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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   40171 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Once again, someone of Indian descent is on the cusp of power in the West (well Indian and black in this case). Are there any theories why, among Asians, Indians in the West so often end up in leadership positions (especially in the corporate world), and East Asians don't?

I can only imagine that whatever the sauce is, adding black genes to mix might quicken it.

Edit: Also, lol at Elon's lame attack on her on Twitter. They're afraid.

  • -30

Also, lol at Elon's lame attack on her on Twitter. They're afraid.

I know they’ll figure it out eventually but watching in real time as rightoids try to figure out how to attack Kamala is pretty funny.

In the spirit of equal-opportunity sneering, it was cringy how everyone’s bye Biden tweets all used the word “consequential” like someone must have directed them to.

People are throwing every kind of insult at Kamala to see what sticks. Many are very sexist and very racist, which I imagine would push any non-misogynistic, non-racist moderate away from voting Republican. It's all pretty vile, but workshopping takes time. I'm sure Trump will eventually come up with something.

With Kamala as the Democratic nominee, Trump will have to pivot in his rhetoric. He was already pretty mellow in his debate with Biden, at least compared to his usual self. The assassination attempt reportedly mellowed him out even further. His RNC speech had to be scrapped and re-written with unity as the central theme.

But Trump's platform of unity lasted only a week. I believe that unity is no longer a working, winning strategy now that Biden is gone.

People are throwing every kind of insult at Kamala to see what sticks.

Cacklin' Kamala has a certain ring to it, don't you think? Isn't sexist or racist either which is another plus.

Cacklin' Kamala

High Fiber breakfast cereal that makes a pleasing sound when milk is added.

Geared towards children 5 - 10 with health conscious parents. Not a premium brand, but not bottom shelf. Sold next to Kix and Honey Bunches of Oats.

Eh. It just doesn't sting for me. What, she laughs too much? The best anti-Kamala taunt was the throw in I've seen on bumper stickers and flags: Joe and the Ho Have Got to Go.

I'm sure once Trump puts his mind to it he'll come up with something. Ron DeSanctimonious was still pretty good.

Isn't sexist or racist either

"Cackling" carries connotations of femininity (it generally is not used to describe a man's laughter), so it could be considered sexist. (I can't think of a masculine counterpart word.)

"Guffawing" is a more masculine-coded often-negative connotation word for laughing, though not exclusively masculine nor always negative. Also when negative it connotes boorishness, not bitchiness or supernatural evil.

Many are very sexist and very racist, which I imagine would push any non-misogynistic, non-racist moderate away from voting Republican.

I think the effect will be lower than expected. People are intelligent enough to distinguish between sexism and misogyny and vitriol towards specific person even if they do performative pearl clutch.

I dunno,I follow some spicy people on twitter and the most risable things I've heard is that she's an Affirmative Action VP or that she slept her way into politics neither of which are new.

How much ammo does one need to summon to crush a wounded, pathetic little duckling?

I respect the possibility that she may WOW me with a pivot to a smart, competent, and incisive campaign. If only these were qualities she had ever managed to exhibit or sustain beyond a 30-second edit. This meme you're pushing that "Repubs are scrambling to figure out an attack on Kamala" is one of the most fanciful things I've read in this last week, as if she hasn't been repeatedly trotted out as a pinata to playfully hit with a stick in between more serious concerns regarding Joe Biden and the Blob. She is known to her opponents, and they make hay out of her every day.

The Trump campaign should give her a cursory acknowledgment as the Dem nominee, and then go back to hammering the Biden admin while pretending she's not even in the room.

How much ammo does one need to summon to crush a wounded, pathetic little duckling?

On the one hand, I see this sort of thing in some quarters. Like Neema Parvini declaring that Kamala is a "sacrificial lamb" intended to lose to Trump, and that this whole election proves his thesis about how our elites are "putting the woke away" and actively pursuing Trump's return as "right-wing containment" and a pivot to rebuilding America's force-projection capacity to maintain the global American empire.

On the other hand, I encounter others arguing that this guarantees Trump's defeat, because the only candidate he could even possibly defeat was Biden, and he's utterly doomed against literally anyone else. Further, many of these argue that this is Good, Actually — not because they support Dem policies (far from it), but because they "want to see Trump supporters cry" and think that the sooner "this MAGA shit dies" the better, to make way for their preferred alternative.

And then you have the Dreaded Jim predicting that "Kamala gets one hundred and twenty million votes at three in the morning after all voting centres have been locked down and Republican scrutineers expelled."

(And don't get me started on the opinions about Vance — he's a based neoreactionary, he's an "anti-MAGA" Republican establishment type, he's a race traitor, he's a CIA/Palantir plant intended to bring about digital passports and a central bank digital currency, he's secretly gay…)

I'm really not sure who — if anyone — has the right of it.

Has the present tumult weakened your confidence that Blues have already won and Reds should despair?

No, not really. The only question is whether they win by using Trump as "containment" — giving Reds another meaningless "win", to defuse tension and slow the proverbial frog-boiling, that translates to no actual rightward movement due to the permanent bureaucracy being fully insulated from election outcomes (Project 2025 is utterly doomed); by using deep-cover CIA Vance to get the GOP back on script as the Washington Generals outer party jobbers; or by announcing Kamala as the winner with over 100 million votes in the most-safester-and-securester election ever, and these absolutely-not-fake official results are unquestionable — literally unquestionable because anyone engaged in "election denial" is officially a domestic terrorist and will be arrested by the FBI forthwith; or some other horror scenario.

Every battleground but one, every mode of conflict between the tribes but one, inherently favors the left. There is only one field of battle where the right has a relative, comparative advantage, and that's the actual field of battle. Any other method, we're guaranteed to lose. And as I've said to you before, I still think that — thanks to the nature of modern military technology and to our inability to organize (because anyone who so much as mentions "organizing" is a Fed) — we almost-certainly lose that one too.

So yes, we're still doomed. Come back to me after you've won a civil war, and then I'll have likely changed my mind.

Except when posting about his companies' achievements, Elon Musk is usually lame on Twitter.

Politics is a profession where only the paranoid survive, so I am sure Team Trump are going to respond in ways which could be spun as "They're afraid" - even if all they are "afraid" of is that Trump has gone from a 80% favourite to a 75% one. Musk will respond as shitposter-in-chief and will be pretty lame for the usual reasons.

One of the less talked about outcomes of Musk buying twitter is the predictable revelation that he's sort of a dweeby edgelord. Some of the things he retweets are absolutely perfect mappings to "the weird IT guys have been passing around this meme all week. eye roll"

I think he has just enough self-awareness to catch this much of the time. One of his ticks is a retweet with a single word comment - "true", "this","wow" etc. But other times he goes full 'sperg. The one this week was him retweeting the "AI fashion show" that included (among the Pope, Nancy Pelosi, and Kim Jong Un) an AI Elon in a weird speedo quickly followed by a suit of armor.

But keen observes will see that the shtick has been going on for some time. Elon has learned to deploy a simulacra of high end verbal intelligence - dramatic pauses, quickened speech patterns with some jargon thrown in, and verbal intonations that make you think he's bestowing something deep upon you. If Musk and Aaron Sorkin ever team up on a show, I will pen my suicide note to it.

Indians have been plugged into the Anglosphere & Western Democracy for centuries at this point, plus there's a level of gamesmanship that comes from sheer population scrabbling for limited resources that seems to outstrip Western equivalents.

Can't tell you about mixed indians or epigenetic causes, but specifically she is very much down for corruption and sex for favors.

That’s the kind of hot take which requires evidence.

You’ve been warned half a dozen times for lazy, snide culture warring. One day ban this time.

"Kamala kickstarted her career by engaging in sex-for-favours (ie. corruption) with Willie Brown" is a hot-take?

Maybe I’m misreading Fistfullofcrows, but I didn’t understand him to be connecting Kamala’s sexual past with her Indian heritage, just saying that she, specifically, ended up in a leadership position due to her past sexual activities.

Nah, that’s pretty defensible.

OP did not bother being so specific.

What is this, Culture War for ants babies? I think we should be allowed to assume a certain level of common knowledge, else posting gets pretty cumbersome.

He's just providing a tiny sample of how the media is going to run this campaign. One of my favorite mods for doing that so reliably.
Get ready to hear the word "malinformation" until you want to scream.

Well, I for one didn't know (and still don't, since nobody's spoonfeeding)...but then again, I can live with not getting all the implications about US insider baseball.

Willie Brown is a titan of California state politics. Back when Kamala was young she was decent looking. Proof for those in shock she was ever passable. She was also abandoned by her father as a young child. Willie Brown was a much older patronizing man to her.

He gave her no-effort high-paying political sinecures. And advocated for her advancement to higher office in a state in which merely being the Democratic anointed candidate near-guarantees election.

She gave him something else in return.

The short version is what I just said -- she had an affair with him while he was mayor of SF, at the same time landing pretty good jobs under his control/with his support.

Anyways the point is not that everyone should know this, but that Crows' statement was totally true, and banning him for not typing enough background seems out of line.

If he actually died surely he would have also ‘resigned’ as president for Kamala?

Can a president resign via letter on Twitter? Sure, they can announce their intention to resign, but there are formal constitutional requirements to actually resign that a dead Biden would be unable to fulfill.

Per the Nixon precedent, it requires a letter to the Secretary of State, on which someone willing to run this conspiracy would happily forge Biden's signature. (It isn't deliberate, but it is useful the SoS has probably seen more wet-ink Presidential signatures than anyone else except the National Archivist because they countersign documents that require sealing). You can publish the letter on Twitter, but it isn't effective until someone couriers the wet-ink original to Blinken's office. If Blinken isn't on board with the conspiracy and refuses the letter until Biden authenticates it in person, then you probably didn't have enough support to pull it off to begin with.

What would there be for the Dems to gain for hiding Biden's death?

I'm reminded of the time when Kate Middleton went on an extended media hiatus and the odd behavior by the British royals around it led to a host of conspiracy theories, ranging from relatively benign "they're divorced" to the raving ones like "They've harvested her for organs to keep King Charles alive". Or when Putin was absent from publicity for some time in late 2022 and there was fervent speculation that he had died and there was a power struggle in Kremlin. In both cases the supposedly dead party eventually turned up and the speculators, well, at least didn't come out looking so good afterwards.

Of course it is entirely possibly that it does turn out that Biden has died or been seriously incapacitated by Covid, but again, why wouldn't they just come right out with it to get sympathy points and make Kamala's road to nomination even easier?

You're right that it's irrational, but it's not unthinkable coming from a severely dysfunctional organisation where there are very strong incentives to lie.

If Biden is dead then the Democrats don’t have a tie breaker vote in the Senate until a new VP is confirmed.

What would there be for the Dems to gain for hiding Biden's death?

Who knows. Maybe they are so addicted to lying, it's so much their first and most natural impulse, that they do it even when it serves no purpose what so ever. This has been shown to be true for Hillary Clinton and all the made up stories she tells, Biden was a habitual liar his entire political career and it tanked his Presidential run in the 80's, Kamala has been caught plagiarizing stories and adopting them as her own. I was listening to Dan Carlin, one of the Supernova in the East episodes I think, and he mentions Roosevelt had a reputation as "a man who would never tell the truth when a lie would serve him just as well" or something to that effect.

It may be time to consider that most politicians are just congenital liars.

I think Kamala would rather campaign as an incumbent, even an unpopular one, rather than as a veep.

What would there be for the Dems to gain for hiding Biden's death?

His staff / family delegating power to their allies before the jig is up, perhaps?

Possibly to prevent a new VP that might be forced upon her by the Congress, so she can run with whoever she wants?

Well sure but that doesn't affect the ticket, just the last few months of the current administration.

Kamala gets to appoint her own VP if Biden resigns/gets 25th Amendmented. It's subject to congressional approval but it's still her nomination.

Are there any theories why, among Asians, Indians in the West so often end up in leadership positions (especially in the corporate world), and East Asians don't?

The typical answer given is that "the leadership attainment gap between East Asians and South Asians [is] consistently explained by cultural differences in assertiveness, but not by prejudice or motivation". We see this reflected in the types of stories told in each culture about how an individual may rise to prominence and leadership: Chinese examples tend to be something like "kid studies hard for the imperial exams and passes at age 17, lifting his family out of poverty" or "brilliant strategist lives a quiet life in the countryside until a worthy leader seeks him out and asks for his help reunifying the empire", neither of which lend themselves to the type of assertive self-promotion needed to succeed in American business or politics. This may be less of an issue for 3rd generation immigrants and beyond who are fully assimilated, but they are relatively small in number at the moment.

Some Brahmin sub-groups appear to have extremely high verbal IQ, possibly on par with Jews. Consider that in stand-up comedy, one of the purest tests of verbal intelligence, Indians are quite overrepresented in the US and UK.

Tamil Brahmins are uniquely successful even among Brahmins. If anything it is interesting that Harris’ verbal ability and charisma appear comparatively poor given her background.

  1. Kamala is more outgoing and forward than Asian people. The most important trait to reach the political and media elite is to have the personality of a narcissistic car salesmen. Asians are a bit too timid and not outgoing enough.

  2. Indians like to fight internally but whenever they go abroad they seem to hold together much better. Even Indians and Pakistanis seem to be great friends as soon as they leave their home region. Asians don't have the same level of Asian cohesion.

Afraid of what?

I've been trying to find the right sports metaphor for dropping Biden for a while now and I've finally got it:

The new candidate is Big Sam Allardyce, getting brought in to save the democrats from relegation.

Big Sam often succeeded though. What moxie does Kamala have? She seems a bit like a midwit to me.

Big Sam is the model. You need a guy who can keep a bad team from getting played off the field.

There are two quantitative facts for me that set up what Kamala has to get through independent of Trump.

  1. The beating heart of the Democrat party today is college-educated women, frequently unmarried

  2. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost White women outright. It was even worse for white married women.

"Just turn out the base" is a red herring of a strategy because a big part of the base has already demonstrate that, absent total ideological capture, when push comes to voting booth, they might torpedo their publicly professed choice. Revealed preferences and female-on-female relative-status aggression. Yes, there is a pretty high floor of Democrat voters who are so down for the cause that they'll vote Kamala no matter what, but there's also a non-trivial amount that will scream that in public and then do something different in the ballot box.

Furthermore, as I am certain we will see from Nate Silver this week, the polls are going to be all over the place and kind of valueless until maybe September. Too many structural assumptions are out of whack.

So what's Kamala to do? Well, the obvious answer is something. But I think that's a high bar to clear for her. Most of VP-ship has been staff turnover and other .... unburdenings.

What moxie does Kamala have?

She has the media, Dobbs, the most partisan American voting base in my lifetime and an 80-something opponent who may as well be Satan to her base. And the election is going to be before the honeymoon phase is over. And she can talk in complete sentences

If the goal is to shithouse a win, or just shithouse a lower impact on downballot races, it's a foundation.

I think the honeymoon phase for politicians ends pretty quickly once real policy changes are being proposed. It's easy to present oneself as a reasonable, upstanding figure that wants what's best for everyone. It's much harder to keep that image when tough choices have to be made.

Voters can agree that the status quo sucks, but in aggregate hate any suggested changes to it. I don't think the honeymoon will continue once Harris has had to clarify her positions on immigration, inflation, the Middle East, and Ukraine. Thus far she's mostly been hiding (or perhaps forced to hide) behind Biden's positions, and there is no combination of views there that satisfies all the left's core constituencies.

Shithousery is about satisficing more than anything. A draw is a win for the inferior team. The goal is to eke out enough turnout. If people have to hold their noses or take a shower later so be it.

I firmly believe that Americans are narcissists and it's to their credit here; they'll mostly vote on domestic matters that truly impact them. I doubt Ukraine will in any way be a major stumbling block, no matter what the really Left says. Israel might, if only because of some very motivated voters in Michigan. The progressive Left has been somewhat contained on this.

Without Biden's age the media will default to hating on Trump again, reminding the base What's At Stake.

Not much she can do about inflation at this point. The border is also going to be bad, especially since she was briefly appointed to help manage it. It remains to be seen how bad (how many people even recall that?).

I imagine she'll continue Biden's desperate pandering: capping rent increases, deporting some migrants while allowing others to stay, talking about SCOTUS reform and more giveaways to their base that took college loans.

Just throw enough at the base that people project enough hope unto your candidacy that you hopefully squeak out a win. And, if you don't, stop sinking the rest of the ticket. That's really what's essential here. The Democrats may have to just take a Harris loss so long as she runs ahead of Biden and lets people who want to vote for a Democrat elsewhere do so. Newsom and co. can pick up the pieces later, so long as they haven't been ground into a fine powder by the mobility scooter of a candidate 2/3rds of their party thinks literally cannot run.

I firmly believe that Americans are narcissists and it's to their credit here; they'll mostly vote on domestic matters that truly impact them.

Does that make them narcissists? I'm not sure why anyone should be expected to vote more on the basis of issues affecting people overseas rather than domestic concerns.

