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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   41854 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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In the days following Charlie Kirk's murder, has seen a wave of employers being contacted regarding off-color remarks made by employees on social media about his passing. The debate is, does this constitute cancel culture, but by the right instead of the typical left? Some have argued that it is not the same thing, due to the disparaging comments being immediate, vs old comments dredged up in an attempt to cancel someone. There is a big difference between someone desecrating Charlie Kirk in an overt manner right after his passing, compared to a social media post made 10+ years ago against living targets that could be deemed as racist only under the most uncharitable light.

My take is, contacting an employer with the intent of getting someone fired for something not work-related or fired in the public interest as a 'concerned citizen', by definition, is cancel culture. Sure, one can argue that this is a different degree of cancelation, but it's the same principle. Someone posting a vile comment on his social media celebrating someone's death doesn’t necessarily affect his ability to do his job, like making sandwiches or whatever. Sure, if said individual confessed on social media to spitting in customers' sandwiches or making disparaging remarks about customers, go ahead and get his ass fired to protect the customers if no one else. But this is not like that. Consumers and other employees are not negatively affected by an employee holding a grudge against a dead podcaster.

To turn the tables, imagine if George Soros died and many of those same people wrote "good riddance" on their social media accounts, should this be grounds for cancelation? By the above logic, yes if you want to be morally consistent.

relevant tweet https://x.com/politicalmath/status/1967066826590028174

To turn the tables, imagine if George Soros died

IMO there is a very important difference between someone dying (in an accident, of natural causes) and someone being murdered. In the second case you are walking a fine line between criticizing someone who died (ok) and celebrating political assassination (not ok).

That said my rules > your rules applied fairly > your rules applied unfairly, as always. Until cancellation is taken off the table as a viable weapon the equilibrium is always going to end up being that if you can use it you use it.

Also there's been plenty of massive celebrations of the deaths of Thatcher, Kissinger etcetera without any meaningful right wing cancellation. Kirk situation pretty clearly crossed a line in a few ways

Kirk happened in the age of social media's over-socialization engine, which amplifies everything

Okay. I'll grant it's cancel culture. So what? Cancel culture is a weapon invented by my enemy. This is war. We did not ask for this war. We did not instigate it. For fifteen years, they have been bombarding us with a terrible new weapon against which we have little defense. Cancel culture has in large part forced us underground. We won recent political and cultural victories only with great sacrifice, and then only barely.

Now my side has seized an enemy battery of this weapon and have figured out how to wheel it around 180 degrees and fire. Our shots seem to be hitting their marks. Should we stop? Why? Would our refusing as a matter of ethics to fire our commandeered battery against the enemy prompt them to have any mercy in January 2029 if they win? Why would we think they would? Why, after all this time?

This war, while memetic not kinetic, is nevertheless total, absolute, and existential. The people being targeted now are enemy combatants. They (often literally) wear and uniform and wave a flag. We can rebuild polite norms after we win.

And you know what? That's a shame. It's a shame we have to rebuild anything. War is always messy. But like I said, my side didn't choose this.

There aren't just two sides here, plenty of the people who were victims of illiberal leftist cancel culture were not conservatives. It's fairly selfish for conservatives to claim the right to permanently destroy society just to satisfy their need for vengeance. If anything, conservatives benefited from cancel culture more than anyone else. The republican party was dead until Trump came along and harnessed the anti-woke movement. Without good old wokeness to kick around, the republicans would still be running on "drill baby drill" and tax cuts for the rich.

Upon this, one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.

-Niccolo Machiavelli

Persecuting people doesn't help you unless you're removing their ability to fight back by doing so. Getting people fired doesn't remove their ability to fight back unless they're in key positions (e.g. HR); their job didn't give them power and they can still vote.

It imposes real costs on them. Their power depends on propagating their memes. Now there's more friction to their doing so.

I don’t want people to be fired for comments on social media, but I see the open celebration of murder as really socially corrosive and incredibly disturbing. In my view something must be done about it. Ideally social media like Reddit would simply treat it with the same aggressive censorship they reserve for anti-trans comments. But if social media can’t or won’t do something about it I will accept cancellation as it’s better than letting this go unchecked. There is almost nothing in my mind more important than combatting the bloodthirst we saw this week.

I'll take the principled stand here. I don't like cancellation of anyone* for passing remarks online (or in person, but especially online).

*: unless acting in an official capacity for their job, or in a role to which your moral standing is central (pastor, maybe teacher).

This all not withstanding that I'd like at least small employers to be able to fire for literally any/no reason. My objection isn't to the firing itself, but to the random selective enforcement caused by crowd sourcing the firing. In the day of LLMs, do you really want someone programmatically reading social media, cross referencing with Linkedin, and contacting employers?

If leftists genuinely believe that he is harmful to the country, and they'd like to celebrate the cessation of that harm - even by glibly conflating the harm with the man himself - let them.

If some day there is signed a peace treaty for the Culture War, I can imagine nothing sweeter than it reading "we, the undersigned, agree to disagree."

Something something your rules applied fairly. A cancel culture truce isn't happening anytime soon so we have to fight fire with fire.

It may be cancel culture but honestly, I don't really care. Ultimately if it had been some left-wing pundit that had been assassinated like Contrapoints or Destiny or Hasan, and right-wingers were getting fired for celebrating, I don't believe for a second hardly any lefties would be sticking up for them and really, nor would I. I didn't make a stink when that guy got fired for outing himself as a literal fascist on Jubilee, I'm not going to make a stink when people get fired for supporting political assassinations of pundits they dislike. I'm perfectly fine with a norm of "don't celebrate assassinations of mainstream political pundits" existing, or not existing, it just needs to be applied symmetrically to left and right.

I absolutely would be against people facing legal consequences for it, but to my knowledge that hasn't happened thus far. I suppose I don't agree with the calls to deport non-US citizens who have celebrated the assassination, and I don't think people should be fired for making jokes or just saying they don't care, either. Nor should they be if someone dies in an accident or of natural causes, and they say he/she had it coming. But supporting outright murder of a pundit because you didn't like their mainstream, milquetoast political opinions goes much further than that in my view, and it's really not that unreasonable for somebody to get you fired over it. That's what it comes down to for me, the real transgression isn't "I don't have sympathy for him" or even "I'm happy he's dead" but "I think it's good he was murdered for saying things I disagree with."

There is a bright line which I hope the backlash does not cross. The bright line is the support for political violence and terrorist acts. The American left has been extraordinarily undisciplined about advocating these things. (The right has been modestly better mostly by virtue of getting kicked off most sites but 4chan, where you can go find advocacy for political violence and terrorist acts if you so desire.)

If the effect of this winds up being that advocating for violence on social media becomes extremely unpopular, that would be an excellent thing for America. It would be a real cooling of the overall temperature. If, instead, it becomes an excuse for the lunatic right to breach containment, it would be quite bad.

The cancel culture part is honestly much less important than this. Part of how things went south in France in the early 20th was people coordinating with one another to one-up on crazy demands to destroy the Other on their niche media (newspapers). The temperature kept going up and it made it impossible for people to cooperate on anything, even keeping the Germans from conquering them. Free speech is highly important, but the standard criticism is that speech acts are real and form a weakness to a blanket policy thereof. Advocating popular and political violence is one such act.

As a business owner I reserve the right to fire someone for something I think makes them unsuitable for that position. It doesn't matter if it didn't occur at work. If I discovered, say, that a cashier at my shop had a second job where they were caught stealing, to me that would obviously be grounds for me to also fire them. It indicates their character.

Likewise, if someone publicly celebrates a political assassination, that to me demonstrates they lack moral character and cannot be trusted.

Maybe poking around on people's social media and reporting then is a little gauche, but once I'm aware that my employee has this moral flaw I'm going to act on that information. Maybe that's 'cancel culture'? I'm sure you could argue that firing someone for racism is the same thing, but I think there's a significant enough difference in severity that I'm not too worried about it. You have to draw a line at some point.

I think that's all your right as a business owner. That's distinct from campaigning for other people to enforce one's judgements.

It's the same. They prefer the feel of the handle, which they haven't had for a long time (aside from a few aberrations like the Home Depot woman) to the sting of the lash.

To turn the tables, imagine if George Soros died and many of those same people wrote "good riddance" on their social media accounts, should this be grounds for cancelation? By the above logic, yes if you want to be morally consistent.

