start. Even here, we should sit up and treat people like people, because we can and because we should. We owe it to each other.

I would like to see the end of the first cycle, please, before I spend any time worrying about the next cycle.

moral integrity is still a cornerstone for human society and greatness

And what do you do to people who have no integrity? Do you drive them out of your lands? Kill them, or their children? Put them in camps to teach them integrity?

Democrats want to import people that have no integrity, and are not fit for this country. They want to do it at a rate that replaces me and mine. I'm not going to handicap myself with slave morality while my hometown is overrun by somali muslims and other assorted Africans who have no fucking business on this side of the Atlantic.

Even here, we should sit up and treat people like people, because we can and because we should.

People suck, didn't you know that? Hell is other people. I am treating her like a person, but I don't care about people. I care about friends and family and these people are neither. I care about my countrymen and I'm not talking about paper citizens or hyphenated Americans. I don't care about Muslims, at all, despite them being people.

So maybe one cycle of vengeance, first. Maybe when immigration stops altogether, and the foreign born fraction in this country falls below 5%, we can recalibrate. Maybe when every Trump-deranged journalist and politician is out of a job.

But not now. Not this moment.

I don’t care about people. I care about friends and family and these people are neither. I care about my countrymen

I can only hope that one day you see the shortsightedness of this view. It’s also incredibly ironic that you espouse such a myopic selfishness when the very country you praise was built on (and successful because of rather than in spite of) caring about other people beyond your immediate surrounds.

Like, John Adams defended British soldiers in court despite the unpopularity of it, and the the fact they really weren’t countryman and he certainly didn’t like them, because he recognized that a right to a lawyer and a fair defense was, long-term, an important thing we want to have. It seems you have yet to learn that wisdom.

It’s also incredibly ironic that you espouse such a myopic selfishness when the very country you praise was built on (and successful because of rather than in spite of) caring about other people beyond your immediate surrounds.

Don't lie to me about my own ancestors and my own people.

The country I praise was built on and successful because of people like my borderer ancestors who cross the Appalachians to settle Tennessee. They didn't care about other people beyond their immediate surrounds, and in fact when more people came to their immediate surrounds, they left Tennessee and kept going west, beating a trail for freedom across the wilderness.

That's my country, my history, my legacy. Not some fairy tale concocted in the post-war haze of propaganda about how America is an idea or a nation of immigrants. NO. It is a nation of conquerors, of settlers, of colonists and of pilgrims who shared a language and history among themselves. Not immigrants. Not diversity. And not by defending British soldiers.

In fact, the fact that he's defending British soldiers puts a lie to what you're saying. Those people were of the same race, spoke the same language, and were as brothers or cousins. Adams defended the Brits because he identified with them, and therefore he was defending his own right to representation.

It seems you have yet to learn that wisdom.

There's no wisdom in watching your family be replaced and their lands taken and repopulated by foreigners.

Lie? Lmao. Those British soldiers from the Boston Massacre in 1770 Boston at the time were representatives of what many (of course, not all - there was already conflict between patriot and loyalist groups even within Boston) felt to be a foreign occupation force. Hundreds of soldiers, brought in from overseas and not the colonies, were stationed in Boston for the explicit purpose of making sure the tax was collected for Britain's foreign wars, that was the whole point. The soldiers were not neighbors and nor was the tax for local purposes. "Countrymen" is always a bit of a slippery term, of course, and is easily abused. Most students of history are well aware of how fierce anti-immigrant feeling was toward immigrants from Germany or Ireland, for example, in very strong language decrying how bad and evil and Catholic and hard-drinking and foreign-culture they were... and now many of those same descendants are easily considered true-blooded Americans. Weird how the categories of hate conveniently change, eh? Catholics then, Muslims now, maybe? I'm exaggerating a bit, but you're the one telling yourself a historical fairy tale. I say this as someone with probably very similar ancestry/family history (though further West).

I should also add that the country wasn't set up by people from Tennessee. It was set up and allowed/enabled to grow by the earliest patriots who came up with a system of governance based on the same principles that resulted in that defense of those soldiers, it was explicitly a governmental model that made a point to expand legal protection - but also cultural grace - to those beyond your immediate neighbors, friends, and family.