It was more a shot at the pretense that large numbers of people are going to peel away for a global issue that's ostensibly of ultimate importance but is really just a way to play out people's more short-range anti-apartheid larps or fight their domestic opponents (Gaza)

As I said, voting on your economy or political system is quite rational.

don't think the honeymoon will continue once Harris has had to clarify her positions on immigration, inflation, the Middle East, and Ukraine.

I think it's fair to say that she doesn't have positions on these topics. Why can't she just dodge these issues and remain opaque? It's not like the mainstream media will ask her hard questions.

And the election is going to be before the honeymoon phase is over.

With the news velocity lately - don't count on predicting honeymoon duration.

SatanDonald Trump is "only" 78.

I don't think Kamala is going to get a honeymoon phase; she's been around and is associated with the administration, and she doesn't even get the benefit of being a primary winner. She's probably strictly better than Biden (who will only get worse), but IMO the Democrats would have been better off going for the higher-risk strategy of an open convention where the winner probably WOULD get some sort of honeymoon (if they didn't split the party)

Brahmins had power in India, And Kamala is Brahmin. Just from what I’ve read about the corporate world online, the stereotype of Indians (as opposed to East Asians) is that they are better at the social games which lead to promotions. Whereas East Asians historically had a test that guaranteed promotions, perhaps Indian culture relied more on social quid pro quo?

India is very communalist and is divided into thousands of endogamous castes. China is one big melting pot of a population with a big focus on being a meritocratic peasant society. These lead to very different societies.

Given that this seems to be the thread all about discussing Harris, can I bring up the fact that she is TINY.

She is only 5 foot 2. Versus Trumps 6 foot 3! I don’t mean to sound like some Height obsessed incel (probably too late for that now but anyway) that is just a yuuuge difference. If I were Trump I would demand any debate be on an open floor in a townhouse style so that it maximizes the height differential. Advantage: Trump

...

Height doesn't really matter in women as long as it is within the normal range, which 5'2" is. If she had been a man, it would've mattered at least a bit, but she isn't.

I remember Obama saying Buttigieg was unelectable. Not for being gay, but too short at 5'8".

When looking at the height pay gap (tall people get paid more than short people), it exists in both women and men, but is much larger in men.

As with many things in life, men have the burden of performance, including Doing the Bare Minimum of being tall and not being short.

Calling 5'2" Harris "Little Kamala" would just be perceived by normies as somewhere between a weird non-sequitur and just plain mean-spirited, even for what they view as Trump's standards. After all, Hillary is/was only three inches taller than Kamala and it wasn't an issue at all. In contrast, calling 5'9" Marco Rubio "Little Marco" on stage basically ended Rubio's Presidential campaign. There was tremendous compass unity in laughing at "Little Marco" getting pwned.

Despite the average Burgerland heights of women and men being 5'5" and 5'10", respectively, a 5'2" woman is just a woman. At worst called "petite," which can even be a positive. Most women like feeling smol, even if they don't like openly admitting it. A 5'9" man may very well find himself in manlet territory and mocked accordingly.

From recollection, studies on the height premium in the workplace (e.g., compensation, CEOs, or CEOs and compensation) tend to show a materially... higher... height premium for men than women. One way academics have tried to cope with this is to claim that African Americans are More Affected:

There’s also a gendered component. Research conducted by Inas R Kelly, professor of economics at Loyola Marymount University, California, revealed marked differences in the effect of height on mean income by gender. “White men face a much larger premium for each additional 10cm than white women,” she says, and that gap is even more pronounced for African Americans.

Or that, secondly, if there's less of a height premium for women, it's because male insecurities and female internalized misogyny punish tall women:

This links into the idea that women can be too tall, and that tall women face discrimination in a way tall men don't. According to a study of tall female college students, their above-average height resulted in ‘unintended intimidation’. “If there’s a woman towering over others, they might view her as a threat … As a woman, if you show dominance, it’s considered aggression. It could be problematic,” says Pritchard.

Men Judged Harshly for Their Height (or Lack Thereof): Women, Minorities Hardest Hit.

and it wasn't an issue at all.

Except the whole losing thing

In my Emotional Truth, Hillary won in 2016, Federer won in 2019, and it was The Berenstein Bears the whole time *crosses arms and turns away*.

The question is, would she had been better off being a 5’10” man in the 2016 campaign? It’s a definite no for me, especially since she could had then easily gotten dabbed upon with a “Little Hillary” like Marco did. It’d be even for worse for Kamala to be a 5’7” man.

The way you phrase your non-question "Are there any theories why-?" looks an awful lot like certain previous alts who like to Just Ask Questions about Jews, Chinese, Blacks, etc. Haven't seen Indians become a particular focus for this "line of inquiry" before, but if you genuinely want to start a thread discussing the role and success of Indians in the West, you chose about the shadiest way to do it.

You are allowed to trot out your racial theories, your conspiracy theories, your grievances with Group X, here. But we strongly discourage Dark Hinting and shady speculation. If you have a cultural or HBD argument to make, make it. If you just want to say "How weird that there are so many Indians in top positions, what could it mean?" well, it is not believable that you have just happened to Notice this phenomenon and are innocently asking if anyone else has any theories.

Is it possible that Harris is a sort of mirror image of Trump? Both are quirky and memeable and voluble and unintentionally funny but maybe in ways that appeal to (and repel) opposite groups of people. Neither is seen as particularly principled or deep, but their unseriousness manifests in ways associated with their sex and social class: his fragile masculine ego, her giggly femininity; his chest-thumping and locker room talk, her woo-adjacent babbling; his blue-collar affectations, her PMC wine mom energy. He uses his wealth and status to access sex; she uses her sex to access status. (Sorry, I know I stepped away from the Indian thing.)

So you’re not going to even tell us what Elon said, just boo outgroup it?

It's a video of Harris saying "I am Kamala Harris, my pronouns are she and her, and I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit."

Various responses are saying that she's talking to blind people, as if that somehow makes it not weird.

It isn't weird for videotaped presentations among a certain crowd. Such as some people who work for some major tech companies that employ me.

It does make it not weird, everyone else at the table was saying similar things. I mean it’s still kind of performative but it’s not as if she just said that out of imbecility

That everyone else was doing it doesn't make it not weird either. Blind people don't need to know what colour suit you're wearing. When I listen to the radio or to a podcast I can't see the speakers either, and not once have I thought "gee I really wish this person would tell me their pronouns and what they're wearing".

Introduce yourself by name, fair enough. Everything else is unnecessary and if you're participating in some nutty subculture that likes to pretend that this nonsense is somehow supportive of disabled people, that itself is a reflection on you.

You know, it just occurred to me... blind people have their own activist organizations. They have conventions and speakers and seminars and conference calls and stuff. I had to attend a number of those for scholarships and the best training available. In none of the numerous speeches, presentations, seminars, etc that I heard did anyone describe what they were wearing, or what they looked like, in any way. I remember one banquet speaker who brought up diversity and said that, when he looked at the crowd, he saw a rainbow. Which was obvious because of things like accents and ... OK how do I point out that people from different ethnicities smell different without getting accused of saying PoC stink? Because I feel like someone is going to take it that way.

To quote a blind Aspy with a cringie youtube channel where he used to complain about random encounters, "Blind people don't do that."

OK how do I point out that people from different ethnicities smell different without getting accused of saying PoC stink? Because I feel like someone is going to take it that way.

Just the way you did right there.

It's unusual but doesn't seem weird to me. Blind (the community notes say blind and poor vision) are not always blind from birth. They might have internal representation of colour and specifying blue suit can be useful for them to have her image in their minds.

At first her mentioning her pronouns seemed weird but then again – for blind people it could be helpful in certain cases.

No one cares how blue her clothes are. Formerly sighted blind people included.

Yeah, I've always been legally blind, but was not always totally blind, so I have some amount of visual memory.

Of course, I've read this whole thread and still am picturing Harris in a generic almost-black dark grey suit, in spite of the subject matter. My visual imagination can be stubborn.

I don't think the pronouns were for blind people. I think introducing themselves with pronouns is just what people do in place of saying "I am a serious progressive who supports trans people." I'm still annoyed by this trend; 20 years ago, I was supporting trans people by complaining whenever an online service would require disclosing gender in an irrelevant context. Now it's in vogue to do the opposite, and that's somehow more inclusive. But I digress.

Of course, I've read this whole thread and still am picturing Harris in a generic almost-black dark grey suit, in spite of the subject matter. My visual imagination can be stubborn.

It's not a bad thing to assume. She's in blue in that particular video but usually wears more muted colours.

Have you ever talked to a person on the telephone?

Do you open by telling them what you're wearing so they can imagine you in their minds?

Yes, sometimes I do.

Only when they're paying $5.99 a minute.

Ha-ha. Of course you can do that.

But with friends and family, sometimes I tell them how I am doing, what new clothes I have bought and what colour they are. It's a normal talk.

While some of Kamala's recorded speech indeed seems frivolous and unfit for the occasion, I am judging her charitably.

The same critique was directed towards Trump when it was claimed that he suggested drinking bleach etc. He didn't. He was just musing about potential treatments. That wasn't meant to be taken too seriously. But people take seriously everything that the president says, sometimes uncharitably.

Funnily enough, the single blind colleague I have ever worked with, asked for people to tell him their sex and a color of something they were wearing as well as their name. He said this helped him build a mental model of who was where in a meeting room and keep track of who was saying what.

This was over 20 years ago mind you, but perhaps it does help some blind people enough to have become a request/norm.

Before video conferencing was a thing dialing in via phone into a remote meeting was always a pain because keeping track of who said what was a trial. Unlike in a podcast, you're expected to interact back after all.

This may not be as unhelpful as you think in other words.

... why a color specifically? You'd think that type of clothing, hair style, distinguishing feature, or a half-dozen other things would be more relatable than color.

Was he one of the many (most?) legally blind people who still have some (ultra-blurry) color vision?

Or is it a sense of humor thing? "Hey, you know how there's this major qualia that I'll never get to experience? Could you bring it up in a way that will sound natural at first but will make you feel a little more confused and uncomfortable the longer you think about it?" That would actually be awesome.

I thought it had to do with that most blind people are not fully blind like you mention so they can sort of fuzzily perceive that there is a woman wearing blue

... why a color specifically? You'd think that type of clothing, hair style, distinguishing feature, or a half-dozen other things would be more relatable than color.

OK so then you can go back to the 2020/2021 Microsoft meetings where people built more detailed models of themselves and got made fun of for that.

Do I find it intolerably cringe and another way for narcissists to discuss themselves with the excuse of accessibility? Yes. But if I were in a meeting with someone blind I think this is all a reasonable accommodation, is the point.

Oh, it seems entirely reasonable to me, just a very specifically weird way to be reasonable, out of a lot of alternatives. As a choice pushed by narcissists it would make sense to me. But as a request specifically made by a blind person it's an interesting mystery.

Unlike in a podcast, you're expected to interact back after all.

So like during a phone call, where you're not supposed to ask what people are wearing either (unless we're talking about a very particular type of a on me call)?

There's more then one reason for asking these sorts of favors of others, and I don't see why we should go with a mundane one by default.

So like during a phone call, where you're not supposed to ask what people are wearing either (unless we're talking about a very particular type of a on me call)?

Right, but have you ever been the only one dialing into a conference room? Everyone else can see, and all you have is sound? Back in the day I used to have to do that all the time and it was legitimately a pain to make out who was talking, where everyone is in relation to each other and the like. I think it would actually be an improvement to try and construct a visualization in that circumstance. Especially if you don't know who is talking. Indeed what we ended up having to do is preface every statement with "This is Dave, department head of consular services, I think we need to consider the cost implications of adding to ambassadorial security" But that was clunky and time consuming. Now for most people particularly nowadays with video calling that is no longer something that crops up much. But if you are blind it is every meeting, every time. Building up a mechanism to help navigate that seems like exactly the thing that you would do in that circumstance.

I would suggest that the mundane reason for blind people needing/wanting better descriptions of who is talking and how to create visualizations to keep track is exactly the one that should be considered the default. When Bob in network engineering asks me to limit the use of resources on the mainframe on Fridays, I should also consider the mundane reason the most likely one, though it is possible he is training Skynet, the mundane is almost always correct, in my experience.

Right, but have you ever been the only one dialing into a conference room? Everyone else can see, and all you have is sound.

Sure, and the primary reason that's a problem isn't that other people have visuals, and I do not, it's because other people are present in a 3 dimensional space, and I'm not. The sound that I do get is flattened and muffled, just as the sound that they get from me. We know this, because no one decided that demanding participants state their sex and attire helps to communicate in that situation.

When Bob in network engineering asks me to limit the use of resources on the mainframe on Fridays, I should also consider the mundane reason the most likely one, though it is possible he is training Skynet, the mundane is almost always correct, in my experience.

The big difference is that even though you might choose to trust Bob, his claims are verifiable. People asking that you comply with an arbitrary request, who's utility is not only unproven in the instant, but is fundamentally unprovable, tends is not typically explainable by mundane reasons.

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Various responses are saying that she's talking to blind people, as if that somehow makes it not weird.

That's a perfectly reasonable thing to say if you're talking to blind people, or at least the sitting at a table wearing a blue suit stuff is reasonable. If I were blind I'd appreciate it as that would give me a better mental model of the space I'm inhabiting.

The difference between this situation and a phone call is that phone calls are symmetric and nobody has info about what the other is wearing etc. while in this case the sighted people will have a more accurate representation of the situation than the blind ones. Her words were just a way to try and equalise the situation a bit more.

A better comparison would be to a Google Meets session where Alice has audio+video of Bob while Bob can only hear her. There's definitely an inherent element of weirdness in this situation caused by the imbalance (as I'm sure everyone who has been involved in such a situation knows) and the way Kamala was talking attempts to at least cut down on how severe it is.

The rest of the quote is just standard left wing greeting rituals.

There's definitely an inherent element of weirdness in this situation caused by the imbalance (as I'm sure everyone who has been involved in such a situation knows)

How does having the person with no video state their sex and apparel make it any less weird?

Fair enough.

I think this is a typical case of boomer right wingers not recognizing how far behind the curve they are. They don't get to decide what is socially acceptable in the bio-leninist coalition. Those things are already long decided on before they are performed publicly.

As the owner of Twitter Elon now does get to decide that, or at least influence it, which is why his propaganda edit has 77 million views.

There are a lot of right wing boomers in the world. Be that by birth or spirituality. I don't remember the last time any of them at any time in the past 80 years could make any relevant change to the course of history. It seems like it doesn't matter how many 'SJW Owned Compilation's there are, or how many boomers watch them and cackle.

Those derided Boomers represent the change the didn't happen.

We didn't go full Australia on Covid lockdowns. We are still allowed to own guns. The state only takes 35% of our income instead of 50%. Etc...

A country with those "right wing Boomers" gone looks a lot like Canada or Australia, but with the addition of urban decay and a large criminal underclass. It's not a great look.

We didn't go full Australia on Covid lockdowns.

Neither did Canada.

We are still allowed to own guns.

So are Canadians.

The state only takes 35% of our income instead of 50%

Again, look at Canada.

All involved are neck deep in mass immigration. I'm not seeing the boomer utility here.

I reject pretending that the US and Canada are equivalent. Especially when it comes to portion of the population that are first generation immigrants. And their meager crumb of gun ownership privileges.

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We didn't go full Australia on Covid lockdowns.

Nor did most of Australia. Australia had tough restrictions at the border, but inside Australia lockdowns were localised, imposed only as necessary, and abandoned once the most vulnerable groups had been vaccinated.

The only part of Australia that was locked down for longer than California was Melbourne.

Yeah I have a feeling that when all those right wing boomers die off the world is gonna miss them a lot more than they think.

Are the people even blind? The visible ones mostly seem to be taking pen & paper notes, one of them has glasses, and at least two seem to be gazing longlingly at Kamala?

Apparently it's a meeting of disability activists, some of whom are blind. Others may have other disabilities, or no disability at all.

I'm blind. I cringed. It sounds like the opening narration in a really bad first person novella.

But, you know, there aren't that many blind voters. They might be outnumbered by the activist types who like that conspicuous inclusivity signaling that alienates the people it's supposedly including (I'm sure there are dozens of trans people with pronouns in their bios, but it's mostly cis signalers; trans people I've come across just go for a name that communicates the gender they're presenting as and leave it at that, unless pressured).

In other words, she's aiming for the progressive whitewomenin HR vote. As said elsewhere in this thread, if they're the heart of the democratic voters, then she needs to appeal to them. Trans and blind voters combined might feel up a mid-sized city, if I remember the statistics correctly.

Exactly this. Most people want to be treated like they're normal, not like they're special. Yeah sometimes a particular thing becomes an obstacle and you have to work around that as best you can, but disabled people don't usually want everyone constantly acknowledging that they're disabled, immigrants don't like being perpetually reminded they're immigrants, etc, etc. It's actually the opposite of inclusive to constantly orient your language and behaviour around the thing that is different about someone.

What all these language and behaviour rules actually are is a modern form of elite etiquette. Whereas once upon a time you might have needed to demonstrate that you knew the right fork to use or how to curtsey the right way, now you need to show that you know the proper modes of address in different situations. It's not for the the actual blind/trans/whatever people, it's for the cultural class you're showing you are properly a member of.