They don't care. For two reasons. One, they wouldn't post 'good riddance' about Soros on their social media; they are not that sort of hypocrite. And more importantly... they know the other side will cancel them when they can, whether or not they themselves do. It's no reason for them to hold back. The left changed the rules, now they get to live with the changed rules.

The right knows exactly how miserable it is to be cancelled and to have their livelihoods threatened over political beliefs: my evidence is having lived through the past ten years. They don't care anymore. All of the moral principled arguments lost all purchase and force on them. Being bombarded like Palestinians by threats and catty remarks by psuedocommunists has inured them to the calls of hypocrisy.

All of the lost jobs, job opportunities, scholarships, and social damage isn't going to avenge itself: this is the new normal. We live in the postliberal Friend-Enemy Schmittian power dynamic and the left is responsible for it.

"We live in the postliberal Friend-Enemy Schmittian power dynamic and the left is responsible for it."

I'd put the blame more on the development of media and particularly the social media panopticon. But let's assume it's just the left that started it (and not that it hasn't just been a persistent back and forth from both illiberal leftists and rightists for a very long time), for how long does the right get to cancel back before it's the right responsible for it?

Until the war is won, so forever. It is a meme war, a total meme war. As long as teachers decide it's a great idea to show the Charlie Kirk shooting to 11 year olds and tell them he was a bad man who deserved it, the cancelations will continue. If anything, Trump should declare antifa a terrorist organization and bear the full might of the government machine on the various NGOs and super pacs funding the woke mind cancer.

As long as teachers decide it's a great idea to show the Charlie Kirk shooting to 11 year olds and tell them he was a bad man who deserved it

I'm almost afraid to ask... but is there a documented case of this?

To be fair, Toronto, rather than US, but pretty strong evidence.

Yeah, I probably shouldn't have asked. That the teacher thought this was a good idea is testimony to the capture of the institutions.

The left never stopped.

But let's assume it's just the left that started it (and not that it hasn't just been a persistent back and forth from both illiberal leftists and rightists for a very long time), for how long does the right get to cancel back before it's the right responsible for it?

Depends. Do we start counting from Donglegate or Brendan Eich about a year later? I guess "a little longer than a decade" works.

yea that'll work out fine. we can just trust them stop. the best time to stop is always NOW.

Oh no, they won't stop. But that's the minimum time before you get to start blaming them for it.

the best time to stop is always NOW.

That is... often very much not the case in war, and I and many others have been arguing for years now that this is in fact a war. A cold one last week, maybe a hot one next year.

Obviously cancel culture works both ways now. Not new. When Trump was first almost assassinated, you may remember a video of a Home Depot worker which always struck me. Lady is middle aged and working the front desk - actually already one of the most thankless positions, as a former employee there - and is confronted by a guy filming who looked up her social media on his own time before. She basically just asks him to leave. But still, fired. That one stuck in my memory because it felt like an especially low blow, not like someone more professional with more job security, but a true near-minimum wage worker.

But it was recently pointed out to me that the beginnings of what might be termed cancel culture (less individualized but still targeted pressure campaigns) were way earlier. Remember Christian groups trying to cancel different movies because of inappropriate content? Certain songs, company actions too. Actually plenty of moral crusades going back even farther. And the left of course had the apartheid boycott, Vietnam era protest against officials and companies supporting the war, or certain college speakers, stuff like that.

This makes me think that in some fashion it’s more about social media itself than any deliberate action by the left or right in particular. Somewhat supporting this is how when Twitter was left dominated? Lots of leftist cancelling. Now that X is right dominated? Lots of rightist cancelling.

So to me I really don’t think it makes sense to adopt a paradigm of “they did it first”, on neither side. I used to think otherwise, but the longer I see it go on all over, the more I suspect it’s a human nature meets new technology problem. It could be that social media becomes the new workplace in terms of banal corporate-speak and circumspection.

But it was recently pointed out to me that the beginnings of what might be termed cancel culture (less individualized but still targeted pressure campaigns) were way earlier. Remember Christian groups trying to cancel different movies because of inappropriate content? Certain songs, company actions too. Actually plenty of moral crusades going back even farther. And the left of course had the apartheid boycott, Vietnam era protest against officials and companies supporting the war, or certain college speakers, stuff like that.

Those fit with what we call cancel culture, yes. They are the examples I, and many others like me, used in apoplectic exasperation when we were begging progressives (donglegate, elevatorgate, gamergate, etcetera ad infinitum) not to enable a culture of getting people fired for saying dumb shit in their private lives, because by the noughts we were finally establishing a moderately stable and coherent application of free speech to the home/work divide, and the only thing that was required to keep it, the only thing that people had to do to maintain it, was not be petty vindictive assholes who stew for days over words on the internet. But apparently that was a bridge too far.

Well put. The "they started it" angle of attack obscures that we've all "started it" in a messy, volley-like and cross-cutting manner.

"Cancel culture" does not mean "moral crusade".

Wanting to ban a movie because the movie itself contains inappropriate content isn't cancel culture. It would have to be something like "wanting to ban an innocuous movie because it was produced by someone who used inappropriate content in a different movie".

This definition would exclude many, if not most, prominent examples of cancellation.

Such as?

Off the top of my head: Gina Carano (or Chuck Wendig :V), Louis CK, Bret Weinstein, and James Damore were all censured for things they said/did, not for tangential association with someone else.

The equivalent to "banning a movie for the contents of the movie itself", for people, is "firing someone from his job for things said in his role in his job"--writers publishing books that say bad things, politicians making speeches that say bad things, celebrities saying things during publicity for their films, professors teaching bad things in their class, etc. None of your examples are like that and thus are not excluded by my definition.

Damore posted things in a forum at his job, but posting there wasn't part of his job duties. (And even if it had been, he had been assured that he could speak freely.)

I'm not sure I agree with that equivalency, but nevertheless: Louis CK wasn't fired (and, as with many cancelled individuals, couldn't be fired by the very nature of his work). He got in trouble for actions taken in the course of his professional career that were not even political, which led to people disassociating from him for a while. Bret Weinstein got in trouble for statements made in his capacity as an Evergreen State professor, and also wasn't fired (he resigned). Damore got in trouble for statements made in his capacity as a Google employee; whether or not they pertained to his regular duties does not strike me as particularly relevant (to illustrate: suppose Damore had made unambiguously fireable remarks to a fellow employee over his lunch break. The fact that this was outside of his normal duties is irrelevant). The argument in Damore's favor is not that Google had no basis to fire him over stuff not directly related to his job duties, but that he was punished for something that didn't warrant it.

However, as I said, I think this is an incredible narrow conceptualization of cancellation that doesn't match common usage, would exclude many instance that are generally considered to be central examples, and would capture all sorts of things that don't fit common understanding.

Like, hypothetical: someone makes a film disparaging MLK Jr (or whoever; it doesn't really matter). Outraged social media mobs lobby to have showings pulled and the director and producer blacklisted. Under your criteria, this would not be cancellation.

also wasn't fired (he resigned)

Being constructively fired counts as being fired. So does being blacklisted or constructively blacklisted.

suppose Damore had made unambiguously fireable remarks to a fellow employee over his lunch break.

His lunch break is outside his job; actions in his lunch break are not performance of job duties.

Like, hypothetical: someone makes a film disparaging MLK Jr (or whoever; it doesn't really matter). Outraged social media mobs lobby to have showings pulled and the director and producer blacklisted. Under your criteria, this would not be cancellation.

It would not be cancellation if they pulled showings of this particular movie. If they tried to get him removed from producing anything, even movies unrelated to MLK, it would be cancellation. Each movie counts separately, even if you could phrase it as saying he has a single job to make movies.

Wanting to censor a movie because of the contents of the movie, wanting to get someone fired because of something he said, and wanting to get someone fired for association with someone else are three different things. The first is censorship but not really what people refer to with "canceling".

If your book publisher says "censor the racial slurs or we don't publish the book, I don't care how historically accurate they are", that's censorship. If it says "a viral Twitter thread has brought to our attention that you wrote racial slurs in a previous book, we will not publish anything you write" that's cancellation. Cancellations for speech are a kind of attempted censorship by intimidation, and censorship or self-censorship can be motivated by cancel culture even without an actual campaign, but they're not the same thing. Something like the Comics Code wasn't cancellation because (as far as I know) they didn't care if you had made comics that violated it before. On the other hand the Hollywood blacklist of communists was more similar to cancellation. When episodes of It's Always Sunny get taken down for blackface, or episodes of South Park get taken down for depicting Muhammad, that's censorship but it's not a (successful) cancellation unless the people responsible for those episodes get blacklisted or similar.