Your own native Tennessee was a particular hotbed of anti-British sentiment from its early history, especially around the 1812 war where your politicians were among the leaders of the war hawks, which is hardly the attitude of former brothers or cousins, adding additional irony. Or later on, when a lot of Irish immigrants showed up in Tennessee, making up over 8% who were explicitly foreign-born of the Memphis population at one point per this interesting longer article about the Irish in Tennessee, just as one example. Of note: while later attitudes changed (largely due to Southern hatred of Blacks being greater), and on the whole the attitudes weren't as sharply anti-Irish as elsewhere in the United States, even the mayor of Memphis used to use language like calling them a "special abomination" and the 'scum of the city slums'.

Hmm, a little uncomfortable, huh?

I can only describe this sentiment as a serious game theory L for red tribe.

The rules of the online game currently are pretty poor, but it's not like they are actually immutable. And are the 'game theory stakes' even that high in the Twitterverse? Personally, I think no.

Would you sell your soul for a nickel? That's Twitter.

Life is more than game theory, despite nerds' obsession with trying to reduce everything to game theory.

One of my favorite blog posts:

Since I did, in fact, study game theory, I constructed a payoff matrix in my head before the game had started. I noted that I have little chance of acquiring the gummy bears, and also little desire to do so. My real matrix was as follows: [Spoiler redacted]

I would generally describe the attempts to frame this angry mob behavior as a productive and rational game theory strategy as "a serious game theory L for red tribe", yeah.

There are equilibria that are better for the collective out there but we probably do need tit-for-tat to get to them.

If woke cancellation tactics were already forms of disproportionate retribution against random unknown people, how is adopting the same tactic on the right going to result in a better equilibrium?

First of all, it doesn't end up hurting that many people directly, since only a small minority are going to get cancelled in the first place, and that makes it hard for people to take it seriously enough to do something about it. But second of all, I'm not actually sure there is much that can be done about it, short of passing laws that protect the jobs of randos, and making those laws have teeth. Like, plenty of my progressive friends IRL hate cancel culture and wokescolds as much as any right winger, but they don't have any power to stop the decentralized mobs calling for firings.

How does tit-for-tat even work with a large, decentralized collective anyways?

If woke cancellation tactics were already forms of disproportionate retribution against random unknown people, how is adopting the same tactic on the right going to result in a better equilibrium?

It decreases the overall acceptability of disproportionate retribution among people on the other side. It's the same reason why woke cancellation is a threat in the first place: it affects few people directly, but it intimidates a lot more.

I’ll say this about “moral high grounds” — outside of the moral society created by force to enforce those standards is a fool’s belief. If I’m in a society where stealing is normal, my forgiveness of a thief is not noble, it just makes me a mark. And my refusal to participate in vengeance when there are no legal systems to protect me simply means I’m a walking future crime victim along with any family members too weak to defend themselves from attack.

Duels were not common in the Middle Ages because those people had no moral integrity. They were probably more moral than we are. But in the context of a weak state where your ability to defend your honor in combat was needed for the protection of your clan, you didn’t have much choice. If you let people insult you without some sort of duels or whatever they didn’t see that as integrity, they saw it as cowardly and it was blood in the water.

Now where that leaves us in the current era is a bit murky to me. If we’re entering an era where getting people unemployed for political opinions is a norm, refusing to participate just means you are a walking future victim. And that goes for anything else here. If you aren’t going to fight back, it’s cowardice, not integrity which only make sense in a world where everyone agrees to the norm.

If I’m in a society where stealing is normal, my forgiveness of a thief is not noble, it just makes me a mark.

No, it's still noble. It also makes you a mark, but the one does not cancel out the other.

Forgiveness is a method of strength and leveraging the good traits of humanity.

I agree! But the concept is a lot more complicated than that and requires that the other person stop doing whatever it is you need to forgive them for. If I go to a concert and there's an active shooter murdering people in the crowd, preventing them from committing more murders is actually the moral course of action when compared to just forgiving them and letting them continue to shoot people.

That said in this specific case, while I think no cancelling would be ideal, I am not going to blame the people on the right for taking advantage of the new rules the left has set up until the left makes a serious effort to go back and dial down the temperature.

I mean, how would you even measure this? What would it take to say "okay the temperature is going in the right direction, thanks left", do you think you would be able to recognize it or is it purely a vibes check? Because crazies gonna crazy so there's always gonna be something out there. Is it like, LoTT losing tons of likes/subscribers/attention? Is it more about MSM cover for twitterati? Or would it be public disavowal by leading figures? This is an actual question that I'm curious your perspective on, what you feel would be most impactful/genuine step back and what that looks like.