My experience dealing with non first tier Bangalore software shops. You will never get any kind of negative feedback or pushback. It is always yes sir all the way to the failure.

What are the meetings like after the initial failure? Like, say they just blow through a sprint and don't deliver anything.

"Why didn't you get anything done?"

"Yes! We will work harder?"

How does it go? I have trouble seeing how there wouldn't just be a ton of nonsequitors and straight dodging questions.

My experience dealing with Koreans in Korea. There needs to be training for dealing with Westerners. If an American asks you a yes/no question and the correct answer is no, say no. Don't repeatedly say yes many times and then entirely fail to deliver as promised.

There needs to be training for dealing with Westerners.

Oh, you mean diversity and inclusion training?

I have a deep loathing for the Indian ethos of bending the truth or just straight out lying about things.

The power of just nodding in agreement, affirming that you understand, and then refusing to actually do it wins again and again.

It seems obvious to me that the yes-man strategy dominates all others as a way to get ahead. It's definitely the default model in most of the world. So why isn't it the default model in northern European culture? Why is Europe, especially northern Europe, so weird?

Because it doesn't work in Europe, which is just as well because yes man culture is a terrible basis for effective organisations. "Most of the world" got steamrolled by northern Europeans!

Why is Europe, especially northern western Europe, so weird?

There's an obvious answer but I dont think it's one a lot users here are going to like.

How so? If the idea is that Christians don't lie because of their Christian belief, wouldn't they start lying again once they become atheists? But that doesn't seem to have happened in, for example, the Nordic countries.

More convincing is that big changes happened once the Catholic Church banned cousin marriage in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.

I hope he responds with a really off the wall interpretation like how the schisms among high IQ subsets of Europeans over theological quibbles turned into bloodshed resulting in a eugenic selection for intellectual disagreeableness.

Surely that's the kind of thing that selects for agreeableness. At least, that's what people claim about China.

Christianity led to long term cultural changes that resulted in the reaction to persistent and bloody disagreements being liberalism, and not to genocide.

Of course, that doesn't mean Christian societies can't be brutal and repressive- see the entire history of Russia- but the fragmentation in western Europe made bloody disagreements persistent enough long term to render that solution non-viable.

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Its not that "Christians don't lie" so much that the Christian worldview in general and Western attitudes regarding individual worth and the treatment of servants/subordinates in particular are unusually conducive to building trust in an otherwise low trust environment.

At the same time are we sure "wouldn't they start lying again once they become atheists?" Is not exactly what we are seeing? Do you believe that the Democratic party of Jimmy Carter would've allowed the current situation to occur? What about the party of Truman?

It's amazing how unreasonably effective this tactic is, not that I condone it or anything.

Is it possible for Trump to ditch Vance? He doesn't seem to bring much to the ticket, other than taking the spotlight away from Trump. Trump already won Ohio with a wider margin than Vance did in his senate bid. Can I get a steel man for why he was picked? It doesn't change my vote, but it comes off as a bad play to me.

No, not realistically. They already had their convention. In an absolutely extreme circumstance they could maybe scramble to schedule a second online convention or something, but there's no existing process or precedent for it. There's no way it happens for boring "maybe he wasn't such a good pick" reasons.

The democrats changed VP nominees post-convention in 1972.

Yah and how did that go for them?

Probably better than if they'd stuck with Eagleton.

Yes but the Democratic Party's structure is also much more centralized than the Republican's and even if it weren't Trump would have to want to replace Vance which begs the question "Why?"

The people turned off by Vance's "weird views on sex and gender" were never going to vote Republican in the first place.

In the meantime Vance shores up Trump's position with the donors.

Huh, so they did. TIL.

He's taking the spotlight because the very act of selecting him is newsworthy in and of itself.

I mean, taking the spotlight off Trump is itself a major service to the ticket, is it not? Trump is very unpopular. Vance might be a weird sperg with conservative religious views, but the American public is used to weird spergs with conservative religious views on the republican ticket, I don't think that'll sway many votes.

Trump only has one term left. Vance isn't just a VP, he's the MAGA successor.

Vance needs a successful Trump second term to run in 2028 and will use the VP position to get control of the GOP / RNC to secure his spot.

Here's a great article about how the Republicans are a patronage party, not a constituent party: https://scholars-stage.org/patronage-vs-constituent-parties-or-why-republican-party-leaders-matter-more-than-democratic-ones/

Many of the GOP establishment figures have no voter base. They are patrons who have built up a client base over the decades. Most of them don't realize how little voter base they have, their voters just tolerate them. Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell have a lot of control over their states political apparatus, but they had to cozy up to Trump before the 2020 election because the grassroots voters in their states were quite willing to vote them out in a primary for Trump supporting candidates.

Some of them just seem deluded. Liz Cheney seems to have honestly thought she was heading towards a presidential run.

Vance underperformed for a related reasons. He came in without patrons or clients. He wasn't part of any political machine. The RNC saw him as not their guy. There was big money against him.

He'll perform better in subsequent elections.

Vance as VP means that Republicans undermining Trump have a strong chance of being cut out of power until 2032, which dramatically changes how they will behave.

Really no VP choice will add much to the Trump ticket electorally. He's an extremely well known figure.

Often the VP choice is about extending an olive branch to other factions. Trump proved the other factions don't add up to much, so the Vance choice is about cutting a switch.

he's the MAGA successor

He is what certian interest hope could be the MAGA successor. I just don't see it. He is not electric at all and doesn't have the sort of weird Charsma that Trump has. Strangely enough with Trump as a spent force the RNC will find itself in the same boat as the DNC post-Obama. In a bind due to weird circumstances leading to only one person with any Charsma at all being a major player in the party.

There is no VP pick Trump could have made that would not have been spun by hostile media forces as a bad choice.

The idea that the VP pick helps win the home state is largely a myth. Vance isn't going to help Trump win Ohio.

Virtually any other VP pick would have been a sign to Trump's base that he was moderating, and would have depressed turnout.

The idea that the VP pick helps win the home state is largely a myth. Vance isn't going to help Trump win Ohio.

I agree. VP picks make for great news-entertainment, but have very little effect on the overall election. Much like their actual role- their power is limited! The typical voter, especially the swing voters, vote for the pres, not "hmm there's a 2% chance that this VP will takeover so that should influence my vote a little..."

Do you have good sources showing "moderating" will lead to fewer votes, especially in swing states where votes actually matter? I buy more into Median Voter Theorem, where moderating is usually the single best move a politician can make

Richard Baris talks about this on Twitter: the vast majority of voters are not undecided, and driving turnout among partisans ends up being much more impactful than swaying the mythical moderates. (Besides, the more you activate your own partisans, the more reasonable and mainstream your ideas become, and thus inherently more "moderate".)

"Moderating" is basically an act of persuasion more than actually moving to a political center: if you frame the issue right trans kids becomes the responsible take, while tax cuts for the middle class become an extreme take.

I've heard that narrative before, I'm not totally convinced by it. I'd want to see some decently strong evidence for it before buying into it.

Especially since generally, moderates win swing states, not whoever motivates partisans the hardest. The nation as a whole is like one giant swing state in many ways.

I don't believe framing has that much power. I think voters mostly make their own decisions, propaganda has an impact but it's relatively small.

Probably, Trump doesn't think that choosing Vance will meaningfully/negatively change his odds of winning, and likes working with him. If somehow Trump were to be elected then forced out, Vance isn't much of an improvement from their enemies' point of view. The connection with Theil is probably relevant.

The people who are upset about Vance's religious and abortion related views are probably already upset about Trump's Supreme Court pick, which had more actual consequences, and were unlikely to vote for Trump anyway. I don't get the impression that Trump personally cares about religiously motivated conservatism, but a lot of the Republican base do, and will turn up to vote despite not liking how Trump comports himself morally because he does in fact deliver on SC and VP picks who are in line with their values.

FWIW, my in person friends like Vance a fair bit more than they like Trump, and are in the "didn't vote for Trump in 2016 but are planning to this year" camp.

Vance isn’t a bridge to Ohio, he is a bridge to Thiel-adjacent SV capital. If Trump continues to cut into dem advantage with latino and black votes AND tech money moves toward donation parity between the parties, that cuts into two of the Democrats’ most important election pillars for the last 15 years. Democrats can’t win elections relying on, ahem, childless cat ladies as the only reliable party structure.

Was about to post just this. Vance isn't meant to be a signal to plebs, it's securing allyship to the Paypal mafia.

Seconding this opinion. This is an escalation in the shift in power from governmental to extra-governmental corporate/billionaire power. I consider it an obvious step to our inevitable dystopian cyberpunk future.

This is a good call. I think that tech inching towards the GOP – which as I understand it has to do a lot with the other guys threatening bad/expensive new policies – is pretty under-covered but potentially important.

Maybe part of the reason it's under-covered is that the media has been covering tech as a bunch of reactionaries for some time now, so if they actually start to vote right that's almost less of a story then them dabbling in Uncle Ted Thought or whatever?

Yes, but whoever Trump picks next will be attacked just as harshly as Vance. Remember what happened to Kavanaugh. All the media needs is one person claiming personal knowledge that the nominee did or said something bad.

The fact that the main attack on Vance is a blatant and total fabrication probably suggests that it's difficult to make a genuine attack land. You don't go around making up stories about the guy having sex with a couch if there's a reality-based smear available that will stick.

What do you think is the base rate of dudes in Vance's demographic having ever fucked a couch? I suspect it is a lot higher than you would expect.

Well now I'm just wondering what you would expect me to expect and what sort of experiences have led you to think that expected number is wrong.

My guess is that pretty large subset of men have done something weird with their dicks at some point (depending on what counts as weird I guess), but any specific guy is unlikely to have done a specific weird thing.

pretty large subset of men have done something weird with their dicks at some point

I made a graph to illustrate this subset as a percentage.

It is a function that asymptotically approaches 100.

Wait what is the x axis here?

Percentage horniness felt by a young man. Or age across childhood starting just before puberty to adulthood.

I really made this up, so it is open for interpretation.

Time I would expect.

I'd put the base rate of men with a weird masturbation story at 100%. Some will admit it, some won't. It's a fundamentally silly attack.

Is couch fucking really the main attack? The main attacks I've seen are:

  1. He dislikes the childless

  2. He wants to ban abortion in (nearly) all cases

  3. He is against gay marriage

None of which are fabrications. Obviously on Twitter people are going to talk about couch fucking because it's funny, but that's not the angle the media is (mostly) going to take.

Is it true he disliked the childless? He noted in the speech where this came out of that many people have unique situations or medical issues etc.

Instead, he seemed to be reacting to a spirit of anti natalism that seems real and bad.

He has proposed the idea of allowing parents to vote their children's votes until age 18 in order to enhance the voice of parents at the expense of the childless. He has also proposed increasing taxes on the childless, though functionally this is no different from the popular Democratic childcare tax credits. Which, inasmuch as the childless represent a cohesive class interest, amounts to dislike.

That’s one way of framing it. Another way is that a family of four with two adults gets the exact same voice as a family of two with two adults. Maybe the default is wrong as it shrinks the voice of larger families. Maybe the family of four should have a larger voice relative to the family of two.

That could be seen as righting a wrong instead of harming the childless. Perspective matters.

Also if you think kids are on net a good maybe you want to try to raise the status of families. Giving them more of a vote would make politicians cater more to families raising the status of families.

These are all arguments for why this would be a good policy choice. They are irrelevant to the question: would these policies weaken the power and reduce the resources of the childless considered as a class?

Just as "We should have more black people here" is quite obviously a statement of at least relative reduction of the white people that are here already, "we should give more power to the child-rearing" involves taking power away from the childless. This is the closest we get to a true political statement of dislike.

I don't think the policy is bad, or necessarily very partisan-impactful, provided that the various details are resolved in a way that isn't an obvious power grab. How are the votes of the children of divorce assigned? Can a non-citizen vote for their citizen child in cases of immigrants with birthright-citizen children? What about a widowed non-citizen voting the interests of her citizen children with an American father? Can parents who are incompetent to vote by reason of felony convictions or other disqualification still vote for their children? What do we do with parents who are domiciled in a different location from their minor children? The devil is in the details, and the resulting decades of lawfare over the details, but it isn't inherently a bad policy.

My point is that it is framing. Just like a child tax credit is functionally the same as saying childless pay more taxes. No difference.

Close enough to count, imo, and I say that despite being sympathetic to his point of view.

I saw the full context somewhere but now I am totally unable to find it.

The antinatalism stuff is, as far as I can tell, how he's trying to spin those comments now. The original sentiment was clearly "these people without children don't have a stake in our future" or something like that. Maybe you could even argue that just because he thinks they don't have a stake doesn't mean he dislikes them, but that also seems weak.

I think you can read it akin to in democrat culture there is an anti natalist streak. These people are an example of that (ie it isn’t a coincidence that a lot of their leaders don’t have kids). That streak is bad and we don’t really want those kind of leaders as they raise the status of being child free / won’t be as child motivated. That seems…right to me. It isn’t good to have so child free leaders. Babies are great—we should be having more kids. My wife and I are doing our part!

As an aside, it is gross how hard it is to find transcripts to give full context. All you can find are media reports that quote X but don’t provide links for the transcript. Just another example of bad journalism and Google being awful.

Here's an article someone posted elsewhere: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c147yn4xxx4o

On Friday, Mr Vance said: “I wish her step-children and Kamala Harris and her whole family the very best. The point is not that she’s lesser. The point is that her party has pursued a set of policies that are profoundly anti-child.” Mr Vance made similar remarks against Democrats in a 2021 speech at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, in which he also said his criticism was not directed at those who could not have children for biological or medical reasons.

I don't have a strong opinion.

On the one hand, it is in the national interest to be more positive about children, and influence more people to have more children, since we're below replacement levels of fertility throughout the wealthy industrialized world. I would be interested to hear Vance's thoughts on ways the government can encourage more children, especially children in stable, working households.

On the other hand, calling female senators who didn't have children a "bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives" doesn't sound good. It sounds like something to say on an anonymous message board, or to your good guy friend in private, but maybe dress it up or change the subject in public spaces?

I would be interested to hear Vance's thoughts on ways the government can encourage more children, especially children in stable, working households.

He wants to give net taxpayers huge tax credits/refunds(there's very little difference between the two) for fertility.

Seems hard to fund.

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On the other hand, calling female senators who didn't have children a "bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives" doesn't sound good.

He included Pete Buttigieg in that list also.

The internet says he's gay married with adopted kids? That's its own problem from a conservative perspective (and I'm personally in favor of prioritizing married man and wife couples for adoption, since there's a shortage of adoptable children, and "well off, but your dads are in the public eye all the time" isn't a clear win for a child), but doesn't seem like the same problem.

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It's not the full interview but you can see a longer clip here.

I think your interpretation is pretty much correct. He's saying "people like Kamala Harris are miserable because they don't have kids and want to inflict their misery on the rest of us."

So what they say about any generic Republican?

I mean this time they are actually probably true, but the people it would be aimed at have the nerve burned out already.

The "childless" thing is not really a generic Republican attack point.

the people it would be aimed at have the nerve burned out already.

I can't say that Vance is particularly well received by anyone, so I'm not so sure. Democrats don't like him for the above reasons. Trumpists don't like him because he compared Trump to Hitler/Nixon or is a vc stooge. And so on. I'm sure that you can find rationalizations by the right for why he's actually /ourguy/ but I can't say I've seen anyone really like him.

The Ross Douthat crowd likes him.

I kinda-sorta like him. He's clearly a guy with a brain who isn't all style over substance, so that's a pretty good start. I don't think his values exactly match mine, but he's probably closer than most.

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

Scott's article gives 9 reasons why cheering for blood like this might not be the best strategy. They include:

  1. Nobody Learns Anything Useful From Being Persecuted
  2. This Isn’t Tit For Tat, It’s The Nth Round Of A Historical Dialectic
  3. You’re Not Debating Whether To Become Like Woke People, You’re Already Like Woke People
  4. Nobody Is Ever Both-Sides-ist Enough
  5. Most Cancellations Are Friendly Fire
  6. Cancellation Is The Enemy Of Competence
  7. No, Seriously, This Is A Terrible Decision
  8. Don’t Go Mad With Power Until You Actually Get The Power
  9. There’s Probably Other Options

I'm staunchly on the left, virulently anti-Trump, and am completely okay with people being cancelled for these comments. I would be a hypocrite if I weren't. I think there's a lot of crocodile tears from the left on this: if Obama were almost killed and people were saying the same things, how many would protest those people being fired?

Do note that there is a difference between "I wish somebody would assassinate Trump [in the future] [rather than not make an attempt at all]" and "I wish the guy who tried to assassinate Trump [in the past] had succeeded [rather than attempted and failed]". I've little sympathy for the first - that's direct incitement to terrorism - but significantly more for the second.

This may be ungracious, but this is another moment where I cannot help feeling that kind of centrist triumphalism all over again.

The weapon was always bad. It was bad regardless of who used it. It was bad of regardless of who it was aimed at. It was, remains, and will continue to be bad.

"It's different when we do it" was never convincing.