If you find these examples applicable, that seems to suggest an underlying picture of these individuals along the lines of "lead star in the movie that is their life", whence banning a movie from public screening ~ removing the person from positions in which others can get exposed to their life-movie.

Flipping your modus ponens into a modus tollens, are you saying we should see those people in that way? To do so and draw the appropriate consequences may feel like poetic justice when applied to influencers and other attention whores, but it also feels like a setup for dystopian sci-fi. The face you present to society gets judged on age-appropriateness, moral wholesomeness and non-offensiveness in the same way a movie release would. Always act like the children are watching.

I am not sure I follow. My comment was not meant to suggest these people deserved to be shitcanned; it was meant to provide well-known examples of people being cancelled for their actions. That in turn was meant to substantiate my point that Jiro's proposed definition of being cancelled would exclude many cases we'd intuitive consider to be central examples.

As I see it, a big problem here is something that lawyer Youtuber "Legal Mindset" notes with his recent "don't report them to HR, report them to OSHA" video, this part of "cancel culture" is actually downstream from the law — corporations are legally required to take action. This, because OSHA rules require employers to maintain a "safe working environment," and various precedents hold that this includes when employee speech makes the workplace "unsafe." Indeed, as I understand it, much of the early waves of cancel culture were made possible by these legal rulings (sought by the Left). If celebrating murder, and making "do [insert name here] next" comments don't fall under "unsafe work" environment, then how can any other speech?

Now, you can argue that this is bad law that stifles free speech; and some on the left are now doing that… but most of those I'm seeing were fine with these laws stifling speech when it was being used the other direction, and only upset that it's being enforced bidirectionally. It reminds me of the complaints about the Trump admin using civil rights anti-discrimination law (written in a "colorblind" manner) against anti-white discrimination: that don't you know that, however it's written on paper, it's only actually supposed to be enforced one way, and how dare the Right do to us what we've been doing to them! (Like that historian I can't remember argued, "fascism" is when the right uses the left's methods against the left, as opposed to remaining Hlynka-esque "virtuous losers" dreaming of martyrdom.)

Your rules applied fairly > Your rules applied unfairly. Maybe after the left spends some time on the wrong end of the "cancel culture" weapon they've made, we might get some broader support for rolling back some of these laws in favor of broader workplace speech protections. But if the history of warfare (like chemical weapons in WWI) shows anything, it's that you don't get these sorts of "arms limitations treaties" until after the weapon gets used in both directions.

And until OSHA regulations around "unsafe work environments" are changed, corporations have to take action against these employees.

"If I find out you ever said X anywhere, and I work with you, then you said X at work."

I am fairly sure that the EEOCs very expansive definition of "hostile workplace" does not apply in any way, shape, or form to OSHA's "safe working environment" -- that is, working next to someone who has repugnant views is not "unsafe" in OSHA parlance. OSHA is worried about missing railings, not bad politics.

Working next to a bigot who doesn't bigot in the office doesn't constitute a "hostile workplace" under EEOC rules either (although, absurdly, having a co-worker put a Gadsden Flag in their cubicle can do) - the problem is more subtle than that, and involves a combination of the inherent dangers of strong anti-discrimination laws and the spectacularly broken American civil justice system.

Fundamentally, the problem is that if a workplace discrimination lawsuit against a medium or large business gets past summary judgement, you are going to be settling it, probably for a six-figure sum of money, because the alternative is to let the plaintiff go on a fishing expedition at your expense for anything bigoted any employee anywhere in the organisation said or did in the last N years (where N is at the discretion of the judge, and can exceed the statute of limitations). And "this company knew they had racists on staff and didn't fire them" plus "one co-worker said a bad thing to me in the workplace once" is sufficient circumstantial evidence of a pattern of officially-tolerated peer-on-peer discrimination to get past summary judgement.

I don't know the mechanics of OSHA enforcement, but my guess would be a civil lawsuit over workplace safety that gets past summary judgement would require an injured employee and some plausible connection between the injury and the presence of people who shitpost ghoulishly about Charlie Kirk - that is a much less plausible outcome.

Yeah, OSHA can be extreme but they don't care about workplace discrimination. That's somebody else's job.

I have to admit that the debate on this topic confuses me.

People who are merely talking negatively about the legacy of a public figure are fine in my book, but isn't actual celebration of murder something that would usually get one shunned?

I'm not being sarcastic: Is there a norm of it not being a fireable offence to openly celebrate murder? There may be a point that actively calling an employer to get someone fired is not healthy behaviour, and also that a witch-hunt atmosphere may or will also drag in innocent people, but should I be worked up over the firing itself, if the facts of the case are correct?

I suppose there's a nuance of whether people are celebrating his mere passing, or the actual fact that he was murdered.

imagine if George Soros died...should this be grounds for cancelation?

If he was assassinated, and people are celebrating it, I don't see why not...? He isn't an enemy soldier of a country I'm at war with. Personally I've enjoyed watching videos of him speak before, whatever I think he's responsible for.

I think one core idea here is that it used to be the case that a company could get reputational damage. But nowadays it seems like these cases are less and less “organic”. (Dovetails a bit with less organic virality in general). Like maybe in the past someone who got spontaneously famous would need to be cut loose. But when groups dedicate time to hunting down each and every offender? That’s just morality police, empowered with governmental-adjacent power, but without governmental guardrails. A bad state of affairs.

There’s also some conflation of what makes you a good human (don’t celebrate murder) vs what is human but shows a lack of tact (expressing true feelings of ambivalence about a murder) vs what is human but normally acceptable (half-private venting on supposed friend networks) vs what is possibly not even a genuine value statement at all (people feel “out of control” of the political trajectory and sometimes cope poorly with that feeling, saying things they may not truly mean in the heat of the moment).

And celebrities are already subject to a degree of dehumanization: Taylor Swift, Korean idols, etc all have people way up in their personal lives and even normal fans can display at times sociopathic tendencies and expressions. If you have Kirk in the mental bucket of “celebrity” and not “father to two young children” of course your conduct will be different! Frankly no one got fired if they celebrate Michael Jackson dying, whether they thought he was a creep and a predator, or a misunderstood star with a broken childhood. Yet politics, we are told, is different. That’s a little true (threatening democratic processes is more long term destabilizing to future democratic processes), but it’s not completely true!

Is there a norm of it not being a fireable offence to openly celebrate murder?

Yes, there is. In most of Europe firing someone for anything outside work is explicitly illegal.

In most of Europe, celebrating terrorism is also explicitly illegal.

Citation needed.

There is certainly no such clause in Finnish law. Even supporting (ie. material / financial / other direct aid) terrorism is illegal only if the support is for an actual terrorism act or a designated terrorist group.

Don’t assume UK and Germany == most of Europe.

The criminal code chapter 34a paragraph 5e criminalizes encouraging or enticing to join a terrorist organization or to commit a terrorist crime, if it is done in a manner that is likely to cause someone to do so. The law does not explicitly mention celebrating, but I suspect that for example celebrating a terrorist act on television could be interpreted to be enticing, although I don't know if any judgement based on this law has ever been decided in a court of law.

  • The UK (Terrorism Act 2006, Section 1 - "Encouragement of terrorism")
  • Germany(Section 130 StGB (Criminal Code) - "Incitement to hatred" (Volksverhetzung))
  • France (Article 421-2-5 of the Criminal Code)
  • Spain (Article 578 of the Spanish Criminal Code)
  • Italy (Articles 270 quater and 270 quinquies of the Criminal Code)
  • Poland (Article 255a of the Polish Criminal Code)
  • Austria (Section 282a of the Austrian Criminal Code)
  • Belgium (Article 140bis of the Criminal Code)
  • Cyprus (Article 12 of the 2010 law on combating terrorism)
  • Bulgaria (Article 320(1) and 320(2) of the Bulgarian Criminal Code)
  • Lithuania (Article 250(1) of the Lithuanian Criminal Code)
  • Luxembourg (Article 135(11) of the Luxembourg Criminal Code)
  • Romania (Act 187/2012, amending Law 535/2004 on preventing and combating terrorism)
  • Slovenia (Article 110(1)(1) and 110(1)(2) of the Criminal Code)

Most major European nations have laws on the books for this, and there are two EU directives and frameworks expressly referencing "glorification" in a "public provocation to commit a terrorist offense" that may be banned within that framework.

It's a norm that has a long past in Europe (since you know, we've not exactly been a peaceful continent), and though there are exceptions and enforcement varies, free speech that includes support for terrorism has essentially never been the norm in Europe.