Is it like, LoTT losing tons of likes/subscribers/attention? Is it more about MSM cover for twitterati? Or would it be public disavowal by leading figures?

It's weird, because you've answered your own question as far as I can tell. Each of these things is an indication of the temperature going down, though we could probably come up with more examples if we thought about it.

I mean, how would you even measure this? What would it take to say "okay the temperature is going in the right direction, thanks left", do you think you would be able to recognize it or is it purely a vibes check?

I legitimately haven't thought about this because I didn't actually think there was any way to stop it - I assumed it would just continue to get worse over time until there's an irreversible reduction in societal complexity (good luck cancelling someone whose job is stealing copper wiring from abandoned buildings). Any kind of positive steps in this direction would be extremely negative steps, personally, for anyone on the left who actually wanted to make them. Furthermore, it isn't actually like there's a central authority figure who could speak for the entire left and announce that the days of cancelling people are over - and even if there was, making that kind of announcement would doubtless cause them to lose all that influence and authority. Second, the trust required for such an announcement to be taken seriously or in good faith just isn't there, either. You'd have to come up with meaningful consequences for this kind of behaviour, along with a reliable and trustworthy enforcement body, because a system like this would absolutely get gamed the second it was implemented.

The only workable alternative that I can see would be legislation that mandates incredibly harsh penalties for the employers who actually fire people like this, but that has consequences and a lot of complications as well - a left-wing political group should absolutely be able to fire someone because they found out that he was actually a secret nazi doing his best to sabotage them from within.

Of course, my dream goal would be for the world to adopt my preferred political system (non-catholic environmentalist distributism), which would mean that cancellation can't really happen due to the altered structure of the economy. But that isn't going to happen anytime soon so it isn't really a realistic proposal.

I believe that it is morally necessary to keep hate out of one's heart. "Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you" is the correct path forward.

On the other hand, it does no good to pretend that they are not actually your enemies, or to imagine that this path is likely to result in net-positive material outcomes. It's how you secure your soul, not your life. Further, most people are not actually interested in securing their souls, so it is not a good framework for predicting behavior at a population-level.

You do not live in a world compatible with "the moral high ground" in any real sense. You can adopt the moral high ground regardless, but you should do so with the understanding that the likely consequences are net-negative for you from a materialist perspective. Certainly you should not expect the majority of those around you to adopt such a position.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”

This is an aside, but as an extremely imperfect Christian who is trying to be better, how do you do it? I don’t think I hate anyone, but I certainly have a hard time loving and praying for my enemy. I’ll take any advice you got.

how do you do it?

Poorly.

In my experience, the starting point is to confront the fact that when he says these things, he's talking to you, specifically, about your hatred, specifically. If your response is "yeah, this is a lesson that other people really need, they should listen to him", you have already missed the point.

The next step is to recognize the specific parts of your thinking that are hateful. Sin starts as a choice and becomes a habit, a reflex, an instinct. Resisting it means pushing the other way, to gain awareness of the sin as sin, usually in retrospect to start with, but with the goal of gaining awareness of the sin in the moment, and ultimately at the moment of choice. From "I've hated", to "I am hating", to "I am about to hate".

Once you have awareness of the choice, you have to choose righteousness. The best way I've found to approach that is to precommit and practice, to make your decision as much as possible in advance and in a position of strength, rather than trying to choose well in a moment of weakness. For me, hymns help a great deal; it is difficult to maintain hatred while singing It is well with my soul. The hymns do a good job of giving me a model to validate my thoughts against, an example of what a Christian's thoughts should be. In difficult moments, they can pour cold water on the embers in your mind. The ultimate goal is to make obedience habitual, instinctive, to make the right choice until it ceases, as much as possible, to be a choice, but simply part of what you are.

You have to remember and to internalize that you are not better than those you hate, that your hate is not righteous or justified in any way. You, like them, are a sinner. You, like them, were once under condemnation, and your debts are forgiven in exactly the way you are willing to forgive the debts of others. This is not optional, and Jesus is explicit that forgiveness is the standard by which your immortal soul will be judged.

