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Scott has an excellent new article that'll likely enrage at least a few people here: Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance
Last week, the Libs of Tiktok successfully cancelled a random lady from Home Depot who called for the assassination of Trump. This prompted a lot of triumphalism from the right: "the time is finally here, now WE get to be the cancellers" they seemed to cheer.
There was a discussion on the Motte, and while there were some voices calling for restraint, many commenters demanded blood from the left. The real question was how much blood should be taken, with most responses landing somewhere between "massive" and "infinity". Some quotes include
"So this lady losing her job, if she goes into despair, if she becomes homeless, if she kills herself... So what?" (upvoted at over a 3:1 margin)
From the same post as the above, "I don't give one flying fuck that these people are now getting served their own dog food."
"My heart has been turned to stone. No mercy, not before victory."
"I'm not going to cry about her prospects." ... "Call me after one of these people is driven to suicide."
"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."
Scott's article gives 9 reasons why cheering for blood like this might not be the best strategy. They include:
Ban or not, I stand by everything I said. (As the great rhetorician Adolf Hitler proves (regardless of what you think about his politics), sometimes you must breathe fire and brimstone to communicate the righteous fury necessary to get your point across, and I'll take the upvotes as a sign that I made that point in a rhetorically effective way that induced the intended response in most readers. With that said and my prior point made, I will take a different approach in this post.)
Now I think it's also clearly worth pointing out that, even if you advocate for (as I'm seeing all over this subthread) the "This weaponization of someone's expressions/speech/beliefs to deprive him of employment/civil status of basic respect/social media accounts/etc. is a terrible thing and should be off the table for all sides." position (which I actually happen to agree in large part would be the rule of an ideal society, at least in regards to working as a cashier at Home Depot and not as a teacher or in a high-profile government position, which is also why I take the practical position on the necessity of retaliating now that I do, as I'll explain), then you are still simply being rather naive if you think the present right-wing retaliation is a bad outcome/choice in regards to achieving your long-term goal.
Do you know what the best way is to get a child to stop pinching you, thus ensuring no pinching for everybody? Pinch him back just as hard (if not slightly harder), so he understands how it feels (and the precarious dynamics of getting into a pinching fight). No pinchy child has ever thought, "Well I've been pinching this adult all day and he's kindly not retaliated every time even when he could have, so I guess I should just stop pinching him forever. Peace has been achieved for our time."
That is, even if what you really want is the end of both tits and tats forever and entirely, you can rest assured that you are not going to get that through insisting that tits ("tit" being the part of the phrase "tit for tat" that I am interpreting as the retaliatory action, based on the phrase "eye for an eye") be banned. All you're going to get from that is even more confident tats all the time, increasing in frequency (which is exactly what we've experienced with politically-motivated firings/retaliation/"cancellations"/"deplatformings" etc. for the past 10 years proportional to the right's inability (and it's mostly been unable) to respond in kind), which is the absolute worst outcome. Going based off of the old formulation about "rules applied fairly" etc.:
No tits or tats (peace) > Tits and tats applied evenly (war, affecting both sides in an even/fair fashion, so not a massacre) > Only tats (massacre for one side only without any possibility of retribution for them)
Point is, magnanimous inaction is rarely if ever a winning strategy. Your serial killer may appreciate you generously not resisting, but that's neither going to do anything for you nor make society any safer from murder.
So if you think (or pretend) you're trying to achieve the end of both tits and tats evenly, but your practical suggestion to achieve that is just to let the tatters run wild without response because goodness deary it would be so undignified and hypocritical for the titters to tit after complaining so much about the tatters and their tats, then I can only see you as either a disingenuous undercover tatter trying to sabotage the titters for your own personal ends, someone who smugly (and wrongly) believes himself to be above all conflict in all cases (until it comes to their doorstep, as it often does), or again simply very naive and suffering from sloppy, short-term thinking (as opposed to being "principled").