It doesn't mean the police can't arrest you for activities outside of work. It means corporations can't terminate you from your job for your out-of-work activities.

Yes they can. There are just valid and non valid causes for firing. Going to jail for glorifying terrorism is one such valid reason.

If that were the case I know more than a couple of people who should’ve been imprisoned a long time ago.

Plenty people are and its trivially easy find information about this online.

For instance, in 2016 there were 306 persons in France alone that were convicted of apologia for terrorism and 232 of those were sentenced to jail.

I legitimately don't know how european employment law works- the closest analogue in the US that I can think of is union contracts which generally are not going to be used to defend celebrating terrorism even if they might slow down the termination process- does it require a hate speech conviction to fire an employee who says these kinds of things?

It's all complicated and specific to whatever country but in most cases you can fire someone for criminal behavior insofar as you can legitimately argue that it is either related to the business or tarnished the reputation of the business.

In this case, advocacy of terrorism is a very easy crime to argue tarnishes reputation.

So in practice you'll likely be fired soon after being arrested unless your employer is sympathetic.

In theory you are innocent until proven guilty so that should only happen after conviction, but in practice mere criminal proceedings are enough to argue reputational damage. And at best you're signing up to more lawsuits. As I said, details vary a lot.

Yeah, you wouldn't get fired. You'd get arrested.

When you actually dig into what people are being fired for, a lot of it isn't actually celebrating murder. Most people are imagining something like what this lady posted, which yeah, is totally celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk. But then you log onto Twitter and see doctors getting fired for for reposting content drawing a comparison between the brutal violence in Gaza which Charlie Kirk implicitly supported and the brutal violence which ended his own life. This, while stupid, is still valid political commentary.

Maybe I'm being gung-ho about this, but that second link looks like it boils down to "he got what he deserved," which sounds like a celebration of murder to me.

I'll say that there's room for doubt, and also that there's probably a way of wording that sentiment so that it doesn't make me think that it's a celebration of murder. I suppose I should add that there's no reason why my feelings should be the judge of this.

Still, if this is the main problem, the debate should be about whether someone is celebrating murder or not. Instead, I've seen (or, more accurately, I feel as if I have seen) a lot of discussion about whether celebrating murder should be a firable offence.

I actually don't know what the norms or precedents on this question are. If you asked me before this killing, I would have assumed it wasn't that controversial. Maybe I'm wrong.

Doctors also have really, really strict standards of non-anonymous social media behavior.

We also had that case in NJ where a nurse was suspended for calling out a doctor for celebrating.

drawing a comparison between the brutal violence in Gaza which Charlie Kirk implicitly supported and the brutal violence which ended his own life.

"the chickens have come home to roost".

Nope.

EDIT: I absolutely expect to see overextension, here -- 'database of 40k+ incidents' and 'reasonable filtering and accuracy' are less venn diagrams and more completely separate circles -- but it's not very persuasive when the central examples inevitably look like this, instead of this.

The doctor in question isn't just drawing a comparison to it, though. She's saying, 'Charlie Kirk knew there was genocide happening in Gaza and he loved it and he wanted more of it. Now he's dead and it serves him right.' In her own (quoted) words: "The chickens have come home to roost". That seems pretty close to celebrating his murder. At the very least it seems to be saying, 'Charlie Kirk deserved to die this way'.

You could read it like that. You could also read it as a general leftist criticism of the pro-Israeli position, in which violence over there against those people is seen as categorically different than violence over here against our people.

Hmm. She says she's specifically quoting from Malcolm X, and that was celebrating:

Accusing Mr. Kennedy of "twiddling his thumbs" at the killing of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Ngô Dinh Nhu, Malcolm X told a Black Muslim rally at the Manhattan Center that he "never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon." He added: "Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad.”

The speech in general is pretty icky:

Malcolm X told the crowd, estimated at about 700, that immediately after Mr. Kennedy's assassination the Black Muslim leadership had been asked for comments by the newspapers. He charged this was an attempt to trap the organization into a "fanatic, inflexibly dogmatic" statement. He said the press was looking for such a remark as: "Hooray, hooray! I'm glad he got it!" With this exclamation, there was more laughter and applause.

Throughout his address, which lasted an hour, Malcolm X repeated a previous contention that the Black Muslim movement is based on monotheistic love and tolerance of all men, including white men. However, he said that while his followers were nonviolent, they were encouraged for purposes of self-defense to study judo and karate and "everything else you should learn that will show you how to break a white man's neck." Again there was applause and laughter.

https://www.nytimes.com/1963/12/02/archives/malcolm-x-scores-us-and-kennedy-likens-slaying-to-chickens-coming.html

Wait, Malcolm X had a bone to pick with the end of the south Vietnamese theocracy? Like sympathy with North Vietnam is at some level expected for leftists of the era but supporting the Ngo family against the military is not what I would have expected.

Cancel culture didn't start in 2015 or whenever you, the reader, became woke to it. It is not a left or right wing phenomenon. It is bad behavior, but it is also a corollary of freedom of speech and freedom of association. You could make a case for political views being a protected class, but nobody with policy making authority seems quite prepared to bite that bullet.

My take is, contacting an employer with the intent of getting someone fired for something not work-related or fired in the public interest as a 'concerned citizen', by definition, is cancel culture.

The ambiguity here is what does it for something to be not work-related? On the one hand I mostly agree that an employer's interest in their employees' lives starts and ends with the work day unless it directly relates, but I don't think this has unlimited extension. As an extreme example, if I discover one of my employees moonlights for ISIS, I think it is reasonable to fire him even if he has never lets his hobbies impact his work so far. Or, for a perhaps less silly example, if one of someone who operates dangerous machinery keeps racking up DUIs, I would think I am reasonable to worry about his alcoholism even if he hasn't shown up drunk yet.

But once you accept that there are some exceptions, it really becomes an argument about where the line is rather than whether or not there is a line.

My opinion, already expressed on this thread, is that celebration of assassination is something we should have a bipartisan "cancel culture" about, because it's a load-bearing taboo that allows the rest of freedom of speech to function. This is similar to how Lee Kwan Yew banned the communist party in Singapore at a time when SE Asian countries were falling to communist revolutions. A 99% commitment to liberal norms is more durable than one that commits to 100% with obvious loopholes for bad actors to end the liberal system.

Cancel culture for other things are bad, since it cordons off plausibly true ideas from public discussion. You shouldn't be cancelled for "misgendering", or stating FBI crime statistics, or making the okay sign, or having once made racist jokes, or donating to a conservative cause, or saying riots are bad.

The effect of cancel culture over support for assassination is to preserve liberalism. The effect of cancel culture for slight deviations from the Left platform is to end liberalism. This isn't hard.

https://www.themotte.org/post/3128/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/365663?context=8#context

What is the justification in your eyes under this paradigm for a line between assassination support and riot support?

That's a good question. There is a similarity, in that they both encourage political violence and eat away at the axioms of a free society.

There is a difference in degree, however, as assassination is far more corrosive and easier for a single person to pull off on their own. We are a nation of soft-targets, and living that way is a luxury.

Remember here that we are talking about social opprobrium and not the hard power of the state. If supporting assassinations and riots both faced a good deal of social opprobrium, that would be a sign of health for our democratic system. In many countries, the hard power of the state is deployed to police both of these things. Most political orders are not suicidal. America's may appear to be just because we have a lot of social capital to burn. But we should beware of momentum.

Riot support is closer to the line than many leftists probably would like it to be. Financial support for riots/ers is a crime after all

Financial support for riots/ers is a crime after all

It is?

In the case of something like January 6th, assume for the sake of argument it was an attempt at a coup (in my view it of course wasn't). An almost direct but legally implied right to overthrow a tyrannical government is built into the 2nd amendment of the Constitution. Why wouldn't any of the rioters get off on that defense? Because that one isn't entirely clear to me.

The use of deadly force, surely.

There's a reason rioting isn't in and of itself a capital crime.

It is and unless both sides fear it, there's no chance of cancel culture really ending.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

I have often puzzled over Emerson's words, here. Consistency has long been the political right's Achilles heel. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in late 20th century jurisprudence, where the right was closely tied to textualism and originalism and precedent while the left went whole hog on the "Living Constitution." Then, when the right started rolling back stare decisis on "Living Constitution" decisions, suddenly the left was very interested in the hypocrisy of conservatives overturning precedent, as if they had not themselves pioneered the politicization of the Court.