You have to remember that no human is in control, and that there are no ends in this world to judge means by. This life is transient, all humans die, justice is fleeting at best, and suffering is and always will be the common lot of all humans on this Earth. There is no progress, there is no arc of history, there is no glorious victory to be won in any meaningful sense in this life. It does not seem to me that this view demands pacifism, but it does demand a cold, hard realism on what is actually achievable from conflict, an understanding that conflict has far less upside than the world may recognize, and that we should be far more wary of it than the world would think. If your side wins, that fact alone means nothing in the grand scheme of things. If your side loses, that fact alone likewise means nothing. If God's design hinges on some outcome, you have no idea what that outcome is or why it is necessary, and certainly no reason to believe that it coincides neatly with your worldly preferences for ease or glory or the defeat of your enemies. Maybe it serves his purpose for you and all you know and love to die in pain and horror and darkness. It was so for the Japanese Christians, and for many others, and he has promised to wipe the tears from every eye.

The ingrained instincts of the world and of one's own nature fight and scream against every part of this process. It is not easy, and you will regularly fail, but the point is to repent and keep trying. There will be no shortage of opportunities.

I find myself thinking of this comment often. I am having a hard time not being happy about the misfortunes of the people I consider “my enemies” and the “bad guys.” I know it’s wrong, and I catch my thinking, but it comes so naturally, almost like an instinct.

I also struggle with my temper. I’m not hot tempered, per se, but I get aggravated easily and have a hard time controlling it.

Finally, I am having a hard time praying and easing Scripture daily. I am attempting to pray the Daily Office but finding the time and effort is hard.

Sorry, I really only meant to post the first paragraph, but it turned into me whining and venting.

This is months after you wrote this and I was not the intended audience, but after re-seeing this by chance of you linking it in another post I want to leave my regards to it. There is hard-earned wisdom in this that speak to me. It has been an aid in resisting certain mindsets I am not immune from, and I would be a lesser person without it at times, which is to say I would be a better person if I remembered it more often.

Thank you for writing it, and I hope you keep linking back to it in the future.

This is amazing and very insightful. I think you hit the nail on the head with the idea of being aware of the choice to sin just before it happens, so you can address it. Thank you.

My take for many years now has been "turn the other cheek" in personal matters, but don't allow the wicked to cause harm unabated to others. Forgiving others their trespasses against me, even seven times seventy times, does not mean allowing their trespasses against other innocent people to go unopposed.

I can only comment that, in my own personal experience and in observation of numerous others, it is both very easy and very attractive to launder one's own hatred into faux-altruism. I know that I wish to do this, and so I know I cannot trust such convenient constructions. Especially when the forgiveness is nebulous, and the "righteous anger" is focused and specific.

I've certainly caught myself doing that more times than I care to admit. It's definitely something more aspirational than what I am actually capable of consistently living up to.

Damn the comments on the WaPo post linked to in the tweet are a different level of unhinged. If you sort by most liked you get stuff like:

His lawyers are trying desperately to spin what's crystal clear to anyone not a member of the death cult: Another murderous white supremacist took the cowardly way out.


The story leaves out how Mr. Gardner was a well known racist.

So ....thoughts and prayers.... ...


I saw a pic of him online in his Trump-Pence shirt. I'm shocked....... Like most Trump-Pence enthusiasts, he was actually eager to shoot a black person. Be careful what you wish for, cowboy.

Amazing how this sort of stuff was seen as OK, nay supported by the zeitgeist, just 4 short years ago back in 2020. There's no way it would fly today (I'd expect all three of these to be swiftly deleted by the WaPo moderators if the story was being told today) and even reading them gives me a certain level of shock. I guess this was what the residents of Salem felt in the years after the witch trials. The past is a different country, as they say...

Not a call to pick a side particularly, more an attempt to think about cultural dynamics (if possible) before they occur. My model of cultural norms is a sort of "cultural peace" model, where people agree to lay down their metaphorical arms and stop fighting the culture war because it's become troublesome for both sides. (The alternative model of cultural peace seems to be that one side triumphs decisively.)

If the optimal goal is strong cultural free-speech norms, and we take for granted that the prior norm was that "cancellation" was primarily an attack wielded by the left against the right (debatable!) and that the left was not culturally successful at keeping their "own side" from launching cancellation attacks, then it seems like game theory suggests that to achieve the optimal goal one would want

  1. Right wingers successfully canceling left wingers
  2. Other right wingers making a principled stand against cancelations in general

Group #1 is needed to make "the left" realize there is a good pragmatic reason to have a principled pro-free-speech stance (presumably since right-wingers have been canceled by left-wingers, they already have good pragmatic incentives for such a norm).