Going based on the above, I absolutely resent and reject the notion of @FiveHourMarathon below that those advocating for retaliation in this case are therefore not "principled libertarians". If "principled libertarians" had managed to overthrow the Soviet Union, that would not mean that they would have immediately had to apply the NAP to Joseph Stalin the moment they had him on the ropes for a bit or supposedly suddenly lose their principles. It does not mean that after you get punched in the face you must out of principle strictly avoid punching back because "After all, my right to swing my fist stops where their nose begins."
Principled libertarianism is not (or at least doesn't have to be) absolute "Turn the other cheek." Tibetan-monks-praying-for-the-souls-of-their-killers-while-CCP-soldiers-gun-them-down absolute non-violence. (Though I personally am not super attached dogmatically to libertarian(ism) as a philosophy/identifier, even if I do identify with it somewhat, the notion that reasonable retaliation is incompatible with it is at a minimum essentially a de facto rejection of the existence of contracts with penalties (as any contract must have, explicitly or implicitly, if its performance is to be enforced and its violation sanctioned) for one, which is basically the whole foundation of the ideology. So that's why I chose to highlight specifically that attacking people over supporting retaliation here on alleged libertarian grounds is utterly absurd.)
I'll echo the post below of @FarmReadyElephants (which I suggest everybody also read) too and quote the most important line from it:
[Note that he writes, contrarily to me, interpreting the initial action as the "tit" and the retaliatory action as the "tat", whereas again, after considering the phrase "eye for an eye", I decided that the initial action should actually be the "tat" and the retaliatory action the "tit". I tried asking an AI about this, and it could not tell me whether there was a consensus about whether or not the tit or the tat is universally intended to come first, nor could I find anything about the query on basically useless modern search engines. But I prefer to ally with the tits (which is not to say women necessarily), so that's how I wrote it.]
And he's entirely correct. Even going based on what I said above, you must remember as he points out that this is still mostly a massacre of tats (or tits in his formulation) with only the briefest respite of tits (or tats in his formulation) thus far.
So I just don't get the anti-retaliation side at all. I just don't. Do you apply this logic to other aspects of your lives?
If you see Little Timmy, who is near his lowest because he has cancer (that he is recovering from... maybe), get his ass beat by Brad on the playground every day, and then one day some unique circumstance happens, say Brad breaks his arm playing football and it's in a sling, and Little Timmy briefly gets the upper hand and gives the bully a small taste of his own medicine, you'd really start indignantly lecturing him about how hypocritical and unprincipled it is that he went after Brad in his time of weakness after all of the complaining he's done about his own present weakness being exploited? That it proves that Little Timmy was always just as in favor of violent confrontation as Brad is? Even when there's a very good chance that the moment Brad recovers the (attempted, likely successful) ass-beatings for Little Timmy are only going to intensify, that it's not any sort of a permanent victory?
He doesn't deserve to celebrate or luxuriate in his one respite/triumph in a long time at all? He should have just ran out the clock on his brief moment of strength by peacefully meditating on how evil and inconsistent with his prior expressed non-violent principles it would be to take advantage of the circumstances by having poor ol' Brad be the injured party this time instead? (I'm not just slinging around rhetorical questions, but genuinely asking what the general principles on retaliation should be here.)
"But he didn't just go after Brad directly! He also attacked Sarah, who never directly touched him to my knowledge. As far as we know, all she ever did was subscribe to the mutual ideologies of Bradism and anti-Timmyism, cheer on Brad beating up Timmy every day in the background, and post on social media about how disappointed she was that Timmy's mom [who is seen by Little Timmy as his primary defender, as she's been advocating for the obviously unfairly biased teachers/administration to stop being so clearly prejudiced against him and punish Brad for his own bad behavior] didn't die in the car accident she had the day before. She's totally irrelevant, a minuscule fish in the larger pond of the overall affair. Even if you think retaliating against Brad or some more prominent members of his bully posse like Brock is understandable, going after innocent little Sarah is nothing more than pure sadism!" This meanwhile, IMO, is basically the equivalent of defending that cashier at Home Depot and others like her specifically. (No I'm not saying that any of the people defending her formulated their arguments exactly as I did or trying to put words directly into their mouths; the quote is just how I characterize their position myself, simply rephrased.)