I don't know what to say about it. I am not comfortable with the "Charlie's Murderers" website. I am not comfortable with the tone of comeuppance and vengeance and the right taking its pound of flesh. Perhaps Emerson is right--perhaps I am small minded, constantly reaching for consistency and coherence in the interest of social stability and quiet comfort.

But conversely--what alternative remains to them? If the left gets to run cancel culture while the right refrains on principle, it's no longer a culture war, it's a one sided culture slaughter.

People sometimes talk about "norm violation" but really we're still dealing with the fallout of the political norm violations of the 1960s. I don't know where we get a "reset" button on that. Unfortunately, history seems to suggest that the usual reset is "war."

But conversely--what alternative remains to them? If the left gets to run cancel culture while the right refrains on principle, it's no longer a culture war, it's a one sided culture slaughter.

And it's not just a "culture" slaughter anymore. The argument is that the right should just eat bullets and do nothing more than complain about it. No thanks. I'll pass.

I’ve said before that I don’t think these people should be fired, and I will expound in a way that will convince no one: antifragility. Since this issue seems to be coming up with a lot of teachers, I’ll focus on them.

I don’t think conservatives know how to effectively address the problem. In the long term, simply firing the “dumb” ones can actually make things worse. Because of that, I like that teachers feel free to got mask off. It has been very difficult to convince normies how many extreme leftists have infiltrated our institutions, and I want to know which teachers are radical leftists.

I suppose I shouldn’t jinx myself, but I’m confident in my ability to have more influence over my kids’ values than their teachers do, and I want to bring other parents along with me.

Now if we want to actually crush the entire institution of public education then I'm here for it.

I have actually been thinking about this recently in some sense. For example, school shootings.

It is a FACT that you are more likely to die driving your way home from work than in a school shooting (I haven’t examined this in a more rigorous way but think it still would be true). We would call someone afraid to drive home irrational because it impacts your quality of life quite a bit. Yet if I tell a liberal friend of mine that it’s in the best interests of students to play down (even if inaccurately!) the threat of school shootings because the net cost of generalized fear to learning is worse, they look at me like I’m crazy. But I’m pretty sure I’m right, and I’m also pretty sure that in a few decades people will agree with me.

Humans are not designed to live in a a constant state of fear. It’s physically and psychologically damaging. This is incontrovertible. Kids in particular are way too good at picking up the “vibes” of adults. So honestly everyone who works with kids should be extra vigilant about what vibes they give out. If kids feel “permission” to feel constant fear, that unhealthy.

I realize this might not be what you mean when talking about promoting “antifragility” but it seemed related to me. There’s some line where we cross over from being understanding and empathetic to losing a certain degree of thick skin necessary. Just like how phobias are worsened by validating them.

Semi-caveat to teaching “thick skin”: research indicates that teaching children the world is safe, just, interesting, that people are fundamentally nice, etc. improves their life outcomes. It turns out that at least when establishing base primal beliefs, in aggregate there is no such thing as teaching a child to have a too-positive outlook having a drawback (kids tend use these rosy beliefs more like a prior than a rule, which limits downsides).

The debate is, does this constitute cancel culture, but by the right instead of the typical left?

Yes it does. And it is wrong. But before armistice is offered, the right is entitled to extract it's pound of flesh.

Cancel culture doesn't even really work. All it ended up doing for the left in the 2010s was make martyrs and help invigorate the right. If the right goes down the same path it'll end just as badly. People don't change their opinions in your favor if you repress them. All that happens is they find somewhere else to organize out of your sight.

It's a bad idea, even if you can get away with it.

The left enjoyed almost 15 or 20 years of dominance, and they lost it because of 2 errors. They couldn't police their fringe on immigration and trans, and they pissed off one of the few people on the planet with real fuck you money when they censored babylon bee.

I think propping up Joe Biden's body for way too long was another error -- they might have retained control of the Presidency and squashed the X resurgence if they'd managed to get Newsom or some other credible candidate running against Trump.

Eh, I doubt it, inflation was too high, and people's belts were feeling too tight. The incumbent loses that pretty much regardless of who they pick. If I were a Newsom advisor I would have been advising him under no circumstances to run whether against Trump or any other Republican in that climate.

The writing was on the wall, which might be one reason there wasn't much of a concerted effort to unseat Biden prior to the debate. Who wants to burn political capital when you're not in a great position to begin with?

The weekend at biden's did cost them.

“When you kill your enemies, they win” vibes

When you merely piss off your enemies, and on top of that in doing so make them look sympathetic to previously neutral parties, you don't actually win.

I don’t see any of the cancellation looking even remotely sympathetic. Which do you see that way?

When the left was at it, it got to the point where tradesmen were having their lives ruined for making the OK symbol.

This is not that, yet, but it does carry the seed of it.

It's very good as a tool to clean up or conquer institutions. Without it lots of tech wouldn't be held by lefties right now.

It ultimately is self defeating, but that doesn't mean it's useless.

Didn't they already do that by getting that Home Depot cashier fired after the Trump shooting? How many pounds of flesh will it take before we're back to even and can start behaving in a civilized way?

  • -11

One problem is that "right" and "left" are big amorphous constantly-shifting groups, and can't really satisfy these disagreements in the way that individuals can. What people want is for one side is to make a conscious, costly display of commitment. I don't think I'm alone in thinking the left is most in need of that display, and I would find something like the ACLU recommitting to free speech, make a big Skokie to-do about defending a right-winger instead of ceding all speech issues to FIRE, and firing their lawyer that wanted to ban and burn books to be a conscious, costly display. They don't represent the whole left, no one can, but it would be better than The Troubles back and forth with each administration or social disaster.

The list is long. Certainly far longer than "one cashier". There are at least TWO canceled Nobel Prize winners (Tim Hunt and James Watson). Everyone listed on the old "racistsgettingfired" website. Anyone disciplined for giving the OK symbol. Anyone fired for being at Charlottesville or January 6 (even if they did not participate in rioting). Anyone fired or boycotted for claiming there are only two genders.... and I'm only scratching the surface here. A proportionate reprisal for all that would be terrible in the sense of "Ivan the".

It's not about the numbers, it's about the other side coming to the table and negotiating the terms of a truce. This thing isn't going to end if all we have is radicals who explicitly say the tools are good, if they're only used by them, and centrists who want to limit the conversation to hypocrisy, rather than what should be the rules going forward.

Finally, even once the terms of truce are found, anyone who cares about hypocrisy will be in a bit of a bind, because how do you enforce them if not by cancelling the cancellers?

There's this great asymmetry that few seem to notice. The right gets to cancel in the immediate aftermath of one of theirs eating a bullet. The left gets to cancel all the time for a great many reasons. Personally, I'm happy that general norms of polite society still blanch at literally celebrating our murders in front of our families. For now.

I know these things are uncoordinated. But if you were the left, why the hell would you declare an armistice when this is the state of play? The only rule you have to abide is to not celebrate immediately after a righty is killed. And even then, many are morally too far gone to even follow that one rule.

But if you were the left, why the hell would you declare an armistice

Because the 2028 election will probably be determined by which side acts less obnoxiously hysterical in the next 3 years. If the republicans spend that time shrieking about transgenderism and canceling people, the democrats have a good chance at recapturing the normie vote. The 2024 election proved to anyone paying attention that any flavor of smug wokeness is not good politics. So we can either have a continual orgy of vengeance in which each side takes power, alienates the normies and then loses in 4 years, or both sides can decide to actually try winning.

Right. Men in particular of the Joe Rogan sort liken cancelling to HR ladies OR church ladies. Indeed HR ladies are the next generation of church ladies to them. (Though in the age of Trump perhaps it could be described as HR Ladies vs. DR Ladies.) There's something in fact un-manly about cancellations. Something un-manly about being a pink slip sniper, of being a clipboard-carrying, list-compiling hall monitor.

Actually a good example of why, assuming your theory is correct, like I discussed a week or two ago here, the correct game theory approach of relevance is usually “tit for tat… with occasional forgiveness” and not outright tit for tat. It is, of course, hard to tell when forgiveness is appropriate and in what ratio, but it does need to happen occasionally.

I'm not sure that both sides' actions are comparable. The left cancelled people for relatively mundane political opinions and for making edgy jokes. Normies felt like you had to walk on eggshells under ascendant leftism. The right is cancelling people who say really tasteless things about someone who just got murdered in front a large crowd that included his wife and kids. They are also bashing trans people, but I think the vast majority of normies have mixed feelings about trans at best. The right is not going to cancel you if you make an edgy joke about women or blacks or if you express support for Gavin Newsom or whatever. I don't think most normies feel threatened by the right in the same way.