Group #2 is needed to team up with those on "the left" persuaded by Group #1 to write a new cultural peace treaty and cement the pro-free-speech norms across partisan lines.

The fail mode of this on the one side is that one side is very principled and the other side never has to learn principles because they never have any motivation to do so. However, I think the fail mode on the other side (in the theory that I postulate above) is that there will be a failure to coordinate a new peace and instead of reducing cancellations culturally we double them and the culture war heat ticks up a notch.

(This is all a brutal oversimplification and I sort of hate typing something as broadly sweeping as "right/left wingers.")

It also might be worth pointing out that I suppose one could make a principled difference between speech that calls for political violence and speech that...doesn't. There's definitely a slippery slope here (should Marxists be canceled because of their beliefs? what about libertarians?) but it seems like a culture could agree to draw the line at public calls for violence aimed at specific people.

I don’t relish this but I think it needs to be done. “Cancel culture” is still the setup to a joke in most leftist circles I frequent. Until we get mass society-wide incidents of leopards eating faces, we won’t be able to meaningfully converge on anti- face-eating measures.

Believing that the social forces at play can be leashed by cancelling a few people on twitter belies a surprising level of optimism. The violence is getting worse. The trajectory has not altered, and sporadic cancelations certainly aren't going to do the job at this late date.

My heart has been turned to stone. No mercy, not before victory.

I still very much believe in freedom of speech. I also believe it requires peace and unchallenged sovereign authority to be enacted.

As always: My rules fairly > Your rules fairly > Your rules unfairly

Twitter poster QuasLacrimas has, I believe, the right take:

Since everyone seems to have a take: if leftist poors can openly call for assassinations but all other poors can get fired for very milquetoast observations, it creates the impression leftism is legally mandatory. Thus leftist poors must be persecuted to protect the others, however this is a dishonorable job and I suggest anyone with self-respect leave hunting cashiers and the like to bottom-feeding grifters who will gladly smear themselves in muck for attention.(2/2)

I think I prefer Alexandros' Marinos' take:

Guys, I'm not saying Density is a good person. I'm saying he should be allowed to work as a cashier at Home Depot.

yeah his current audience trajectory points to him scrounging at home depot any day now, only 14k viewers while he does incredibly boring shit.

this whole conversation about destiny and free speech is so illuminating to me. The idea that there are no bad tactics just bad targets seems to be much more widespread and bipartisan than i had initially assumed.

I might be missing something, but I don't quite see how poking fun at a guy while I'm defending a person that just lost their job is indicative of "no bad tactics, only bad targets".

im talking about the tweet you posted, not you

I believe he's doing the exact same thing I described.

real answer: im talking about the broader discussion around the streamer in question and how he is being "cancelled" by rightoids for saying mean things.

fun answer: that streamer pissed a bunch of people off by poking fun at a guy that just so happened to be dead

It's still not clear to me what exactly you want to discuss here. I'm not rightoids, and neither is the man I quoted. I am, at most, a single rightoid, and Marino's isn't even that, so your response feels neither here nor there.

And the problem with accusations of hypocrisy is that they go more than one way. I don't recall Destiny and his fans being free speech absolutists, and given his take on an innocent man that was shot dead, I'm having a hard time believing his reaction to me getting cancelled would be any more sympathetic. So why should anyone bother defending him?

More comments

Trample a norm long enough, and it stops being a norm. Enforce a rule long enough, and it becomes a norm. "your rules applied fairly" was a meme back in 2014. "This will be bad if it doesn't change" was said for a decade, and it didn't change. So now we get "this will be bad".

"its all so tiresome" was a meme back then too. Not knocking the republicans who are getting their licks in right now, turnabout is fair play. That said im not sure that we have trampled a norm any more than we have proven that given the opportunity some people will, and always would, pillory their political opponents. The new thing is that the opportunities are more plentiful if you look hard enough and there are more people visible to either parties twitter inquisitioners. Its not like home depot lady is the first person the right has found that even the left cant defend.

This is my feeling as well. This isn't a good thing, and in a perfect society it would never happen to anyone. We don't live in a perfect society, though, and right now the left wing has no incentive to compromise on cancel culture. They need to be given that incentive if they're going to be persuaded to stop. You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, and you can't negotiate a peace treaty if you never win any battles.


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