Even Scotty engages in what I can only see as absolutely facile logic here. Observe this (what I would characterize as) nonsense:
"You admit that being pinched by this annoying child has made you think it might be a good idea to pinch him back; so you admit that being pinched hasn't even taught you as an adult that pinching a child is wrong; so what makes you think that a child being on the receiving end of a pinch is going to teach him anything!?"
Zero acknowledgment of the difference between unprovoked aggression and responding to unprovoked aggression already in progress. This is supposed to be one of our top rationalist game theory gurus? Give me a break. (I'm not even going to bother dissecting the rest of the article, because it is similarly flawed from top to bottom, as most modern barely-worthy-of-engagement Scotty (ever since he let himself be fully chastity caged by Ozy and co., with Alexandros Marinos showing him to be a fraud being the final nail in the coffin) writings are.
If there is a world where tatters (absolutely convinced of the righteousness of their tats in this case as we must be reminded) generally choose to put their tats away without the effective exhibition of tits creating a credible threat of more tits in return, then I'd like to see it, but I haven't yet. And it is precisely those like the Home Depot cashier who cheer on the tatters and their tats that gave them their perception of absolute imprimatur in the first place. How can you address a behavior without addressing such a deeply-rooted cause of it? If you deal in tats, whether by dishing them out or cheering them on, then you must expect an imminent tit to the face (or to the job in these cases). That's the only way to incentivize fair behavior.
tl;dr: By my reckoning, whether you simply like tits or even if you seek an eventual future without them (and tats), the only productive path for either side at the moment that I can see is to free the tits. Get your tits out boys. Otherwise you're committing a mistake much like someone with a cockroach infestation focusing their energy instead on killing the house centipedes chowing down on them.
...
So you're not a libertarian, but you feel resentful that you've been labeled as less than a principled libertarian. No doubt you'll also resent not being called an observant Muslim, or an implication that you had a less-than-stellar academic record at the University of Padua.
So let's address one of your examples. I honestly lost a track of who deserved how much tat so I'm just gonna stick with the first one.
This assumes that your opponents are the children, while you picture yourself as the adult. This strikes me as wishful thinking. At best, these are two co-equal parties, neither of which has strict escalation dominance. At worst, this scenario is the reverse: a child, tired of being spanked, sees that just this once, his father has bent over to pick something up, and now he has the chance to spank his father and see how he feels getting spanked for a change! Do you think that any father, spanking a child he found to be acting out, has been hit back by the child and thought "Now I understand how it feels, I guess I should stop spanking him, peace has been achieved in our time."
Because this isn't a permanent turning of the tables, it is a momentary advantage to the right. For completely random reasons, for this moment, the right has a limited power to hit back. What scalps have they taken in the process? Not nearly enough to deter their enemies, but enough to lose the moral high ground in the eyes of people who think it is acceptable to make any kind of joke you please. I'm cancellable either way for a party with sufficient surveillance of my life: I've made nigger jokes and I've made jokes about politicians deserving death. Hell, I've made serious philosophical arguments about trans people and justifying the assassination of politicians, call the thought police! I may not be the perfect Libertarian, but I am going to note how people behave.
When the child hits his father, he won't cause his father to change his mind about spankings. He won't inflict enough pain on his father that his father will be deterred from hitting him in the future. What he will do is convince onlookers that his father was probably correct to hit him, even retroactively, because clearly a kid that would hit his parent is acting out and needs to be put in line.
Well, sure, if you intentionally cut out the part where I say I do somewhat identify with libertarianism regardless (in that I by no means discount the abundant importance of liberty as a crucial value), even if I don't consider myself an absolute dogmatist (though realistically I'm probably still more libertarian than much if not most of the US population), then I guess my words do sound somewhat stupid, don't they? I'm not a dogmatic "animal rights" supporter either, but yeah I'd probably chafe as well if you suggested that my viewpoints mean that I'm not generally a principled opponent of random dog slayings too. (But yes, if left-wingers came specifically at right-wingers' dogs, part of the solution would be...)