The left cancelled people for relatively mundane political opinions and for making edgy jokes

And for having your hand hanging out of the window of your truck.

I mean it's quite clear at this point that keeping lefty cancel culture and transgenderism in the public eye is very good for republican electoral prospects. Republicans just need to make it look like they're responding to left wing overreach(like they do when it's celebrating murder) so they don't seem like they're pulling shit out of their ass.

I think focusing on transgenderism was good for their electoral prospects in 2024. But if republicans make it their main culture war wedge issue in 2028, I think it could wear out its welcome. It's a safe-edgy position that everyone on the right can sort of get behind - it unites evangelicals, fundamentalist Jews, wignats, groypers, IDW debate bros, and even some feminists. But most people haven't met a trans person in real life, I think there is a limit to the amount of vitriol that can be stirred up. The constant drumbeat of trans bad will just sound like bullying the longer it goes on, especially when it takes the form of the same old misandry that young white males have been dealing with their whole lives. If the right doesn't embrace white identity, I think there's a good chance they won't be able to unite behind anything after Trump is gone.

I predict that the constant drumbeat of "trans bad" will continue to work until parents feel secure that government force is not going to shut them out of medical decisions relating to their children.

It’s certainly possible that anti-trans could become a difficult position to defend in the minds of the public; but the more likely scenario is a salacious hate crime- of the sort which the trans lobby, for all its claims, hasn’t been able to produce yet. Rhetoric does not tend to radicalize people in favor of already unpopular groups, rather the opposite.

It’s also possible that bringing up trans is bad for whatever party is perceived as putting it in the spotlight; that’s certainly a very reasonable interpretation of recent political trends. But at the moment, democrat’s own public statements are what keeps getting them in hot water over the trans issue- yes republicans amplify them but that’s normal politics.

It's a safe-edgy position

It's only a testament to how far we've come that liberals are describing it as "safe-edgy".

The constant drumbeat of trans bad will just sound like bullying the longer it goes on

We don't need to rely on "trans bad" and bullying. We can go after the doctor Mengeles that pushed the practice on unsuspecting parents of vulnerable children, we can go after corrupt academics, we can go after healthcare providers that cynically used this fad to extract money. We can keep hammering this issue longer than you can imagine, outflanking you from the left as we're doing so.

The true depth of this scandal is yet to hit the mainatream, and if it does, you will be looking at the innocent days of the year of Our Lord 2025 with wistful nostalgia.

We can go after the doctor Mengeles that pushed the practice on unsuspecting parents of vulnerable children

We can always just counter by pointing out how many of the same people opposing trans kids have also defended circumcision. Personally I think chopping off a baby's genitals with a meat cleaver is a little worse than letting them dress in opposite-sex clothes. An unwoke democratic party would be able to take the gloves off and make arguments like this without worrying about being called anti-semitic.

More comments

The right can and has canceled people all the time, no assassinations required. A cursory inspection of FIRE's databases on campus speech will reveal no lack of incidents coming from the right (830 of 1760 incidents), and that is purely focused on campus speaking events.

The major asymmetry is that there are a significant number of people on the left who oppose cancellation as a matter of principle; their counterparts on the right are either fewer in number or vastly more passive. Right-wing opposition to cancellation is overwhelmingly centered on right-wingers getting canceled.

This surprised me, so I looked into the data a bit. The results are muddy but mildly interesting. THIS IS EXCLUSIVELY AN ANALYSIS OF FREE SPEECH INCIDENTS AT UNIVERSITIES, not firings etc. and not in the workplace or media.

  1. you're right, there's a pretty even split. Left 848, Right 830.
  2. a lot of these incidents are attempts. I thought that the left would be much more successful at actually cancelling people, which would be what we hear about, so I filtered out cancellation / disruption attempts and kept invitation revocations, event cancellations, etc. The results are tilted towards the left, but less so that I would expect: Left 434 to Right 319.
  3. the Left is much more likely to disrupt or attempt to disrupt events: Left 321: Right 40.
  4. filtering out disruption attempts and keeping only cancellation attempts gives you Left 217, Right 500. The right is about twice as likely to make a failed attempt at cancelling an event through the official system. This accounts for the majority of right-wing activity.
  5. FIRE's database contains various different type of events. The right is three times as likely to attempt to cancel an artwork, cinema showing or performance (Left 107, Right 335). To some extent this may be cofounding the results, as FIRE counts the cancellation of six different artworks in the same show as 6 cancellation attempts, equally for multi-film cinema performances. The left is twice as likely to cancel a speech (Left 602, 277).
  6. During peak woke years 2016-2024, the left was only responsible for about twice as many cancellations (Left 599, Right 305).

Broadly I would say that the number of attempts since 2000 are broadly equal. The manner is somewhat different: the Left are much more prone to disrupting events where the right tries to cancel through official channels. The left are more likely to cancel speech, the right are more likely to cancel art. The left tends to succeed more often, and has attempted to cancel more in the last decade, but not overwhelmingly so, which surprises me.

Caveat: I don't like the way that some of the data is gathered: counting the cancellation of Abortion Film Pts. 1, 2 and 3 as three separate cancellations seems dubious to me.

Where have these 'significant number of people' been in the last decade?

Maybe the cancellations aren't to their principled liking, but if they didn't like it, they didn't make a fuss about it. Certainly not to change policy, or have any material impact on what actually happened. Actions speak louder than words, and by the inaction of these supposedly principled liberals their revealed preferences are known. Indeed, they did so little, it amounts to the same if they didn't exist at all.

In the real world, it doesn't matter how highbrow and principled you are if you do nothing for them. If you sacrifice nothing for them. You're just a coward. And the beliefs of cowards can be casually dismissed without argument.

Where have these 'significant number of people' been in the last decade?

Providing basically all of the intellectual defense of free speech as a principle. Organization like FIRE, for instance, provide legal backing in First Amendment cases on a broad, non-ideological front despite being founded and run by liberals. The vast majority of signatories on the famous Harper's Letter are liberals or leftists. Few are conservative, and virtually none are associated with the populist Right that dominates the Republican establishment.

By contrast, right wing "free speech" defenders have mostly been massive hypocrites, e.g. Musk making a habit of suing critics or anti-BDS laws in Red states. Likewise, there are no real conservative equivalents to organizations like FIRE (or even the ACLU, despite its serious institutional decay) that make a point of standing up for free speech regardless of who the speaker is.

In the real world, it doesn't matter how highbrow and principled you are if you do nothing for them. If you sacrifice nothing for them. You're just a coward.

Can you be specific as to what you're expecting? If speaking out and providing legal support doesn't amount to anything, I'm not really sure what would count.

  • -13

The vast majority of signatories on the famous Harper's Letter are liberals or leftists. Few are conservative, and virtually none are associated with the populist Right that dominates the Republican establishment.

No conservatives signing a letter that includes a denouncement of the current leader of the conservatives doesn't tell you conservatives don't care about free speech. It tells you conservatives have kicked at that football one too many times, Lucy.

And now FIRE is progressive! I'm sure Greg Lukianoff will be surprised, considering the many attacks they have suffered from the left, being branded a front for conservative ideology because the only people they could source funding from were conservative.

And while I'm at it, the original FIRE database you link lists deplatforming attempts, which you call cancelling, but that is like calling attempted murder murder. Attempted cancellations are bad, yes, but of the successful attempts the left clearly dominates.

No conservatives signing a letter that includes a denouncement of the current leader of the conservatives doesn't tell you conservatives don't care about free speech

Not alone, no, though given that Donald Trump is consistently anti-free speech, you would think principled conservative defenders would be willing to speak out against him on that front. Combined with other factors, it's pretty suggestive that conservatives are not pro-free speech, just pro-conservative. In particular, they never extend the same sufferance or support they demand from others. You say the football has been yanked too many times, but there's no history of betrayed reciprocity here. Cancel Culture has always been a thing, but it didn't become a Thing until right-wingers started complaining about it.

And now FIRE is progressive!

I didn't say FIRE was progressive. One of the peculiar aspects of Free Speech discourse is that is primarily an intra-left debate between liberals and progressives, with the right contributing little beyond parroting liberal arguments and complaining that progressives are rude to them.

Greg Lukanioff, however, is openly and unambiguously a liberal, and more broadly, virtually every non-partisan civil liberties organization is staffed and supported by liberals. There's not really any conservative equivalent to FIRE or the EFF or ACLU.

but of the successful attempts the left clearly dominates.