Incidentally, what are people's feelings on these AI article summaries? It's not a long article, and I usually try to avoid that kind of AI summary on principle - especially because it would have been quite easy to just write a summary directly. What value does the machine add?

Incidentally, what are people's feelings on these AI article summaries?

Use the LLM to give you the first draft of a summary, review it, correct it, post it.

Do not mention you used one, and if you do, make it very clear it was reviewed carefully - of what use is the summary otherwise? I can generate it myself, and you come across as lazy, just padding the post out. Take full responsibility for the post.

Frankly, for a forum like Reddit, I think you can proofread an LLM's output, and nobody would be the wiser. That's the dataset it's trained on anyway.

Here, though, it's pretty obvious when someone's using one. If you're going to go through the effort of cleaning it up to seem like an intelligent human trying to persuade, you might as well have written it yourself.

If it's a way for a reply poster to "skim" Scott's article without reading it, then that's also anti-ethical to what we're supposed to be doing here.

I feel like this is weak writing by Scott especially for a psychologists. Actions/behaviors change before beliefs. “Wr are what we repeatedly do” - said by some famous philosopher.

Enforcing social norms will eventually change beliefs to your side. This is basic civilizing of barbarians.

Scott’s central point that nobody learns anything useful from persecution feels wrong to me. I would like to live in Scott’s world of principle libertarianism and debating society but unfortunately I think our tribal instincts for bloodlust are likely correct.

You don’t end a cultural civil war by being nice to the other side. When your side is in power you enforce new cultural norms and hope they stick.

I think he is fundamentally wrong that people don’t learn anything from being persecuted. HD lady will learn that she has the wrong memes. And then if you do it correctly accept your memes as correct. Starve or learn new memes.

HD lady will learn that she has the wrong memes.

As I pointed out the last time this topic came up (though perhaps not to you personally, I can't remember): if this were true the culture war would be over by now. Because the right would've learned they have the wrong memes, and changed. The fact that this hasn't happened should be glaring proof to everyone that cancelling the left isn't going to teach them a thing. It will simply further stoke resentment and lead to further conflict.

As I pointed out the last time this topic came up (though perhaps not to you personally, I can't remember): if this were true the culture war would be over by now. Because the right would've learned they have the wrong memes, and changed.

They have. Everything's moved left.

You don’t end a cultural civil war by being nice to the other side. When your side is in power you enforce new cultural norms and hope they stick.

In this case aren’t they the same thing? How is swinging back enforcing a new cultural norm?

This may be ungracious, but this is another moment where I cannot help feeling that kind of centrist triumphalism all over again.

There was something about your response that rubbed me the wrong way the last time, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but with my response to the article, I think I managed to crystallize it: Yes, it's wrong when we do it, but for us to become unburdened by what has been (sorry, couldn't resist), you have to offer people some form of catharsis. It can be material, or it can be symbollic, but you've got to give them something, otherwise you're asking for saintly levels of forgiveness, and I'm not even a Christian.

I think that's fair? There's still a reasonable discussion to be had about what kind of catharsis is appropriate, but I'll grant that demanding unconditional forgiveness and generosity towards one's ideological foes can be difficult. In particular, while I hope we can all agree that an emotional, id-driven impulse towards vengeance ("they made us suffer so we must make them suffer!") is wrong, considerations of justice or even just making it psychologically possible to move on might require... a kind of penance, or amends?

If it were a war between two clear opposing parties, you could imagine conditions for that. We don't just take all your cancellations and then forgive them full stop - we may, while not cancelling in return, nonetheless ask for recompense. Reinstate or compensate unjustly-cancelled people. Offer them some kind of sincere apology. Remove previous cancellers from power and don't trust them again. All the kinds of things that you would expect from an aggressor who is defeated in a war - not just to stop, but to apologise and attempt to make it right.

That's why, for instance, the sacrament of penance and reconciliation (most often in the Catholic Church, but also more broadly) requires four things - sorrow for the fault, a firm resolution to repair its effects, sincere confession of wrongdoing, and then the sacramental penance itself. While vengeance remains wrong, there's a case for asking the wrongdoer to repair the harm as much as possible, and to demonstrate sorrow and a reformed conscience.

This is much more foggy, however, when dealing with large and vague camps like 'the left' and 'the right'. As Scott's post points out, most people who identify on the left are opposed to cancellation! Moreover, many enthusiastic cancellers as individuals seem very unlikely to recognise their wrongdoing (likewise for right-aligned cancellers) or repent. In fact, often they double-down and blame the other side even more. So there isn't a central organisation to ask for repentance, and it would be wrong to take it out on individuals who weren't involved. Perhaps the best we can hope for is for left-wing organisations to disavow cancellation as a strategy?

While I like Scott's article and agree with his position in principle as someone who is pro-civilization, I also like confuciouscorndog's position. Both of them have a good point, but at the end of the day it's a tempest in a teacup by people who are arguing about something that's existed (as Scott admits) for a very, very long time.

This problem will be with us forever. Campaigning for fairness, even though fairness doesn't exist in the real world, always comes across as sour grapes by those currently suffering the business end of the jackboot.

There is no solution. As long as society exists in any meaningful form, and consists of people that we can reasonably consider human, these societies will always self-curate to throw out undesirables, no matter who they are, what they do, or what they provide. "Canceling" has taken many forms through history - if losing your job, home and having your livelihood destroyed is the worst of it I'd consider those bullets mere grazes, even if they weren't sufficiently dodged. The same impulse could go straight to old-school Americana lynchings or ME fundamentalist Islam beheadings.

America gets around this a lot of the time by self-segregation of societies. Red and blue states, yadda yadda. Blue gets more blue red gets more red as people self-select into the societies they fit into.

Solution is the same as it always is; don't be an undesirable in the eyes of those with power. Frequent software updates to stay on top of who's it's okay to despise in your particular society are recommended for personal security reasons. Last I heard the progressive stack are still squabbling over TERFs, they'll consider Trump ascendant a boon because it'll get them to stop bitching at each other for five minutes for the daily orange man bad prayer.

The fact that your enemies are just as sure as you are should make you less sure.

The more the enemy hates you, the more you should ... doubt yourself???

I think this is an appeal to take the outside view. If your reference class is "partisans who feel strongly that their current enemy is the most evil thing ever" then you see that other members of that class are mistaken about their attributions of evil.

"If you do to us what we did to you, that would hurt Democracy, so be responsible and let us continue discriminating against you, because we're morally superior"

Yeah, that's a tough sell, bro.

I appreciate the link and the implicit "are you sure you want to go down this road?" it contains. A couple of years ago, it felt like unbreakable blue-tribe consensus forever, which I found horrifying. Now that things have cracked, and it only took a failed assassination attempt to do it, what is team red supposed to do otherwise? The rhetoric is still that Trump is the most dangerous Threat to Democracy who must be stopped, from the side that usually makes arguments about stochastic terrorism. I see two broad types of strategic response, both awful:

  1. Claim "principles". This feels like trying to co-operate with defectbot, and seems to bring things further away from balanced, healthy discussion.
  2. Seek vengeance. This feels really good but escalates the culture war, and seems to bring things further away from balanced, healthy discussion.

I really don't know what culture war disarmament looks like. There needs to be some cross-tribe elite consensus that we stop doing these sort of things, and I don't know how you get there without first putting the shoe on the other foot for a while. The pendulum needs to swing back a little bit, then it needs to be caught.

Now that things have cracked, and it only took a failed assassination attempt to do it, what is team red supposed to do otherwise?

Has it really cracked? Will this moment of right-wing cancel power last more than a few weeks?

There needs to be some cross-tribe elite consensus that we stop doing these sort of things, and I don't know how you get there without first putting the shoe on the other foot for a while.

The shoe was on the other foot 60 years ago. Didn't really teach them much; academia promptly generated reasons that it was totally different when they did it.

This feels like trying to co-operate with defectbot

Scott's proposal is along the lines of "co-operate, and also hire a thug to hold a gun to defectbot's head and blow its brains out if it continues defecting". I don't think this is an especially-exploitable strategy.

The shoe was on the other foot 60 years ago.

Was it? I seem to remember the Weathermen becoming college professors at prestigious universities.

Weatherman was less than 60 years ago.

One of my favorite culture war book reviews is of Days of Rage, covering how left wing terrorists in the US were supported by groups like the National Lawyers’ Guild.

Having not lived through the Weather Underground and McCarthyism, I'm hesitant to say which side the shoe was on or how much it should inform our strategy for the current state of the culture war. I do remember 9/11 (I was standing deck watch at the Naval Academy) and the culture for the decade after that. Criticism of the war effort was treated pretty harshly, and that was a time and topic of right wing (RW) dominance. But I also recall gay marriage ballot initiatives failing across the country (an example of RW dominance) until the 14th amendment got stretched around it (LW victory). And we still had Superman embarrassed to be an American enough to change his "Truth, Justice, and the American Way" into "Truth, Justice, and all that stuff" in the 2006 movie Superman Returns (LW dominance). Christianity was never protected or sacred (LW dominance). I recall more collaboration and respect between Republicans and Democrats in Congress (less hostility in the culture war). I'm surely biased, but it seems to me that "elections have consequences" defectbot has been exceptionally effective over the past decade or two at pushing the pendulum to a far left position with much higher amplitude/height than the right swing it was returning from. All of which adds up to limited utility in looking to history while swapping "right" for "left".

Is there anyone here with book recommendations about the culture swings of history, in ways that would inform right wing decisions today?

This is not the first time this year that the right has cancelled it’s enemies- earlier on they managed to cancel some left wingers over Palestine. We also took bud lights scalp last year. I think it probably too late to put the genie back in the bottle; the cold civil war is going to escalate from here.

Now, as far as how it ends, either one side wins, or it goes hot, or we pillarize(hopefully Netherlands-style and not Lebanon-style). Calling a truce in this kind of environment requires strong, central leaders on both sides wanting one, and Trump doesn’t want a truce and the democrats don’t have a strong leader. Cest la vie.

I'd burn your ChatGPT summary; there are some dubious parts to it:

  • "who they believe have used it against them for years" - the "they believe" fnord is ChatGPT's addition
  • "stating that it would be [...] morally questionable" - he mostly shied away from making that point
  • Scott's mention that it's good strategy to actually get power before beginning the abuses is totally omitted

Given all of those it's likely -EV given the read-everything nature of theMotte.

Also, checking your quotes section:

"So this lady losing her job, if she goes into despair, if she becomes homeless, if she kills herself... So what?" "I don't give one flying fuck that these people are now getting served their own dog food."

These are taken from the same post, but are quoted separately with other stuff in-between.

"We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged."

You took this one out of context; Lizzardspawn is basically in agreement with Scott, with only maybe a bit of ex post facto added to the stuff Scott literally suggested should be illegalised.

You're right, both the chatGPT summary and that one particular quote have been replaced, while the two quotes from the same post are now together and marked.

I was reading through the comments, found myself saying "This one guy sounds a lot like darwin", looked up at the name and lo-and-behold.

Points for consistency.

I don't understand what you mean by this.

It was in fact darwin

What short memories people have. This event has made me think I am doomed to live in a world of never-ending reprisals. How silly of me to once think that only the middle east was locked in the hell hole that is endlessly escalating conflict and revenge.

The language used by the right is very much exactly the same damn language the left was using a decade ago.

Scott wrote some impassioned pleas back then for the left to not go down this path. I give him lots of kudos for being consistent. I give everyone here who has called for lots of revenge zero kudos.

The right already had its fun being the purgers. Was no one else alive and remembering what the 2000-2010 decade was like? The slightest lack of extreme patriotism was enough for "cancellation". It was not hard to find stories of small towns and chruches treating gay people terribly. And about a decade of that treatment led the left to feeling quite a bit of bloodlust. So when power dynamics had shifted enough by the early 2010s there were a bunch of bloodthirsty leftists that were happy to live by the sword.

I made my position clear last week:

https://www.themotte.org/post/1077/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/230501?context=8#context

I suppose when it comes down to it I just want a maximum punishment for the spoken word. And cancellations often go way beyond my nebulous line for what a maximum punishment should be. People should suffer social embarrassment for a day, maybe a week for really bad things. And then it should be let go. The written word can maybe receive twice as harsh of punishments. If they are some form of sociopath that isn't really punished by social embarrassment then we can work something else out as a punishment that is about equally as harsh.

Humans aren't perfect, and sometimes they slip up and say dumb things without realizing they have crossed a line. I don't know if you think you've lived a perfect life and never said anything wrong before, but I know I've certainly said things I shouldn't have. I would like to not lose my livelihood over saying those things. I specifically remember one of the earliest instances of me saying a wrong thing, I was bullied by a kid in Elementary school, in middle school that kid committed suicide, in Highschool I made an edgy joke to a friend about being glad he wasn't around to torment me anymore, the friend winced and didn't laugh. I felt mild social embarrassment, and learned not to joke about that. That is an easy one to describe that I feel safe sharing because I can say I was an idiot in highschool, but I've made dumber and worse speech decisions in my adult life that I'd absolutely not feel safe sharing.

Humans also sometimes hold views that are not socially acceptable or within the Overton window. We are specifically on a forum that has been chased out of a larger social media site, because we want to allow people to say things outside of the Overton window. I am very uncomfortable with social rules that make it impossible to state anything outside of the Overton window. My own Dad often says things that are not acceptable on wider social media. He has been temp-banned on Facebook a few times for things he has said. He isn't really willing to not say some of his thoughts. Banning him from social media doesn't really remove him as a person, he is still out there thinking those forbidden thoughts. "Jokes" are one way to tease out the limits of the Overton window. The attempt to use humor, even if the attempt fails, shows that the person in question cares about social conventions. This is a sign that you don't need to punish them as harshly.

To all those about to say something like "its not fair that they got to be mean! I want to be mean back to them!" Don't worry. In a decade when the right has once again gone too far and the power dynamics switch back I will once again say that we shouldn't be "cancelling" people. But it will be the Left that is not listening. All will become fair over time, and meanwhile I won't be pouring gasoline on the house fire.

Was no one else alive and remembering what the 2000-2010 decade was like?

If you go by my comments on the topic you'll see I'm pro-truce, but this is insane. I was very much alive back then, and on the side that was supposedly getting cancelled, and it was not in any way comparable. "Muh Dixie Chicks" is the best people can come up with from that era. Show me someone who got fired for cracking their knuckles, then we'll talk.

There was widespread low level harassment of gays, arabs, and anti-war people. If the dixie chiks is all you remember then I don't think you really remember. Even as late as 2007 people were freaking out that Ron Paul could say something like "they don't hate us for our freedom, they hate us for our interventions in the middle east", the failure to cancel him was a turning point as well as the general 2008 financial and housing crisis. Bill Mahr got kicked off a TV show for saying that people who committed suicidal terror attacks probably weren't "cowards". Comedians were mostly immune to being cancelled back then, but they loved to be "edgy" by picking at the fanaticism of the right.

Social media wasn't a thing so cancellations weren't as visible and weren't as easily documented. But anyone who grew up in a small town and paid enough attention probably has stories.

If the dixie chiks is all you remember then I don't think you really remember.

It's not all I remember, it's the most egregious example of what I remember, and you haven't brought up anything worse, while I can bring up several worse instances for any one you mention.

Social media wasn't a thing so cancellations weren't as visible and weren't as easily documented. But anyone who grew up in a small town and paid enough attention probably has stories.

Yeah, and on top of the things that are public, people now also have stories that never make it to the media.

My experience in both cancellation waves was only to be booted off a few forums that I didn't like much anyways. I'm not gonna claim I know which one was worse. I find it plausible that one cancellation waves could have been ten times worse than the other one and we wouldn't really be able to notice.

I am only certain that there was a cancellation wave, not how bad it was.

If there has been massive escalation by one side that is only an additional reason for me to worry.

Yeah, fair enough. I do agree with your broader point, I was just unreasonably outraged at the idea it's all the same, and to be fair I'm not exactly an impartial observer.

Only other egregious example I can think of is Rage Against the Machine essentially being blacklisted by any radio stations owned by Clear Channel. But yeah that's nothing compared to a lot of the crap the left has done in the last 14 years or so.

Ward Churchill comes to mind. He was fired for research misconduct in the same way Al Capone was arrested for tax fraud.

I agree with Scott that persecuting people won't teach them anything useful. I recommend a leaf from Ozy's book: separate them from their children, raise the kids in your own culture, use violence only when necessary to eliminate expressions of their culture that might contaminate the succeeding generations.

It's a long-term project, but historical precedent says it can be effective if you're organized and consistent about it.

I'd say that we're witnessing in real time how effective this strategy can be if those before/after college videos are any indication.

got a link? I have no idea which videos you're referring to.

https://tiktok.com/@truth24hr/video/7215886406835572010

This is just an example, and there's absolutely no indication that these captions are real. Also, the poster is obviously a warrior, so make of it what you will.

Is Ozy really that bad? Can you link me to the blog post?

It's very old drama, and one of the several things that moved me from "grew up in fandom and thinks freedom of expression is very important" to "many progressives successfully dedicated themselves to changing my mind."