And in fact, though I'm certainly not a communist to any degree, I would still object if you suggested that "principled communists" should oppose something for spurious reasons that have nothing to do with communism. That's just called defending reason.
In any case I will note for the record that other than trying to snark at me with a "gotcha" about me not wanting to box myself in as whatever your definition of "principled libertarian" is (which you probably aren't either for many definitions I could come up with, as I'll demonstrate below), you did nothing to challenge my claim that retaliation is perfectly compatible with and in fact necessary in libertarianism.
It's rather humorous that you ask this as if it's inconceivable, because in a more accurate (as an analogy) and only very slightly tweaked formulation of your scenario, the answer is absolutely... yes! Many physically abusive parents have definitely been chastened by their children showing them that they are grown enough to now beat the parent's ass instead. It's as common of an anecdote as it is a media trope, the 13-17 year old boy who gives his rough stepdad his first black eye to fiercely let him know that he's never going to hurt him or mom again.
Now you may protest that you were talking about presumably justified spankings (assuming spanking can be justified, as much research on childhood discipline says it can't) here, not physical abuse, but since the referent in the analogy is leftist "cancellation" (which I believe even your own argument admits is unwarranted), my change for it to be physical abuse instead of mere spanking (which would be more akin to some neutral, order-keeping activity of an official authority like a cop or judge) is more accurate to the real case the analogy references. (It's worth nothing that in the real scenario there is also nothing analogous to the right coming after the left merely because it happened to come across themm innocently bent over (unlike the innocent gamers who really were doing not much other than enjoying their preferred medium when leftists attacked them in one of the earliest shots of the culture war, Gamergate) as opposed to, you know, openly cheering on the assassination of their current political leader...)
So yes, if you're a child who is unfairly physically abused a parent, whether it's in the ostensible form of spankings or not, you should absolutely, definitely beat that abusive parent's ass in return as soon as reasonable to try to deter them into stopping. And I certainly question the morality of anyone who is against that statement on a moral level (as opposed to saying on a tactical level that it's not a wise time for it yet).
Along the lines of my parentheses, you might further object to this that the right cannot be sure that it has truly become a big enough child to hold off its parent for good. A little temporary retribution now, no matter how satisfying, might just lead to a bigger, angrier ass whoopin' from daddy later, right? But that is merely a question of tactics, not ethics. Who is the parent, who is the child, and if the child has become large enough to challenge the parent-- that is all still to be decided. Yet it's a well-known fact of martial strategy that you can lose a war by being too passive and not taking advantage of a situation just as much as you can lose it by being too eager to take advantage of one. Evaluating the risk/reward, I think the opportunity here is worthwhile. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but again that's not a moral judgment.
Again, I completely question not only the morality but in fact the "principled libertarian" bona fides (given the inherently hierarchical and coercive nature of parental authority over children, though I won't be as much of a shit (yet) as to question you if you're allowed to consider yourself a "principled libertarian" if you're not against it) of anyone who sees a child driven to physical violence against their own parent and automatically assumes the child is 100% in the wrong without appropriate additional context.
Yes, we've apparently lost the "moral high ground" in the eyes of "principled libertarians" who, in my reckoning, seem to think something at least like the equivalent of that you should be allowed to physically assault your kids with impunity and them fighting back at all is merely automatic proof that they deserved it in the first place (which I think is a reasonably fair interpretation of your words in the quote above the most recent). Somehow I think we'll live.
Well, I guess we'll see what happens then. One set of facts about the world will turn out to be correct, but not for years.
Okay, great, as long as you're not sticking to your story that retaliation is incompatible with any notion of libertarianism. Also don't automatically assume the child is wrong in conflicts between child and parent; some parents are legitimately abusive.
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It is probably also worth pointing out that, for males, the ability and willingness to do this (to parental figures or to authority more generally) is the ultimate dividing line between child (who can't and aren't) and adult (who can and will).
For females, this dividing line comes when they can successfully convince an adult male to exercise that capacity for violence on their behalf.
If your opponent has more capacity for violence than you it will result in your subhumanization/demotion to child (relative to the more powerful) 100% of the time given infinite time, though whether anyone happens to care is another question entirely.
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