If by 'clearly dominates' you mean a 50% vs 40% success rate, that would seem like an indictment of the theory of left-wing supremacy, given that this is supposed to be their home turf, where they enjoy material and institutional superiority.

Actually policing its side of the political spectrum and ostracizing its perpetuators. You know, action.

I don't care about 'intellectual defenses', and honestly the only people who do are the cowards I speak of. What did the universities do to curb cancel culture? They institutionalized it. Title IX. The entirety of the media sphere. Hate speech laws. One feeble organization championing free speech does not cancel out an entire NGO complex of censors and sensitivity readers, the indoctrination of judges and legislatures, the complete takeover of psychology and medicine and every field of science...

Indeed, their wickedness is so wide-encompassing and total that it beggars the imagination to speak of it all.

Everything you're talking about is a fig leaf of virtue on the unashamed and naked grasp for power. The people you think so highly of have worthless principles, and when their opposition was being brushed aside by illiberalism they stayed silent because the people that were doing it were their friends and colleagues and family. Their appeals to quokka principles landed on deaf ears: and they did not change their stance or escalate their action. They merely continued to make their impotent appeals to virtue while Rome burned.

Why then, should their appeals to my party have any moral weight or consequence, if it did not stir the hearts of the previous regime?

If this is the culture war, then they were the quislings and the collaborators of the other side, and I do not hesitate to condemn them alongside their masters. Only after they and their fellow travelers are driven from the field will I consider any action to form a truce to be a correct one. Until then, I will gladly use the master's tools to destroy the master's house.

The number of people that were canceled during 2017-2023 + 10%.

At some point you have to show the adversary that you can really hurt him, but because we are generous, isn't it better if we all behave.

That seems fair as long as it's actually tracked in a public database. It would also be a lot more palatable if the people being cancelled had previously supported cancel culture when it was happening to the other side.

Ask yourself this. Would these people be getting fired for saying Charlie Kirk deserved to die, had the way not been paved with firing tradesmen for making the OK symbol out their truck window?

I mean maybe. But the right did not establish this norm of getting people fired for speech. The right did not force companies to adopt formal policies around making sure everyone feels safe about their employees outside speech. The right did not force every social media company to adopt draconian and expansive speech codes.

But now that those are the rules, and I mean actual codified rules, at many institutions, why shouldn't the right avail themselves of them? If I'm against a law, but the law passes anyways, why should I not take full advantage of it? Many people see the right "playing by the left's rules", but I see the left complaining that those rules were only supposed to be for them!

The right established a norm that every single politician must be a christian, even though many are clearly faking it. Up until the 2010s it was right-wingers demanding censorship of media. Illiberal leftist cancel culture is a recent development, puritanical cancel culture has been going on for thousands of years. Which doesn't mean illiberal leftist cancel culture was justified as "revenge" for puritanical cancel culture, they are both bad and often for the same reasons. I switched on a dime from complaining about conservatives to complaining about SJW feminazis in 2012. I expect the same from conservatives who supposedly believe in free speech. It's incredibly annoying when the side currently in power pretends that they have no power and refuses to even attempt to wield it responsibly.

  • -13

It's incredibly annoying when the side currently in power

All we have is government power (for now) and it’s not at all universal (see the anarchotyranny of the UK and Canada)

The right established a norm that every single politician must be a christian,

That’s a tradition, and no it wasn’t the right. Christianity was what the country was founded on.

The country was founded on religious freedom and separation of church and state. The founders were significantly less Christian than any powerful politicians after their time. Even a democrat nowadays couldn't get away with blaspheming the way Jefferson did. After "under God" was added to the pledge of allegiance and the currency, everyone has had to pay the Jesus tax.

The founding documents make reference to a Creator. Who is this creator if not God? How can man be “created equal” if there is no creator?

Who is this creator if not God?

Whoever built the computers that are running the simulation we're in. The founders called him the "clock maker" but that's how I interpret it now.

He didn't say they weren't very religious, he said they weren't very Christian. Obviously the "Creator" refers to God. But not to the Christian God.

You're quite wrong, the US was founded because the old country wasn't christian enough for the desires of the pilgrims.

The pilgrims founded Massachusetts, not the US. And "wasn't Christian enough" is misleading - that's they way the pilgrims saw it, but "the wrong kind of Christian" is how a neutral observer would describe it.

The right established a norm that every single politician must be a christian

I don't share your confidence in straighforwardly categorizing the second great awakening as a work of "the right".

It’s always been a bit of a thing for sure, but I think the commenter above is referring to the Cold War era where right wing actors added “under God” to the Pledge, and stuff like that. Also around the same time the first Catholic was President and begrudgingly accepted as also OK.

Of course it's cancel culture. I can maybe, sort of get behind shaming some of the most egregious cases just like I could maybe get behind shaming some of the extreme cases the left highlighted during peak woke, but this type of thing always degenerates rapidly. That's exactly what's happening right now. There's a website serving as a MAGA doxxing database over this stuff, which supposedly only includes the worst examples, yet I'm finding cases like this one and this one. Posting stuff like "and the world kept spinning" is apparently a fire-worthy offense in MAGA's eyes.

Just pure MAGA hypocrisy. I can't believe I once saw the modern right as an ally in the fight for free speech.

There's a website serving as a MAGA doxxing database over this stuff, which supposedly only includes the worst examples, yet I'm finding cases like this one and this one.

I recall "All Lives Matter" written on a BLM mural at a major corporation leading to an internal investigation to find the culprit. I remember "It's okay to be white" flyers posted on a university campus being investigated by the FBI, and commenters here claiming that was a reasonable response.

I am comfortable with both of those people losing their jobs. I am not a hypocrite, I stopped believing in "free speech" a long time ago. There are a few people here I consider to actually hold sincere free speech principles; I consider them to be badly mistaken, and I do not think you are one of them.

Posting stuff like "and the world kept spinning" is apparently a fire-worthy offense in MAGA's eyes.

That’s on the employer. With over 50k submissions it’s unlikely many are getting much pressure

Anyway it’s not even close to the same thing as what the left was getting people fired for. A cop made an anonymous twenty dollar donation to Rittenhouses defense fund. The fund was hacked and the list spread. For his crime the officer was fired. But sure, it’s totally the same thing >.>

Just pure MAGA hypocrisy. I can't believe I once saw the modern right as an ally in the fight for free speech.

Only if you they're looking tor excuses to not call it cancel culture, otherwise it's about as hypocritic as Ukrainians bombing Russian territory. Centrists that never spoke up against progressive cancel culture, but act outraged now, are much worse than this.

In some cases it's prudent to escalate to using the opponents' tactics to secure victory. Stuff like gerrymandering comes to mind, where unilateral disarmament is self-defeating.

This is not one of those cases. Cancel culture will blow up in MAGA's face eventually if they go down this road as hard as the Woke did.

  • -11

So let's not go down this road as hard as the Woke did. Let's use Blue Tribe's unforced error to deal serious harm to their cadre and their institutions, without proceeding on to getting people fired over dongle jokes and OK gestures. It does not seem to me that this should be difficult to do.

We are arguing here over public celebration of a political murder. We are a long, long way from the road the Wokes started on.

48 hours into the new right-wing cancel culture, and already the demand for people "celebrating the murder of Charlie to Kirk" to cancel exceeds the supply. There are cancel mobs out for speech on the lines of "Of course Charlie Kirk shouldn't have been murdered but that doesn't change the fact that he was a racist/homophobe/other kind of bad person" and "I think this level of public mourning is excessive for a murdered podcast bro". And the official policy of the United States government is that "making light" of Kirk's murder is deportable - that is a much broader category of cancellable speech than "celebrating" it.

It is inherent to the nature of witch hunting that the demand for witches exceeds the supply, and accordingly that the definition of a witch is subject to scope creep. The type specimen here is 1950's anti-communism. Senator McCarthy's lawyer, an corrupt faggot by the name of Roy Cohn, sicced McCarthy on the US Army after they wouldn't give his catamite a cushy desk job. This led to the Army-McCarthy hearings and eventually blew up McCarthyism. After being driven out of public life, Cohn built a successful legal practice in NYC representing corrupt politicians, gangsters and real estate developers. One of his jobs was to negotiate the arrangement where Fred Trump paid off the mafia to ensure that there were no union problems on his construction projects. A young executive in the Trump organisation who was closely involved with the deal regards Cohn as an important mentor.