I'll have to go look for the link.

Edit: here it is.

I do not understand what you wrote.

"one of the several things that moved me from "grew up in fandom and thinks freedom of expression is very important" to "many progressives successfully dedicated themselves to changing my mind.""

This is confusingly written to me

I think what Tinted meant is that, like me and others, they grew up with online fandom (think forums and early social media), steeped in the tits-n'-beer-liberalism milieu, and then watched with horror as GamerGate transpired and revealed just how many people operated on Conflict Theory.

More books, less online. Some anime fandom around the edges. And I was never much of a gamer, unless you count Myst. But none of that mattered. You have the principle.

In many ways it's worse: the meaning of that document rather changes connotations when you find out Ozy's significant other 'contributed' a bunch of e-mails with Scott just after the NYTimes article, all of which Scott had asked him to keep in confidence, and one of Ozy's first examples of compassionate, integrated feminism argued that all that open-minded tolerance from Excluded only applied to "perspectives/experiences of marginalized groups", ie her side specifically to bash Scott.

Maybe Ozy has all the strength of principles about not prosecuting people, but without the ability to present anyone who won't on their side, it's little more than standing on laurels and calling on an army to do the dirty work.

I don’t exactly remember the timeline, but was this after their relationship ended? Can we separate this cleanly from Ozy’s partner simply being a jerk to a flame’s ex-boyfriend?

Come to think of it, this is a good reason to avoid polyamory. Limit your exposure. Works for the clap, too.

They've not made the timeline too clear, but yeah. You could even use the same excuse for Frantz themself.

But I think that's an exception that swallows the rule. A lot of cancel culture involves people with petty disagreements getting blown out into public spaces; dismissing a cancellation because it's driven by a flame's drama turns quickly into throwing out major cases.

I wasn't excusing it or disagreeing with you. In fact my point was to emphasize how petty and personal these incidents end up being, and how little they often have to do with the serious issues theoretically presented rather than interpersonal drama.

It's one of the foundational texts of the culture-war canon, in my view.

Back when this was written, Ozy was well-known as a reasonable, thoughtful pro-SJ blogger, someone who could put some real weight behind "okay, maybe some of these people are crazy, but there's a point here worth considering". I don't read it as proof that they're an especially terrible person. All they do in that essay is play out the necessary implications of liberal Progressivism. The values conflict is in fact real, and there is not in fact anything that can really stop it within a population.

I don't think that Ozy is making a good point in this essay. I don't think that "progressives" and "conservatives" are moral mutants to each other. Mostly my counter-argument would follow similar lines to Scott's essay:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/18/fundamental-value-differences-are-not-that-fundamental/

Also I think that "progressive" and "conservative" are silly, mostly illusory categories. It's more complicated than that, but I do basically think it's a mistake to treat them like elves and dwarves or whatever.

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:

So it's just wrong to model this as tit-for-tat violence. It's 10,000 tits for one tat. And the one tat is a nonpartisan tat that absolutely must hold.

[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:

The right-wingers admit that they have suffered terribly at the hands of cancellation mobs. Okay, check. They admit it’s made them so mad that they want a bloodbath of cancelling liberals harder than anyone has ever been cancelled before. Okay, check.

And now they say . . . that lefties must suffer terribly at the hands of cancellation mobs, because it will teach them that cancellation is wrong?

If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught you that. It obviously hasn’t, so try a different strategy.

"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 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?

I'm on the left and I find the "retaliation" angle here somewhat odd. If done solely or primarily out of retaliation or spite - like Cernovich with Sam Seder - where you do not think someone did something bad for real but you just want to give them a taste of their own medicine, then it feels like stupid, emotional, warmongering bullshit to me and I agree with all of the criticisms of the "right wing cancel squads" that I've seen in the past few days.

If you genuinely think it's really bad to support the attempted assassination of any major political figure, then while there can certainly be a retaliation motive, you're still broadly acting in good faith by trying to get people cancelled. If there's some sort of "I have a principle of supporting freedom of speech and opposing cancel culture but the desire for just deserts is temporarily overriding that at the moment" going on as well - sure, whatever. But if you actually are disgusted and outraged by people endorsing assassination attempts, I really see zero issue with any of these cancellations, because 1) that part of the motive seems "pure", and 2) I personally agree that it's bad to endorse assassinating politicians (including Trump, who I detest) so I feel fine with it.

I'm assuming most of these pro-cancellers on the right aren't just looking for some excuse to cancel annoying leftoids and gleefully jumping on the opportunity. As Scott points out, such behavior is bad and dumb for many reasons, including that one has no evidence any of these assassination-supporters endorse the sorts of cancellations the canceller despises, even if it could be likely. I figure most of the pro-cancellers in this situation just share the logic of most pro-cancellers on the left: they see something they find sickening and corrosive to society and antithetical to morality, and they're doing something about it.

(There's some wiggle room here: a liberal making a joke about the shooting does not necessarily genuinely think the shooting is good or desirable. For the sake of argument I'm speaking about the people who clearly sincerely are saying and believing "I wish the shooter hadn't missed".)

stupid, emotional, warmongering bullshit to me

Is it warmongering to wage war against those who have already started a war with you? Or if it is, is warmongering still a vice in that case?

I'm on the left and I find the "retaliation" angle here somewhat odd. If done solely or primarily out of retaliation or spite - like Cernovich with Sam Seder - where you do not think someone did something bad for real but you just want to give them a taste of their own medicine, then it feels like stupid, emotional, warmongering bullshit to me and I agree with all of the criticisms of the "right wing cancel squads" that I've seen in the past few days.

It's not necessarily pure spite, for some pro-retaliation people it's about making it stop. In my opinion it's a valid approach, but requires better targets then random Home Depot workers.

Wow, an angry rant talking about how the libs really do deserve hatred. Enjoy your trip to the QCs.

This is not a ban message or even a warning, because what you’re saying here is within the rules. At least, I’m fairly confident that’s the case; my eyes glazed over somewhere around the third agonizing metaphor. But compared to your previous screed, it’s positively restrained, so you’re getting credit for improvement.

You’re still missing the point.

Contrary to what certain critics believe, the point of this forum is not to emulate Hitler. It should be abundantly clear that all Hitler’s self-righteous fire did not keep him from being a fuckwit. No, he wallpapered over his incoherent philosophy by speaking to the anger and desperation in his audience. That is not conducive to truth-seeking. If you care about that at all, that feeling of righteousness should be a warning, not a point of pride.

Wow, an angry rant talking about how the libs really do deserve hatred.

Hey look, more proof of a point from my subsequent post:

And this is why the strictest literal letter of the rules here is rarely/only selectively enforced, though who gets the privilege of bending them the most can differ based on mod fiat.

Completely uncharitable and overly simplistic, putting words in my mouth summary of what is essentially a post about game theory and the broader implications/necessity of retaliation to prevent defection? Check. Coming from a mod, so totally kosher and okay? Check. (Would a user have ever been guaranteed to be modded for such a thing? No (as again it depends on who they are anyway). Could they readily have been modded, especially at least with a warning, for such a thing over the course of this forum's existence? The exact probability depends on the time period and who was mod at the moment, but absolutely. As always though the mods here fire confidently and freely on the posters, safe in their nests, while the rest of us fight it out in no man's land waiting to see if a machine gun will suddenly take us out.)

It should be abundantly clear that all Hitler’s self-righteous fire did not keep him from being a fuckwit.

Agreed, in many, if not some of the most important ways, unfortunately. :(

Contrary to what certain critics believe, the point of this forum is not to emulate Hitler.

It shouldn't be to emulate anyone, but that doesn't mean you can't learn from them.

Your mistake is apparently assuming that history, even the "good" history, isn't mostly littered with "fuckwits" or that even the best figures in history weren't "fuckwits" in their own way. I mean, though Hitler made many bad decisions, luck is also a factor. Some of the least "fuckwitty" figures in history were actually still just "fuckwits" with better dice rolls.

If you can't learn from the best aspects of "fuckwits", then you're not really trying to learn IMO. Arrogance is the cousin of ignorance.

No, he wallpapered over his incoherent philosophy by speaking to the anger and desperation in his audience.

Well, that's fine. His philosophy was somewhat incoherent at times (which is often basically inevitable when you have to be an actual leader in the real world who has to unite disparate factions like German Protestants, German/Austrian Catholics, Aryan mystics, vehemently atheist racial science enthusiasts, etc. into unsteady coalitions instead of just posting the Internet). Mine is (mostly) not, I believe. Must it be only the incoherent who wield anger and desperation? Should only criminals have guns?

That is not conducive to truth-seeking.

Truth-seeking, maybe not. Truth-sharing, yes. What's the point of the first without the second? I thought I had a truth, so I coated it in the medicine that I also thought would best make it go down others' mental throats smoothly.

If somebody, like maybe for example you, had posted some amazing logical rhetoric that soundly refuted my central point, then I would have read it with rapt attention, admitted they were right if so, and that would be truth-seeking. (Or perhaps truth-baiting, its cousin. That's what you do when you post something on a forum like this that you think is true. You bait a possible counter-truth, the realer, better truth. I think that's a perfectly valid form of truth seeking.)

Instead I was entirely prevented from speaking for a little bit for communicating the truth a bit too spicily. And now from the same police force I'm receiving similar spice back for pointing that out. Oh well. A lost opportunity for truth-seeking, perhaps?

Pray, where shall I seek the truth you believe I need if none shall put it out there to find? Is your anger at me the real truth, as opposed to my anger at left-wingers? Are you truth-seeking/baiting and/or truth-sharing with your post? Enlighten me.

Or feel free to respond to my original post again, without the mod hat (which seems highly superfluous in this case given that you say you're not even warning me (though it sure seems to me like using a mod hat at all is inherently at least a "quasi-warning", which itself elaborates upon the weird political/power dynamics of this place) and my post is entirely within the boundaries of the rules), and actually engage with my real argument this time. I mean, sorry for the "agonizing metaphors". Feel free to skip them if they don't add anything to your understanding. But the whole post is still only about 12K characters, hardly a novel, and I promise you I didn't waste my time writing it with the intention that it be entirely without substance.

So if you think it doesn't represent the truth that should be sought, perhaps you could present the truth, for the benefit of all of us, that we should be seeking instead of just apparently raging that I invoked the Great Satan? Again, enlighten me.

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"

...

Though I personally am not super attached dogmatically to libertarianism...

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The anti-retaliation side assumes that there are more groups than the two monoliths, of which one is actively doing the titting upon all tatters and the other has only now gained a reprieve to briefly tat upon all titters.

If I'm someone who dislikes the left at their current level of cancel-happiness, yet would dislike the right more if they were in power and would be just as cancel-happy, then blind, cathartic retaliation from the right as soon as they can teaches me that I actually don't want to give them a chance to prove they'll stop canceling as soon as they get the catharsis out of their system.

So again, per my post, do you apply this logic universally? Do you recoil at Little Timmy punching Brad, because you imagine that in all of his resentful little fury he'd probably be just as bad of a schoolyard bully or worse if he had Brad's status?

If "I believe you would behave badly if you were in a position of strength, therefore I can't support your retaliation from a position of weakness in the present moment." is a solid argument against retaliation, then retaliation is basically off the table entirely, because, as the old saying goes, power corrupts. If anybody who might take inappropriate advantage of a position of strength is banned from defending themselves from a position of a weakness, then almost everybody would be banned from defending themselves from a position of weakness.

Among the victims of mass shooters, for example, haven't there almost certainly been some who themselves fantasized about going Columbine occasionally? The types of young men who perpetrate these massacres have also not infrequently been their victims. So if one of these potential victims who likes to indulge in a little GTA and might even do so IRL if they had the power to do it without consequences (as unlike an actual mass shooter they're not willing to give up their life over it) manages to wrest control of a gun from an actual current mass shooter and end him, we should object?

The anti-retaliation side assumes that there are more groups than the two monoliths, of which one is actively doing the titting upon all tatters and the other has only now gained a reprieve to briefly tat upon all titters.

I think this is just a bad assumption. Yes, left vs. right is somewhat reductive, but in regards to the issue of Donald Trump's assassination, splitting people into those two camps is hardly inaccurate.

Your mistake is assuming that "their unprovoked assault, our retaliation" is a correct take on the situation in the first place, because you once again reduce the two coalitions to monoliths. A better analogy would be Little Timmy "retaliating" by punching Kyle, who actually didn't touch him other than standing next to Brad and looking complicit. What is Kyle going to think now? Likely that if he's going to be assaulted anyway (perhaps for some verbal insult against Timmy), he might as well join in on the beatdown.

"I believe you would behave badly if you were in a position of strength, therefore I can't support your retaliation from a position of weakness in the present moment." is a solid argument against retaliation

My argument is "if you don't like the side I'm closer to, how about you start your retaliation with the people who have wronged you most, not the people who are the easiest targets, such as myself. Otherwise, you'll find me closing ranks". If you don't care and see yourself as a perpetual Little Timmy, then be my guest and flail around. I'll keep the enforced pronouns.

A better analogy would be Little Timmy "retaliating" by punching Kyle, who actually didn't touch him other than standing next to Brad and looking complicit.

Which Kyle has been attacked? Because if we consider who has been highlighted as the most innocent victim (the Home Depot cashier), she wasn't targeted for merely "standing next" to anyone or "looking complicit". Nobody is going after people who just happen to merely identify as left-wingers or Democrats, simply automatically assuming they support Trump's assassination (even though of probably many if not most of them do based on their "stopping Hitler" rhetoric), and proceeding from there (as left-wingers meanwhile have often done in the past with anybody who identifies as right-wing in relation to their most hated right-wing beliefs, as anyone who has ever tried to post on Reddit can testify to). She made a direct comment supporting Trump's murder. She is, as I characterized her, Sarah. She cheered Brad on openly and wished for the death of Little Timmy's mom.

My argument is "if you don't like the side I'm closer to, how about you start your retaliation with the people who have wronged you most, not the people who are the easiest targets, such as myself. Otherwise, you'll find me closing ranks".

This just gets into my broader point about tit for tat though. If left-wingers had taken your own prescribed medicine and focused their efforts exclusively on the Trumps and Musks of the world instead of the random people using the "OK" hand sign, then we wouldn't be here. But if you go after our cashiers, as you have for years, why shouldn't we go after yours? Are you just going to stop without any retaliation looming over you? Again, I doubt that.

I'll keep the enforced pronouns.

And we'll keep up the aggressive "misgendering" then. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If not, then the gander has no reason to ever let up on the goose.

So I don't even really see where you're contradicting me.

I actually don't want to give them a chance to prove they'll stop canceling as soon as they get the catharsis out of their system.

You already thought that, though, since you said you would dislike the right more given the same actions.

The right currently claims their principles are against the same actions, though. I'm explaining how being flippant about the Home Depot lady makes me disbelieve that they will act according to those stated principles if given the opportunity.

Can your principles not be against certain actions then if you would ever make use of them as demonstrative retaliation to prove their malice (or just to actively quell a threat/as a deterrent to further harmful actions against you)? If somebody punches me in the face and I punch them back, do I lose any credible claim to being basically more or less against punching people forever then? (Or, to specifically address the Home Depot lady, if I've been punched in the face repeatedly for years, and I punch somebody in the face for being a punchist who posted on social media that they're upset I didn't get punched so hard I died.)

"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!?"

Here's perhaps a better analogy: somebody keeps screaming at the top of his lungs and disrupting things. Which is more useful: screaming back at him, or handcuffing and gagging him so he can't scream anymore?

Scott is suggesting doing the latter, breaking the teeth of the cancellation monster by throwing HR ladies and others in jail until they stop executing the will of the mob. This is not rolling over and playing dead; it's in some ways an escalation. But it's an escalation that accomplishes something and which doesn't burn the commons.

Okay, but the problem is that throwing the HR ladies in jail is presently impossible.

If you can handcuff and gag a person who is screaming at you, then yes, that's the superior option. (Of course it's worth noting that handcuffing and gagging people is in most cases illegal, even if they're screaming at you.)

But if you can't, then screaming back at them is at least superior to doing nothing. I'm pretty sure that, probabilistically speaking, someone who is screaming at somebody else is more likely to stop or at least be interrupted if they're screaming back as opposed to just sitting there and taking it. That's my entire point.

doesn't burn the commons.

The commons being depleted for the exclusive gain of one side < The commons being depleted evenly for the gain of both sides < The commons not being depleted at all

So that argument is irrelevant too. If someone else is destroying the commons, you're not going to stop them by just appealing to the commons (which they're perfectly happy with the state of, because you're giving them a monopoly on abusing it) and refusing to demonstrate to them how it feels to have the commons depleted for somebody else's exclusive gain. That's just more for them.

Quite frankly, I just feel like some people here (not necessarily you @magic9mushroom, but just the anti-retaliation case in general) are almost game theory denialists, like some Flat Earth stuff. Tit for tat is a well established as a ridiculously effective strategy there. That's why it's used productively even in entirely non-political contexts like bandwidth allocation algorithms for decentralized networks. You can come up with as many hypotheticals as you want, as many different ways of phrasing things, but you're not going to make tit for tat bad anymore than you will prove that 2 + 2 = 5.

Okay, but the problem is that throwing the HR ladies in jail is presently impossible.

Indeed, you do not have real power. Your goal should therefore be to get real power, and it mostly looks like the easiest way there* is a coalition with liberals. Liberals don't like cancel mobs, though.

If someone else is destroying the commons, you're not going to stop them by just appealing to the commons (which they're perfectly happy with the state of, because you're giving them a monopoly on abusing it) and refusing to demonstrate to them how it feels to have the commons depleted for somebody else's exclusive gain. That's just more for them.

Indeed, this does not suffice. But that's not what Scott or I are suggesting. We're merely suggesting that you retaliate in an asymmetric way that does not burn the commons - not all retaliation does!

*Well, the easiest reliable way there. The easiest way there is to wait for WWIII to incinerate your enemies for you, but that's not guaranteed to happen.

A "coalition" with people who don't want you to actually fight back (other than in some future magic fairy tale "right moment" where every star has perfectly aligned, which they will almost certainly keep finding a reason to declare hasn't come yet, but just you wait!) because "Nooo be civil, don't be so grossly hypocritical as to attack the people who attacked you first, because remember, if you kill your enemies, they win, and muh commons, so just wait until you're magically in charge of all corporations and can fire all your enemies directly instead (because that's somehow ethically superior)!" (even though if that ever comes to fruition it would have to mean that the right's already won and tactical considerations of seizing power would be irrelevant then anyway, basically making such advice "Don't even try to make any gains until your victory is already fully assured anyway. Surely that'll work right?") is a classic "With 'friends' like these, who needs enemies?" situation, not a path to "real power".

If "liberals" want to interpret liberalism to mean game theory denialism that pretends that tit for tat is not just and effective, then as far as I'm concerned they can keep their "coalition" to themselves and try their luck with the lefties. Surely you'll be able to convince them to shut down their attack mobs, right? Don't think so. (That is, liberals need us more than we need them. Almost no true liberal has ever been attacked in the modern era by right-wingers over it, whereas they tend to share institutions with lefties who love taking their scalps constantly for supporting insufficiently many Stalins. The right has been the only modern refuge for true liberals. If you want to reject the only shred of protection you've got, the only people who have ever gone to bat for you, because they're actually choosing to fight back against their and your mutual enemy now during an obvious opportune moment that's actually presented itself in the real world (instead of waiting for a hypothetical Death Note keikaku from a Substack post to play out), so you can jump out of "principle" on grenades for lefties who already think you're the same "fascists" as us too anyway (and still will after they reward your generosity by gulaging you themselves later), then be our guests. Just don't expect us to jump with you though.)

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.

Upvotes for wall-of-text polemics about how much you hate your enemies are usually just a sign that you got a lot of seals to clap for you. There are quite a few people who regularly nominate the most toxic rants for AAQCs, and people who write very calm and well-reasoned arguments for a very unpopular (usually leftist) viewpoint often get heavily downvoted.

This place isn't as bad as reddit, and sometimes upvotes and downvotes do reflect the quality of a post. But no one should delude themselves that the average Motter isn't prone to using upvotes/downvotes as "Fuck yeah!"" or "Fuck you!" buttons.

If they are intelligent enough to recognize the obvious correctness and virtue of what I wrote (in my view), then I'm happy to have them as clapping seals.

Seals are hardly uncivilized anyway. The delightful tricks they can do often greatly supersede those of my adversaries, such as the many Reddit (since you brought it up) mods who yet possess comparable if not superior amounts of blubber.

Thank you for putting this to words.

This community is unusually good at resisting the urge. On the other hand, it’s a really strong urge, and it benefits from feedback loops we can’t really control. The site would be boring with zero fire, which is part of the reason Deiseach and Hlynka were so well-known. Can’t keep them while trying to enforce civility. Can’t keep their critics if we bend the rules for charisma. Lose-lose.

Well said. I don't upvote very often, but I feel this deserved one. The purpose of the Motte was always supposed to be light rather than heat, but it is often... not the best at shedding that, and sometimes attracts posters more interested in raising the temperature. Let's bring it back down.

The idea that there is some state of pure discourse free of even the hint of antagonism where humans merely discuss, unmolested by concepts like personal interest or context, the culture war without waging it to any degree is a fantasy, unless they're Spock (in which case they aren't human) or some secret time traveler posting from 3050 who finds the whole thing irrelevant. Maybe it's an important or necessary fantasy to prevent a discussion forum from entirely turning into /pol/, so maybe me getting banned for stretching kayfabe a little too much with my prior post was necessary (not that I really think so, but I have no idea where the Culture War Roundup community went or how I can participate in it), but it's still a fantasy.

But no, I wasn't optimizing for heat instead of light in that post. (That's more like a genre of post not uncommonly made on /pol/ that says something like "All women like to be dominated, therefore all Israeli women secretly want BHC (Big Hamas Cock). Only JIDF shills disagree. Prove me wrong, if you work for Mossad. Also, God doesn't exist, and Nick Fuentes is confirmed gay. But don't post in this thread if you have an American flag, because I don't want to talk to mutts who can't stop getting themselves shot." (Pls don't ban me mods for accurately imitating a /pol/ poster like you previously banned me for accurately imitating a black person. It's genuinely just an example to illustrate the difference between what I posted and what actually optimizing for heat is.)) I simply acknowledge that there's no light that doesn't also produce heat, and sometimes the best way to get the kind of light you need effectively is to turn up the heat a bit (whereas with my current post I instead tried a more logic-based rhetorical approach). Again, only in a fantasy world is this never the case.

The only thing strict adherence to the absolute most literal letter most rules here gets you is the culture war still being clearly waged, just in an infuriatingly indirect, passive aggressive fashion, like when Andrew Yang fans would pretend they were entirely non-partisan even though they obviously leaned heavily to the left. (And this is why the strictest literal letter of the rules here is rarely/only selectively enforced, though who gets the privilege of bending them the most can differ based on mod fiat.) I prefer my direct approach, though it's of course necessarily limited by the venue.

And I am traffic as opposed to merely in it? Good. I appreciate the compliment. The only thing that gives me pause about the current state of this world is that I'm not getting in its way enough, not that I'm getting in its way too much. You know who also acted as really infuriating traffic for the drivers on the road once? This guy. Traffic can be a noble thing.

So am I just waging the culture war? No more than basically anybody else here, even if I acknowledge it a bit more than some. Maybe I'll get popped extra/again for rejecting the polite fiction that this is a venue inherently opposed to that, but again if that happens given the pretty anodyne tone of my current posts then that's just a matter of selective enforcement, not reality.

In any case, if you think my prior post was wrong, then you should be happy with the mods here, who banned me and incentivized me to use a different rhetorical strategy this time. Your Motte lives, or at least its naked emperor has not yet ended his alleged fashion show.

The fact you got "upvotes" merely proves that other people on this site are also angry

That's good for me. They should be in my view.

that you are in an echo chamber. What an achievement.

Yes, I'm happy to confirm that some reasonably intelligent people agree with me. (Though according to the OP's count, almost a quarter of voters still disagreed with me, so hardly an echo chamber. Perhaps I just made a good point, even if it wasn't dressed up all fancy in pretending that I have no dog in the fight?)

I remember when expressing anger and hatred wasn't considered a virtue

I remember those days too. They were called the '90s when I lived them. Alas, they've changed some things since then that have affected people's propensity for anger and hatred.

"Kind", no. But I do desire to be relatively unbiased (other than by what I see as the truth) and knowledge-seeking (and it's worth noting that it's the pursuit of "kindness" that often inhibits those two more important values), and I think that I'm at a reasonable level of both and that the quoted paragraph in controversy by no means contradicts that. If effective rhetoric invalidates truth and knowledge-seeking, then there is not a truthful or knowledgeable person on this planet (or if there is, he has zero tools to communicate any of it to the rest of us or at least is apparently not supposed to use them, which seems a bit unproductive to me).

IMO, those ideals are no longer the consensus on this website.

That's the rub, isn't it? Any time you make a venue to attract intelligent people founded on a certain set of principles, if you succeed, those principles will inevitably be challenged, because intelligent people (who you wanted to attract) always challenge principles and ideas. Perhaps by its original standards this place would have stayed better if it had stayed dumber, because dumb people listen and obey.

But yeah, I'm fine with being proud of not being lockstep in agreement with communicative norms inspired by weird Berkeley polysex people who have for the most part collectively accomplished nothing, even easy layups like all getting rich on Bitcoin so they could influence everything with money, other than mostly ruining their reputation in the mainstream. They don't have a monopoly on truth or knowledge-seeking any more than I do, and their blog posts from 2014 or whenever about Edwardian Salafi Confucius Lite etiquette or whatever are not the gospel for all time.

As mentioned too, the people who most adhere to the commandments of "niceness" on this site and other places like it overwhelmingly aren't actually that nice deep down either (including its alleged enforcers, if you'll look at the angry response left on my post by a mod here who chose to don their hat for it despite declaring it not even a warning) I often find. At their best, they're better at keeping the knife hidden behind their back. At their worst, they're merely sneakier about pulling it out and plunging it into your throat before you've even noticed.

That's why I'd rather hear it straight and say it straight, even if pesky human feelings and shocking realities like "conflict" and "People often associate negative emotionality with sociopolitical and cultural issues, especially when those who oppose their preferred beliefs and have hurt them over it appear." end up involved. That to me is helping the pursuit of truth and knowledge. Revealing that I'm biased by what I see as the truth in a particular evidentiary or even emotional (yes, we are not Vulcans, not even the rats) direction is helping the conversation stay overall less biased (or at least transparent about it, which realistically with humans involved is the best you can hope for). Everything else is a smokescreen of little imperial court mandarins just desperately trying not to rock the boat. Boring and pointless.

Personally, I don't think disagreeableness is all that tightly correlated with intelligence, and I certainly don't think that people who feel a need to vent on social media are more intelligent than those who don't.

Maybe not, but I'm not sure that the agreeable are generally more intelligent than the "disagreeable" (assuming in this case that a mere propensity for dissent and adversarial analysis is equivalent to the psychological trait of disagreeableness, but I won't get into the weeds of dissecting that now) either. That means that at a minimum, if you try to draw intelligent people to your platform, you will attract both kinds. In fact, if even just 5% of intelligent people are somewhat "disagreeable" (or actually disagreeable), that's still enough people in raw terms to force every janny online into a jumble daily.

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That's the rub, isn't it? Any time you make a venue to attract intelligent people founded on a certain set of principles, if you succeed, those principles will inevitably be challenged, because intelligent people (who you wanted to attract) always challenge principles and ideas. Perhaps by its original standards this place would have stayed better if it had stayed dumber, because dumb people listen and obey.

There may be a correlation between intelligence and contrarianness, but I think you're going a step beyond that and asserting a correlation between intelligence and aggression, or between intelligence and lack of charity.

I find that much more doubtful.

I will repeat my recent reply to a very similar objection for efficiency's sake in response to you:

Maybe not, but I'm not sure that the agreeable are generally more intelligent than the "disagreeable" (assuming in this case that a mere propensity for dissent and adversarial analysis is equivalent to the psychological trait of disagreeableness, but I won't get into the weeds of dissecting that now) either. That means that at a minimum, if you try to draw intelligent people to your platform, you will attract both kinds. In fact, if even just 5% of intelligent people are somewhat "disagreeable" (or actually disagreeable), that's still enough people in raw terms to force every janny online into a jumble daily.

So while I was perhaps asserting such a correlation (not sure if I want to commit to that or explain more nuance, but it's not super important), and I am perhaps wrong if I was, it's still worth nothing that no such correlation is required for "aggressive", "charity-lacking" (by your standards, as by my standards the mods here often lack the most charity when modding others' posts) people to be all up in your intellectual discussion venue (based on subjective frequency of appearance).

I haven't asserted that agreeability correlates with intelligence either. In fact, I just said that I think plausibly intelligence correlates with being contrarian.

But being contrarian, or even just disagreeableness simpliciter, is not the same thing as being a passionate culture warrior who seeks heat rather than light. I don't particularly care to discuss moderation here, particularly since, in my experience, culture and implicit norms are vastly more important than explicit rule enforcement.

Where I object to what you're saying is that I think you're defending a pugilistic, uncharitable approach to discussion, which I think is opposed to a goal like actually learning. I think a measure of charity, of good-faith curiosity and desire to understand different perspectives, is necessary for intellectual growth, and that's what I think is lacking in what you advocate.

That doesn't mean I think people should be dishonest, passive, or should feign agreement. Forthrightness is an intellectual virtue. But that is still a long way away from a Hitler-like "fire and brimstone" approach.

It may be that fire and brimstone are more persuasive - indeed, if your goal is to sway the public, they almost certainly are. In your top comment, you described Hitler as a 'great rhetorician', and indeed he was. But rhetoricians optimise for persuasiveness, rather than truth-seeking. 'Winning' in the sense of swaying more of an audience is something you may sometimes want to aim for. But here is supposed to be a place about 'winning' in the sense of learning and increasing your understanding.

That's why I think the aggressive, militant approach is wrong here. Soldier mindset, to use Galef's term, may be great for soldiers - but we're not soldiers. This is not a barracks.

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Many people here over the course of years or even decades were probably incubated in the idea that anger or hatred were not virtues, and should be avoided despite our occasional, personal lapses. Your parents, teachers, and media all probably echoed the same sentiments, and this was sold as non-negotiable bedrock. Over time, you realize this isn't actually how things work, and that many of your moral instructors have a hard time even bothering to keep up the act. And so you go from having a sincere belief, to an abstract ideal, to lip service, and it has now bottomed out entirely. A fairy tale has lost its spell, and we are all Spider-Man now.

I don't think this should be license for infinite rudeness or malice. But if we're going to talk about modern cancel culture dynamics and explore the idea of 'revenge' being compatible with 'justice' (for real, not snapping up the drawbridge at "eye for an eye" platitudes), then this ire is a very legitimate data point, and it is ignored at everybody's peril.

I see where Scott is coming from, and it is not even close to overcoming the war memorial I can visualize of victims shitcanned for transgressing progressive values in the most milquetoast ways. And I don't know why I should have to reflect in the mirror and assume I'm the one getting warped because I feel a bit cross.

(Hear, hear! I think this is the first comment I've upvoted on this site.)

There's a lesson to be learned in the idea that justice and hate aren't so clearly delineated. It just needs to be contemplated by more people from more walks of life first.

I disagree with this - the entire reason LessWrong got as big as it got was that Eliezer very much "brought the fire" in the name of advocating for his vision of correct thought. I don't think you can read, say, the Zombies sequence and argue it's cold and passionless.

"What does the god-damned collapse postulate have to do for physicists to reject it? Kill a god-damned puppy?"

I upvoted the parent because I think it's entirely in keeping with that rhetorical lineage.

What do Trudeau conservatives like this want? We can't kill our enemies, because then they win. So when we get power we ??? and profit?

It seems like the overarching theory is that we can induce some sort of stasis where, if everyone behaves and doesn't do anything self serving with power then we can live happily. OK, that's obviously not reality, as this entire rigamarole is fueled by people abusing the power they have. On top of that they have no reason to stop so why would they?

I'm more inclined to chalk this line of thinking to conflict aversion. It's not principle but cowardice.

@WestphalianPeace has a solid idea: win by making the opposition unappealing without removing all their exits.

  • Nazi and Stasi officers alike got their retirements.
  • 60s hippies got real jobs and mortgages and turned into boring adults.
  • Nixon got a pardon and spent 20 years being useful to the state.
  • My grandfather (and the rest of his generation of blue-collar workers) dumped Carter and became lifelong Republicans.

These outcomes are obviously better than stoking a generational feud! Massacring your enemies is a waste.

I really do believe that a boring-ass Mitt Romney candidate would peel away a ton of Democrats. Trudeau equivalents can’t run such a platform because Trump could and would splinter their faction. But it’s the best, proven way to disarm America’s radical left.

@WestphalianPeace has a solid idea: win by making the opposition unappealing without removing all their exits.

Your examples were not that. The Nazis were beaten by main force. The 60s hippies weren't beaten at all. Nixon was beaten before he was pardoned. There may be cases where an enemy, weakened but still dangerous, should be allowed to retreat or surrender and live rather than being wiped out, but the right is not in that position. First they have to be winning, and winning by such a margin that mercy looks like magnanimity rather than weakness.

I really do believe that a boring-ass Mitt Romney candidate would peel away a ton of Democrats.

LOL. Literal boring-ass Mitt Romney got spanked, and the Democrats attacked him with vigor. Dog abuser, binders full of women, "race-mongering pyromaniac", eh?

Eh, that was then, and this is now. The shit flung at Romney was tame by comparison.

He was also running against a healthy, charismatic incumbent in the wake of a recession. Biden hasn’t been very visible, and the closest he’s come to signature legislation is student loan helicopter money. The COVID management was mediocre at best. The infra bill got panned as a DEI sinecure. He didn’t offer the radical centrists much on campaign, but I think they’ve been disappointed.

No, his most important trait is Not Being Trump. Harris is running on a similar “platform”.

If Republicans had that on the table, I’m confident it would be very well received…amongst Democrats. And there’s the rub. So long as Trump can spoil the election, Republicans have to keep his base satisfied. That means not compromising.

No, his most important trait is Not Being Trump. Harris is running on a similar “platform”.

If Republicans had that on the table, I’m confident it would be very well received …amongst Democrats.

Do you mind elaborating on what Being Trump is? It seems to imply that Democrats are turned of by his crassness, and if only the Republicans would field someone more presentable, Democrats would be swayed (while swaying Trump's base in the other direction). The issue I have with this idea is that from hanging out with Trumpists it's less about surface-level characteristics, and really really not wanting another empty suit that will sell them out culturally to progressives, financially to corprations, and send them to fight in foreign wars. You can put someone more presentable with a similar platform, and Democrats will blow the "literally Hilter" gasket just the same (see: DeSantis).

So what is the Trumpness that Republicans are supposed to Not Be?

I think netstack literally means "not being the actual person Donald Trump".

I'm a bit skeptical that this is enough. We already seen some samples of he enhitlering of DeSantis, for example.

You can put someone more presentable with a similar platform, and Democrats will blow the "literally Hilter" gasket just the same (see: DeSantis).

Exhibit B: Van Jones ‘shaking’ over Ramaswamy remarks: ‘That guy is dangerous’

“And the smug, condescending way that he just spews this poison out, is very, very dangerous. Because he won’t stop Trump, but he’s going to outlive Trump by about 50 years,” he said.

“You’re watching the rise of an American demagogue that is a very, very despicable person. And I literally, I was— I was shaking listening to him talk because a lot of people don’t know. That is one step away from Nazi propaganda coming out of his mouth.”

Some right-wing voices advocate for principles and restraint, while others argue for vengeance to teach the left a lesson about the consequences of cancel culture. The article highlights the long history of punitive social practices and argues that adopting a forgiving public ethos is essential to avoid a totalitarian society where everyone is held to impossible standards of public discourse.

But rightists already are. It is like advicating that a rebellion in a death camp will be counter-productive because nazis might massacre those who rise up.

dismantling government support for it,

Stare sponsored persecution of whites and white adjacent peoples will increase in severity with time, as long as the US remains a democracy. In a democracy the vote of Mexican-American, Somali-American or Polish-American each have the same weight, and as the fraction of US citizens with ethnic ties to Europe decreases, the political power of them will follow the same trajectory. So the values held by "legacy Americans" will become less common and be popular to discriminate against.

Don't blindly assume demographic trends will continue forever. WWIII would upend quite a few of them, and it's looking more likely this decade than it has since '91.

The real question was how much blood should be taken, with most responses landing somewhere between "massive" and "infinity".

You seem to be deliberately ignoring the parts where people were saying "Enough until the left no longer uses cancelation as a weapon/realizes what they've unleashed and decide to stop"

Given a realistic model of human behavior, that sounds somewhere between "massive" and "infinity" to me. How long will we keep kidnapping our enemy's children and torturing them to death on stream? Until the blood feud stops. Obviously.

Given a realistic model of human behavior, that sounds somewhere between "massive" and "infinity" to me.

It wasn't "infinity" when it came to gas attacks in World War I. From the link:

The British expressed outrage at Germany's use of poison gas at Ypres and responded by developing their own gas warfare capability. The commander of II Corps, Lieutenant General Sir Charles Ferguson, said of gas:

It is a cowardly form of warfare which does not commend itself to me or other English soldiers ... We cannot win this war unless we kill or incapacitate more of our enemies than they do of us, and if this can only be done by our copying the enemy in his choice of weapons, we must not refuse to do so.

And I'd point out that blood feuds did end. Indeed, the development of "compensatory" law systems like weregild, or Somali xeer law, arose because people on all sides became tired of the costs of retaliation. Same with the European wars of religion giving rise to the Peace of Westphalia. The same with chemical weapons after WWI as mentioned above.

"Unilateral disarmament" is not a path to bilateral disarmament, and it is a path to peace only in that it's a recipe for the defeat of the side that adopts it. Indeed, the Left cancelling the Right would come to an end if the Right ceased to exist. But otherwise, as with the wars mentioned above, the only way out is through — the only way to get the side using these weapons to lay them down is when they're just as tired of being on the receiving end as the other guys.

All that said, I think that this current example is tactically unwise, and not something the right should be pursuing. It's too early, too weak, poorly aimed, and a diversion of effort best spent elsewhere.

People like to complain about blood feuds and the pointless deaths they caused, they don't seem to complain as much about the people who chose not to fight and were slowly thrown in the dustbins of history.

Scott and all the people who want to play the principled libertarian game don't understand that this isn't the game we're playing. We can only play that game in a society where somebody has won the power game. And to win that one you have to play by its rules. Or you lose.

We can't end blood feuds without a sovereign monopolizing force.

Either the state bans political firings, someone sacrifices enough cultural capital to make it more costly to fire somebody over politics than not firing them, or the weapon keeps being used by both sides. You'd think rats of all people would understand that Unconditional Cooperation is a bad strategy in iterated games like this one.

I read a bit, and then started skimming. Not enraged, just disagree with a few points (though I guess I was a voice of relative restraint):

1. Nobody Learns Anything Useful From Being Persecuted

(...) And now they say . . . that lefties must suffer terribly at the hands of cancellation mobs, because it will teach them that cancellation is wrong?

If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught you that. It obviously hasn’t, so try a different strategy.

That's silly. They don't want to do it because they think it's good, they think it's bad, and that his bad thing needs to be done to the people who were doing it with impunity for the past decade. So yes, it has taught them that it's bad.

3. You’re Not Debating Whether To Become Like Woke People, You’re Already Like Woke People

(...) One of the fundamental problems with wokeness was that it believed in collective guilt and collective punishment.

Much like his point about the necessity to define Cancel Culture, I think we need to sit down and talk out the limits of individualism and collectivism. Yes, I agree full-collectivism is bad, but full-individualism is plainly unworkable, and opens you to attack from hostile groups. We mostly know this already - no one is going to treat a hundred thousand Russian soldiers the same way they'd treat a hundred thousand individual Russians they met somewhere. Now one might protest it's obviously different, because an army is an official organization, with uniforms that makes your membership clearly visible from a distance, but I regret to inform you that not all collectives (not even all armies) are kind enough to uniform themselves, or have a clear hierarchical command structure, with a chain of responsibility.

I'd argue half the reason we're in this mess to start with is individualists insisting on individualism, and getting their ass handed to them by collectivists as a result.

I don't have answers here, but I think the question does need to be raised.

5. Most Cancellations Are Friendly Fire

(...) But they’re not stories about Trump, Tucker Carlson, or Nick Fuentes. The median victim of cancel culture is some center-left college professor who sent out an email saying that he supports BLM but questions some of their tactics.

I'd counter by pointing out that Nick Fuentes is, quite possibly, The Most Cancelled Man In America. Aside from that - I stood for a lot of these people when they were getting shot at, and was shot at myself for doing so, you don't get to push me away from them now, just because you've mentally put me in the "red" basket.

9. There’s Probably Other Options

All fine and well, but if you want to avoid a cycle of vengence, you have to at least offer some restitution (everyone that got throttled by Big Tech, will now have to be promoted by the algorithm!), or offer a different venue for the bloodlust. Here's my humble contribution: make it legal for cancellation victims to challenge their cancelers to a duel, and illegal for the cancelers to decline. If you got me fired for the OK handisgn, I get to pommel you in the Octagon until you black out. Bloodlust satisfied, no need for more cancellations, and we even have a mechanism to prevent future cancel mobs!

I think honestly people do learn from being persecuted. If they didn’t we’d never have gotten to this point. The very public cancellations will have some impact if they continue for longer, just like the Budlight thing is having an impact. I’ve noted a decline in public companies making overtly political statements since then. A lot of Pride related merchandising has declined. Companies are somewhat less vocal about DEI since the backlash against that.

What seems to work is targeted cancellations over a long enough time and having mere apologies not being enough.

The real question was how much blood should be taken, with most responses landing somewhere between "massive" and "infinity".

To play Devil's Advocate for a bit, I'm not sure the answer should be zero either. The historical parallel that comes to mind is the difference in long-term outcome between WWI and WWII. Germany lost both, but at the end of the first hadn't really suffered any major damage to its infrastructure or civilian population, since the front lines were mostly beyond their borders. Belgium and parts of France certainly got hit hard, but I can't help but look at how the second war weaved its narrative around the aftermath of the first: Versailles was unfair, but wasn't even fully enforced, and a generation later Germans were thinking not that the lesson to take away was that simultaneously fighting Russia, France, and the UK was doomed to failure, but that "this time, it'll be different." But the lesson from the second, even before the country was split among occupying forces for several generations, was (loosely) "nothing we could have won would have been worth it."

I can't help but think that to at least some extent, history teaches the costs of the war need to be at least plausibly fairly distributed to discourage revanchism. And I think that could easily be applied to the Culture War: yes, that absolutely sucks for the victims, but ensuring a long-term stable peace is plausibly cheaper than the short term concerns here. Giving one's opponent, after they've inflicted a serious beating, a chance to tap out before getting hit back seems like a recipe for convincing enough people that it might be worth it to try again later.

On the other hand, I don't wholly endorse this view: I generally side with Asimov that "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." But I don't think the idea is completely meritless either.

A public cancellation works a lot like a public execution: everyone viewing it becomes afraid of committing the same infraction. This occurs whether or not you think the person did the crime or deserved to be punished. It changes psychology mechanically, according to the number of trials / iterations of one stimuli paired with a feared stimuli. It works best when the exposure is random, and in this case it works best when the cancelleé is capriciously chosen and otherwise unworthy of attention. (“If even she can be cancelled, I can too.”) There’s a reason that when we write online, we feel some fear at fully writing the N-Word, and some people feel fear writing faggot and retard, not because of some ethical position everyone developed over decades, but because they have experienced trials that paired this formerly neutral word with a punishment. So when we talk about canceling blameless old ladies, we do have to consider that there are significant social consequences to the act of public consequences, making prominent progressives and liberals on Twitter a little afraid of doing similar things.

I don't feel particularly enraged but I do think this post is the most clear-cut example of mistake vs. conflict theory I've seen in years if not ever - an acclaimed grandmaster of mistake theory politely addresses one side of the culture war (I don't have my dictionary but I think a "war" can be pictured as a kind of conflict), helpfully suggests that their course of action may be, well, a mistake, and is shocked to discover the apparent persuasive power of yes_chad.jpg. While I do not dare doubt Scott's ulterior motives and believe he really is this naive principled, I refuse to believe he is not aware of what he's arguing, he is this close to realizing it (emphasis mine):

From the Right’s perspective, <...> the moment they get some chance to retaliate, their enemies say “Hey, bro, come on, being mean is morally wrong, you’ve got to be immaculately kind and law-abiding now that it’s your turn”, while still obviously holding behind their back the dagger they plan to use as soon as they’re on top again.

Followed by 9 points of reminding stab victims that daggers are dangerous weapons, and one shouldn't swing them recklessly - someone could get hurt!

Disregarding whether or not the broadly painted enemies-of-the-right are in fact going to go right back to swinging daggers the millisecond the cultural headwind blows their way again (although the answer seems intuitive) - what compelling reason, at this point, is there to believe they would not? Does he really think that gracefully turning the other cheek will magically convince anyone on the obviously dominant side that cancel culture is bad actually - or (less charitably) even lead to any, any "are we the baddies" entry-level introspection among those involved at all? Does he expect anyone at all to be reassured by a reminder that daggers can't legally enter your body without your consent? I suppose he really does since from his list only 8) can be read as a psyop attempt and everything else seems to be entirely genuine, but I'll freely admit this mindset is alien to me.

Does he really think that gracefully turning the other cheek will magically convince anyone on the obviously dominant side that cancel culture is bad actually - or (less charitably) even lead to any, any "are we the baddies" entry-level introspection among those involved at all?

Do the people rationalizing the escalatory course of action as "something we'll do until the other side learns to stop" really think that their actions will lead to any basic "are we the baddies"-type introspection on the left?

No, I don't think any possible actions, up to and including total surrender, will spark introspection.

(that was the joke)

Besides, {russell:fighting back/lashing out/escalatory course of action} once in a while has a far better track record of effectively stopping bullying than just gracefully taking it.

Do the "let's unilaterally surrender" people think the beatings will stop if only we submit more meekly?

"Don't fire back at them when they are shelling us. That will only make them shoot at us even more."

Nonviolence/nonslander as a response to violence/slander is a known part of game theory. It only works when someone on the side of the aggressors has both the introspection to see their actions as wrong and the power to halt the aggression. Otherwise, it’ll have to be tit-for-tat for survival.

At the moment, all such people are on the right, except maybe Obama, Oprah, and Anderson Cooper. (I’m only calling out names the undecided voters would consider following if they called for peace in the culture war.)

I don't think it will lead to introspection by most people on the left; most people in general are incapable of "are we the baddies"-type introspection. An escalatory course of action is likely to lead to a change in behavior by the left because when it's widely known that (doing whatever left-coded thing the right is able to push outside the overton window) will cost you your job, friends, social status, etc. then most people will stop doing that thing. The masses will make posthoc rationalizations for why they were justified in their prior behavior but now they know better.

If the right continues to "take the high ground", there's no reason for the masses to ever change their behavior or beliefs. The right would have to wait until the majority of the left decides to perform that "are we the baddies"-type introspection, and that will never happen.

If the right continues to "take the high ground", there's no reason for the masses to ever change their behavior or beliefs.

On the contrary: if the right abuses the tactics the left does, there's no reason that the masses will ever change their behavior or beliefs. They will see "the right is a bunch of hypocrites" (and they will be correct to do so), and continue to fight to put the screws to their enemies. After all, they thought the right was evil before, the right confirmed it in their eyes, so why shouldn't they fight to put them out of existence?

That's why people keep saying to not escalate things into a cycle of hatred where each side stabs the other as soon as it gets ahold of a dagger. Taking the high road is not a sufficient condition for peace, but it is necessary. Taking the low road simply ensures the conflict will continue unabated.

That does not match my predictions of social behavior or my reading of history. People do not pick sides based on which they view is more of a hypocrite; they pick sides mostly based on what's socially acceptable. The Peace of Westphalia was not negotiated because the Catholics "turned the other cheek" so much that the Protestants felt guilty. It was because everyone got tired of the killing.

The responses to StickerMule's milquetoast post-assassination-attempt call for unity tell me that the left is not close to being tired of the metaphorical killing.

People have already picked sides. The goal at this point is not "get people to pick my side", it's "get people who have already chosen the other side to stand down". And those people are going to double down, not stand down, if the right persists in this hypocrisy on cancel culture.

"Pick sides" in this context is "we should get our enemies fired from their jobs" vs "we should abstain from doing that". Apologies if that wasn't clear.

Regardless, that does not match my predictions of social behavior or my reading of history. From the standpoint of the right, the choices are:

  1. Your proposal, where the right takes the high road and keeps losing the culture war until they cease to exist, or
  2. Double down, expect the left to double down, and let it keep getting worse until both sides agree to stop

I disagree with your analysis. The two choices are, in my view:

  1. Take the high road, and by doing so gain credibility with the left which can be used to cool tensions, or

  2. Double down, expect the left to double down, and let it keep getting worse until both sides agree to stop. Which they may never, and it may not be in our lifetimes.

Option 1 is the clear superior choice in my view. Also note that in option 2, someone still needs to take the high road eventually. So long as people are thinking in terms of "fuck the other guy, it's his turn to get kicked now" (which is what many in this forum have explicitly argued for), the conflict in #2 will never actually end.

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and let it keep getting worse until both sides agree to stop

Do you have some reason to believe this is going to happen? Cold civil war turning to hot civil war seems much likelier.

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This is just a reverse application of “When I am Weaker Than You, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom Because that is according to my principles.

First there was cancel culture, with people of all walks of life getting canceled for going against the party narrative (remember the scientist who got canceled for his shirt). Then (interestingly seems to have starred around the time Elon took over twitter) a denial that there is such a thing as cancel culture, and it is just a right wing boogeyman (eg how can cancel culture exist if Shane Gillis is more popular now than when he was canceled from snl) . Now, we’re at the stage when the right is using cancel culture and the left is angry it exists.

The left is very good at progressing by disavowing it’s failures (eg eugenics) and only remembering its successes.

Hopefully cancel culture will be one of those failures, but I think it is too much a part of human nature to ever go away.

Then (interestingly seems to have starred around the time Elon took over twitter) a denial that there is such a thing as cancel culture

I think you have your timeline wrong, I vividly remember having an argument with a girl in 2021 in which she insisted that cancel culture didn't exist and it was just a right-wing phantom.

Then (interestingly seems to have starred around the time Elon took over twitter) a denial that there is such a thing as cancel culture

Huh? I am not very good at recalling exact dates, but I seem to remember "Cancel culture does not exist" being a thing at the tail end of the BLM2 riots, but before Biden got elected. I know time is going fast nowadays, but that's at least few years before Elon started talking about buying Twitter, isn't it?

You’re probably right. I’ve been hearing it more and more frequently lately and associated it with twitter being a more free place and cancellation not working as well as it once did.

I seem to remember "Cancel culture does not exist" being a thing at the tail end of the BLM2 riots, but before Biden got elected.

There have been plenty of writers advocating that position, but I'm not sure it's really distinct from the classic "it doesn't exist, but it's good actually" argument. It would amuse my internal memeplex if it started getting quoted back to the the cancelled who were previously cancellers, but I'm not sure that includes the lady from Home Depot.

I want to register my distaste for quoting and upvote-analyzing prior discussions, and for ChatGPT summaries of articles. Idk that it's worth reporting, but it feels like something that shouldn't be done often. If you can't be arsed to summarize it yourself and the readers can't be arsed to read it, maybe just let it go.

The debate on this just reminds me that there are approximately seven principled libertarians, and everyone else is just using libertarian arguments when convenient. This goes at least back to the States Rights arguments around slavery that lead to the American Civil War, which flipped completely in regional and political valence the moment Abe Lincoln got elected. The slave states were pro-federal-power to enforce the fugitive slave acts, right up until they saw that power likely to be turned against slavery.

I want to register my distaste for quoting and upvote-analyzing prior discussions

This one doesn't bother me. The sentiment / revealed consensus of TheMotte is a valid topic of discussion for TheMotte, and past comments can serve as important data for many conversations.

ChatGPT summaries of articles

This one I agree with. LLM summaries shouldn't serve as a replacement for your own analysis and commentary, even when they're marked as such.

The sentiment / revealed consensus of TheMotte is a valid topic of discussion for TheMotte, and past comments can serve as important data for many conversations.

If you want to reply to a particular comment, reply to it directly and keep that thread going. Don't start a whole new argument trying to take the high ground looking down on them. Upvote analysis doesn't show revealed preferences accurately, it mostly shows the attention economy, a lot of which has to do with timing.

This is not a warning, in the sense that I'm not putting a note on your account, but I have two moderator-level questions about your post that I'd be interested in an honest response to, if possible.

The first is your rhetoric concerning the Motte. You wrote:

...while there were some voices calling for restraint...

Which can actually literally mean anywhere from one voice, to all voices; from a small majority to a large one, and anywhere in between. Then you wrote:

...many commenters demanded blood from the left...

Which literally means the same thing as the first part of that sentence, in reverse. However you chose "many" instead of "some," which paints a certain picture of this space. You then dropped four quotes. But weirdly, the first and fourth quotes are from the same post, and it is a post for which that user got banned, which you don't mention. So my first question is: why did you decide to portray the discussion here with such uncharitable rhetoric?

The Motte exists as text. One of the things that sometimes happens to places like this is, what sets them apart from other spaces gets amplified as it gets noticed. So for example people notice that reddit is a teeming hive of fedora-wearing atheists, which attracts more fedora-wearing atheists (and repels non-fedora-wearing-atheists) until the admin slashes-and-burns their way through the algorithm (or whatever), converting the site to a teeming hive of reflexively woke young adults. In a way I suspect this is analogous to Flanderization, but with a community rather than a fictional character. Maybe sociologists have a name for this process?

Anyway, this is a space for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. But our "open debate, no positions banned" policy meant that people with Overton-suppressed political views found this space unusually welcoming. One way we try to tamp down the "seven zillion witches" problem that this eventually Flanderizes to is by emphasizing individual arguments over discussion of "groups" wherever possible. I have often repeated the line "you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic" to people who make sweeping claims about the Motte. It applies to your post, here: the reason I don't want people making claims about the Motte is that I think it tends to Flanderize the space. People read your claim, and it shifts, however slightly, their priors on whether this space is "for them." But of course it's for them! As long as they follow the rules, this space is for everyone, no matter what they believe. That's the foundation; that's the bedrock.

My second question is: why did you include the ChatGPT summary? Did you feel the need to provide a summary but didn't feel up to writing one yourself? Were you just padding your word count in hopes of avoiding a "low effort" moderation action? I'm not accusing you of anything, mind--I'm just curious. You have a pretty good posting history so I was caught off guard by it. Not only does generative AI minimize engagement with your audience, it minimizes your own engagement with the text you're citing. No one benefits from it. It seems to me that ChatGPT quotes are quinessential low-effort participation, unless maybe you're showing your work on a post specifically about generative AI or something. I don't think we've explicitly made it against the rules but I do think it's incompatible with the rules we've got--but maybe I'm overlooking something.

For your first question, you contend that I'm interpreting the conversation in that other thread uncharitably, but I don't think I am. In my eyes, those calling the cancellations justified were a bit more common than those calling explicitly for restraint. It wasn't by a massive amount, and the exact split would come down to how you'd classify some of the people who were ambivalent. But for a quick calculation, check out the upvote totals in this back and forth between KMC and EverythingIsFine. For further evidence, confuciuscorndog's post is what I'd consider to be the most repugnant. This was the one with "eat their own dogfood" bit and the explanation of just how much he wouldn't care if this woman killed herself. Credit where it's due, this post was modded since it flagrantly broke the rules, but even despite this, the reaction from onlookers was "yes, this is the type of content we want to see more of", voted Motte users by more than a 3:1 margin. Then, the post explaining why he was getting modded stands at a nearly equal vote ratio.

You're correct the first and fourth quotes I had were from the same post. I think they're both quite extraordinary and worth highlighting, but I should have kept them together and noted they were from the same post. This was sloppiness on my part and I've corrected it. But... I also wasn't terribly short on bombastic quotes. I've added a few others to the pile after I've reread some of that other thread.

I understand your point about flanderization, and how it can become a self-fulfilling if people keep repeating it even if it's not necessarily true. But the way you're presenting it seems a bit overbroad here. A blanket ban on meta discussions of the forum's ideological split would be to put our heads in the sand and ignore an obvious phenomenon. As it happens, I've been having a relatively bad time with this site recently. One part of it has been conversations with a handful of users that have degenerated to accusations of dishonesty, ad hominems, or disrespect in ways that clearly violate the spirit of the rules while apparently doing just enough to avoid being modded. As someone who has views across the political spectrum, it's hard not to notice that my right-leaning views are received well, my center views are received somewhat well, and my left-leaning views are received with scorn and derision. I've been meaning to do a top-level post on this to make sure it's not just all in my head, but then one presidential candidate got shot in the head, and the other dropped out.

For your second question on chatGPT, I've gotten mostly positive reviews when I've posted summaries on other relatively high quality subs like /r/slatestarcodex and /r/credibledefense. By that, I mean nobody questioned it and people responded to the points earnestly. I don't really like writing summaries but people seem to expect them and it's the type of rote thing that I'd expect an LLM to excel at. Though, notably, I didn't include the fact that it was AI-generated in my other tests, so I'm wondering if there's some placebo effect going on here.

Somebody else pointed out that it might be hallucinating so I've replaced it with Scott's 9 points.

Thanks for the response.

Discussions of the meta are not banned, of course--and I would re-emphasize that my analysis of your comment was not intended in any punitive way. Several users have raised concerns about a slide in the quality of discourse. Two mods have left the site, citing this as a reason. "The discourse is degrading" is not a new accusation; analogous complaints are arguably why the CW thread got kicked off the SSC subreddit in the first place. I've been moderating for something like five years and "the discourse is degrading" has been a steady drumbeat all along. And yet some of the most highly informative and uniquely insightful posts ever contributed to the CW thread were written long ago by users with names like "yodatsracist" and "trannyporno."

So I'm (yes, probably as an exercise in futility) trying to understand the shape of what's really going on. The Sneer Club subreddit (now defunct) was created eight years ago. Most of Scott Alexander's best culture war posts were written in 2014. The underlying mechanism of being "a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases" has contributed to the development of numerous semi-famous and arguably even influential substack writers and podcasters and the like. And yes--it has also resulted in a metric shit-ton of weird stuff, conspiracy-theory level madness, flat-earther tier denials of reality, etc. It has always been that bad, and it has always been that great. And as specific individuals have found its usefulness to them personally to expire, they have on many occasions departed with the declaration that now the Motte is just too much a hive of scum and villainy. But... maybe this time it's different? That's kind of what I'm trying to understand.

I myself no longer find the CW thread as useful as it has been to me in the past! But that's very much about me. The idea of freewheeling discourse being totally cool was well within the Overton window before 2016 introduced the idea of a "Misinformation Age" (whether things actually happened that way or not), and today, well... today people are much more concerned about epistemic hygiene, I guess would be the charitable way to say it. "Wrongthink bad" is not a new idea, but I daresay it is much more fashionable now than it was ten years ago.

I don't know where that leaves us. I've never been the solutions person. I know @ZorbaTHut has expressed some desire to implement solutions in the form of code, but the demands of day jobs are a curse upon us all. (Isn't there something in the Bible about that?) Anyway, thanks for answering my questions, I appreciate the effort and reflection.

Two mods have left the site

I saw TracingWoodgrains posts about leaving here. Who was the other one?

It's wrong to analyze this event through the lens of a cycle of escalating violence. I did it myself, before I realized that isn't what's going on.

Left-wing cancel culture is when someone loses their job for violating any norm of the Left, no matter how unpopular and niche. It can be as small as donating years prior to support a popular California ballot measure. Or it can be literally violating a norm that the Left just made up (such as the gentleman that got cancelled for making an "OK" sign out his truck window).

Right-wing cancel culture is basically nonexistent. You can't get cancelled for blaspheming Christ, for example. The man who made a work of art out of statue of Christ in a jar of his own piss received government grants. There is only a small window of power here for celebrating the recent assassination attempt on their political candidate. It will probably last only a few weeks. And it only works because mainstream leftists are willing to support the taboo. It's a good thing they are! This means we are still in a state of politics, and not in a state of war, despite all the rhetoric about Trump being an existential threat to the system.

This taboo against celebrating political assassination is not a partisan thing. It's a load-bearing taboo for our system of government. We depend on political assassinations being rare for our way of life to exist. This taboo absolutely must not erode, or we descend into a system of election by carbomb.

So it's just wrong to model this as tit-for-tat violence. It's 10,000 tits for one tat. And the one tat is a nonpartisan tat that absolutely must hold.

That sounds like Russell conjugation. “I am firm, he is obstinate, you are making up norms as you go.” I expect the people cancelling, uh, Justin Timberlake insist that cultural appropriation is very serious business.

You’re right to be skeptical when a Twitter tankie suddenly discovers that cancellation is immoral. The converse is skepticism towards people announcing that, hey, this cancellation thing feels pretty good! Perhaps they don’t have the purest of motives?

I think there’s a solid case for reluctant enforcement of this critical taboo. I don’t think that it’s the most likely explanation for what we’re seeing. Triumphalism is usually a sign of the same old tribal psychology; this case isn’t any different.

The left claims things like saying "there are only two genders" creates a culture of violence that makes society hostile towards the marginalized and that people who say it deserve to be punished to deter further harm. And I claim that celebrating a recent assassination attempt, especially in public by people of influence, is a bad thing that could make the Republic unravel.

Maybe these are rival perspectives both equally blinded by partisanship. Or maybe one is a true, time-tested fact borne out of hard-won political wisdom and the other is ephemeral revolutionary nonsense.

“People of influence” like Home Depot clerks?

Look, I’d find your argument a lot more convincing if you could point to any left-leaning cancellations which you think clear this bar. Maybe the time they threatened Supreme Court justices in their homes? Those are pretty influential. Or prominent MeToo allegations, given the time-tested political wisdom of defending women.

Surely your criteria don’t exactly line up with your pre-existing politics.

Physical intimidation of Supreme Court Justices is another example of substituting violence or the threat thereof for the political process. Of course I don't support it. It's a shame those who did that were not made an example of, excepting the one who brought a gun to Kavanaugh's house. It's a "loophole" in our democratic system that if left open leads to the collapse of the whole system. Just like the loophole of politicians moving about the

If you're looking for a right-wing version of violating this principle, the correct example is January 6. Though it is notable that significant deterrence was inflicted on the perpetrators in that case. The justice system, acting under the cover of the media-propaganda system, was capable of punishing those who took part in it.

The situation in America is not symmetrical between Right and Left so I reject any implicit demand to find a balanced criticism of each. I live in fear of Left cancellation. All my friends who were cancelled were cancelled by the Left. People who go to university have to swear fealty to the Left. I won't pretend that the Right shares in the Left's flaws equally, because it is not true. The couple of days that you weren't allowed to wish death on Trump in public just aren't the same kind of thing as the decade+ of threat I've experienced from the Left.

One of the things Scott does not bring up is the lack of an easy narrative from the anti-woke right to allow people to an easy out. If you want victory over your opponents then make it narratively easy for people to recuse themselves until your opponent's coalition is miniscule. Give them plausible deniability, even if it's hollow. Make it as cheap as possible to defect from a coalition.

Your inspiration should be Winston Churchill fighting on behalf of Eastern Front legend General Erich Von Manstein to get him cleared of war crimes charges.

Within living memory of the war itself America & Europe constructed a narrative that recast Nazi's on the Eastern Front into Simple Soldiers merely Doing Their Duty, unaware of the war crimes amidst them. Even the former SS members were recast as what David Glantz describes "above reproach, knights engaged in a crusade to defend Western civilization against the barbaric hordes of Bolshevism". Which is bullshit of course, and to be clear Glantz arguing against this absurdity. But consider the power of the following narrative in giving people an out from their previous enmeshment with a regime.

The German army, or Wehrmacht, fought a "clean" and valiant war against the Soviet Union, devoid of ideology and atrocity. The German officer caste did not share Hitler's ideological precepts and blamed the SS and other Nazi paramilitary organizations for creating the war of racial enslavement and extermination that the conflict became.

The German Landser, or soldier, as far as conditions allowed, was generally paternal and kind to the Soviet citizens and uninterested in Soviet Jewry. That the German military lost this war was due in no way to its battlefield acumen, but to a combination of external factors, first and foremost Hitler's decisions. According to this myth, the defeat of Germany on the Eastern Front constituted a tragedy, not just for Germans, but for Western civilization.

For decades that narrative gave people an excuse. It took until the 90's for Germans to confront the reality of what the Wehrmacht did. But in that crucial period after the war there was a narrative path for millions of people to distance themselves from evil. Interested WW2 amateurs today decry the existence of wehraboo's and how many Japanese and West German officials were former members of their respective regimes but when I compare what happened with de-baathification it sure looks pretty efficacious.

and what's remarkable is that Scott directly links to Yarvin but only regarding Yarvin's coining of the term Brown Scare. And merely linking to Yarvin is a massive risk to Scott's reputability. But in spite of taking that risk he avoids the more relevant to the point at hand which is that Yarvin, from the ultra-right, makes a similar case for avoiding cycles of retaliation by means of giving people an out.

"There's a funny fact about regime change. The federal republic of Germany is still paying pensions not only to retired Stasi officers but also to retired Wehrmacht officers. It is accepted that both of those regimes were Germany. If you served those regimes, and you wern't some major criminal who was prosecuted, yeah, you're entitled to your pension. And the way that shut down worked is, that the day the doors of the stasi building were closed and these people were sent home, you couldn't reboot that system."

Yarvin is also fond of telling parables of Caesar constantly forgiving his enemies. He tells a tale of Caesar winning a battle and scavenging a bag full of letters that would allow his faction to engage in reprisals against every single person who supported his enemies. And that's Caesar's response was to burn the bag. A point independently echoed by Mike Duncan of the History of Rome podcast where Duncan points out that resolution of the civil war basically required someone to take it on the chin and not engage in property confiscation and tribunals after total victory.

So lets simplify and add one more bullet to Scott's list at the end of how to approach this problem instead of massive retaliation.

  1. Remove the laws that give rise to this culture
  2. Encourage universities to follow the Chicago Principles
  3. Improve internet moderation
  4. Make what Cancel Culture is explicit, not generable
  5. Weave a narrative that allows for mass defection

after total victory.

That's the part you're eliding. After, it is possible. Before, it is not.

I agree strongly with this. In practice I think part of the difficulty is “oh I didn’t realize it before but now I get it” is a very common narrative but can be difficult to tolerate.

See the non-stop rampant accusations of “you just didn't care until it affected you!”

Maybe we need to accept chad_yes.jpg as a valid response….

You conveniently omit the fact that despite his forgiving nature, Caesar was killed by people he forgave and another destructive Civil War ensued. What happened with Augustus is that he learned his lesson. He was murderous in his purges of hardcore elite - he had no issues with Marc Anthony's murder of Cicero and he ruthlessly persecuted hundreds of senators and other opponents. He also utilized other people like his second in command Agrippa to supposedly "overdo" some of the atrocities, only for Augustus to step in as a merciful one to chastise his supposedly overzealeous pet general while of course building huge temples for him as well.

It is similar to denazification: you need to have a way out for some people, but you also have to ruthlessly crush your main opponents and hang them like dogs in order to provide some incentives to defect. Otherwise you only invite snakes like Brutus to stab you in the back.

Per Machiavelli, you should do your evil all at once, then blame the subordinate you had do it, execute him and after that be conciliatory.


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