So I don't think a political movement led by Donald Trump is going to resist the natural tendency of cancel culture to spiral out of control until it starts eating its own. Based on public statements by Donald Trump and Steven Miller, I don't think they even want to.

You might be right, but at the moment you're freaking out over getting hit with a fraction of the force you were dishing out over a decade, so I don't know if you're qualified to gauge demand exceeding supply, or who is likely to spiral out of control.

I'm not in America so this isn't about me - I'm mostly worried about the damage to the system from another round of purges. McCarthyism was on track to break the system if it hadn't been stopped by the Army-McCarthy hearings. Wokestupid cancel culture didn't just unjustly end a few careers - it made a whole bunch of institutions dumber. It would in fact be a good thing if America had university social science departments that could do research in the social sciences, movie studios that could make good movies, or a left-wing political party that could nominate replacement-level candidates. (And that is just the institutions where the brain damage from wokestupid looks fatal.) If it does go full retard in the way such things usually do, MAGAtarded cancel culture will also break institutions - with the most immediately obvious candidate at this early stage being the armed forces.

Wokestupid cancel culture ended up harming the American left, America as a whole, and the American-led system that delivers peace and prosperity to billions of people. If MAGA choose to play three-tits-for-a-tat (and that is what the President of the United States and most of his core supporters in the country appear to want) and no pro-establishment right faction is able to stop them Army-McCarthy style then the clapback is going to do three times as much damage to America and the system as wokestupid did. And that is scary.

I'm not in America so this isn't about me - I'm mostly worried about the damage to the system from another round of purges. McCarthyism was on track to break the system if it hadn't been stopped by the Army-McCarthy hearings.

I'm trying to find a way to move the conversation forward and not dredge up the past, but when I hear stuff like this it's really hard. Like, how come you never mentioned all your worries about the system when every other anti-woke here was doing so? How come the spectre of McCarthyism didn't worry you enough to bring it up, when it was progressives doing it?

And is "I'm not in America" a good argument for you? Your country is literally arresting people for tweets, and you're worried about people getting fired an ocean away from you?

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The problem with your perspective isn't necessarily that you are wrong, but that you are mostly powerless in political circles. One side has not learned (or at least has forgotten) the problem with cancel culture, and they will now get to experience what it is like to be at the shit end of it.

After a while, cancel culture will either run its course after some critical mass of the public actually get a taste of what it's like and we will all collectively decide to STFU online, or social media will decide (or be forced) to fix their outrage algorithms and get people to STFU, or it will continue to spiral. Whatever the case, near term cancellations perpetrated by right seem unavoidable.

Hopefully we'll all be able to take a step back, and have a conversation about the rules of warfare. A vicious cycle of escalation, ultimately ending in the defeat of the red tribe, is certainly possible, but I don't see how unilateral disarmament ends any better.

Has cancel culture blown up in the woke's face yet?

Blown up no,not so dramatic, but it did hollow out the political consultant class in the Democratic Party machine of a lot of talent, which was basically one of the main contributors to Harris’ loss. This is pretty widely conceded as a primary cause even among hardcore mainstream Democrats. Because the woke purges happened to apply disproportionately to non-college educated younger staffers, they were left with disproportionately college educated young staffers, which ironically creates a blind spot that theoretically DEI was supposed to fix (it just replaced one with another, so to speak)

This is pretty widely conceded as a primary cause even among hardcore mainstream Democrats.

Do you have more info on this?

Although not about the election and focusing on the nonprofit administerial/management classes, there was a lot of discussion around woke movements destroying nonprofits capabilities back in 2022. E.g. https://ryangrim.substack.com/p/elephant-in-the-zoom. People here at least probably wouldn't object to them being considered quasi-political/Democratic.

As for the Democratic Party apparatus itself, I don't think it's ever had a full reckoning, but I also don't think it ever was dominated by true believers in the same way media/academia/nonprofits were/are. Instead, its failings were more conventional: domination by a gerontocracy and a risk-averse leadership whose main qualification was never rocking the boat. That's how you end up with a comic scenario of Kamala Harris whining that it's Biden's fault because he stayed on well past the sell by date and because no one in his administration was willing to do anything about it.

Upon reflection I probably overstated my case honestly. (I do think it’s a major issue but not one they are paying lots of attention to).

They do say it indirectly though. Maybe a good barometer would be these statements back in February for DNC chair, on what they’d do differently. The eventual winner said they did too well among the wealthy and college voters, systemically, and that they needed more local election focus too.

Another said less democracy talk and more economic talk, and door knocking was overrated. The last said more social media work and rely less on people who watch the news.

So few people are saying it directly I guess but it’s latent underneath a lot of these ideas: that the machine is out of touch.

This is that - but note it was necessary for the right to respond in kind to create the consequences that would deter it in the first place.

As Arjin noted, when someone bombs you, and you don't like that - and you maybe even think nobody should bomb anyone - that doesn't mean it's hypocrisy to bomb them back.

Si vis pacem para bellum. To create a world without war you must be able to wage war.

Yes. They drove freethinking independent media personalities like Joe Rogan away from the left, and the lack of substantive intra-coalition criticism from the center led to Kamala being chosen as an affirmative action VP, which set the Democratic Party up for collapse when Biden's health failed.

That wasn't just because of the left's cancel culture, it was also because of, but not limited to, it's dogmaticism, aversion to debate with the outgroup, radicalism, and the application of it's rules in a one-sided manner, according to an oppressor-oppressed framework.

I doubt we would have been where we are, if the left satisfied itself with cancelling racists, and otherwise acted normal.

I doubt we would have been where we are, if the left satisfied itself with cancelling racists, and otherwise acted normal.

This is a bit like saying “I doubt the milk would be all over the floor, if the glass had just stopped in midair instead of hitting the ground and shattering to pieces”

Yes, that is technically true, almost by definition—but in practice, “the left only cancels racists and is otherwise milquetoast colorblind meritocratic Third Way Clinton Democrat/Blairite New Labour straight outta the 90s” is, like a glass of milk after being knocked off the table but before hitting the floor, a highly unstable state that can only exist for a moment on the inexorable path to a decidedly higher-entropy equilibrium.

It was "Cancel Culture is out of control" when (as found downthread (news article)) someone got their sponsorship cancelled for a different person's offensive speech before they were born.

This is Cancel Culture under control. It's entered the range where I can see valid arguments for both sides and the relevant tradeoffs. I still want even less of it, but having social policies/practices that are a bit off from with my desires is normal so it's not worth highlighting anymore.

This is Cancel Culture under control.

For at least some of these cases I'll agree with you (I haven't looked into all of them). Maybe we should have an explicit societal Overton Window — much wider than the last few years — that frowns upon calling for or celebrating acts of literal violence. There is some fuzziness around exactly where the edges should be, but I don't think society is expected to tolerate a high level of anti-social (not just asocial) activism.

Agreed. Arguments to abolish cancel culture is just an argument for an even more shameless culture than we already have. It’s nihilism disguised as principles

Busybody pile-ons full of people feeling giddy at the prospect of ruining someone's life for an opinion is is shameful.

A business owner in Sacramento was just mistaken for a guy in So Cal whose wife talked shit about Kirk. He was getting threats from people running away with ignorant moral righteousness fueled by social media amphetamines. Again, shameful.

The right discovering that they believe liberalism itself is nihilism reminds me of a central Asian Muslim student who attended a classical liberal seminar years back with me. He said it all just sounded like moral relativism to him. (He ended up sleeping with a Marxist woman that night we both were trying to get at, lol, but I digress. Totally principled guy!)

Busybody pile-ons full of people feeling giddy at the prospect of ruining someone's life for an opinion is is shameful.

No one’s life is getting ruined by this. It’s not like they said the dreaded N word or anything. But yes they may have some hardship, hopefully it will teach them to have some empathy.

Liberalism is when you keep your job while being a horrible person? Okay guess liberalism should DEFINITELY die then

I guess I feel bad for some on the left now the same way I felt bad for conservatives amid covid, when they were the pariahs

Hardly comparable. Conservatives couldn’t travel, shop, or be employed

Liberals can’t…make fun of a recently murdered celebrity? Oh boo hoo

I feel like the hypothetical Soros comment is in poor taste regardless, but IMO only outside the Overton Window if he didn't die of natural causes. If Kirk had died of an aneurysm, I think you'd see much the same comments, but less outrage over them.

The U.S. has some of if not the most legal protections enshrined for free speech of any country in the world, but our case law still recognizes that some things you cannot say.

The recent firings are superficially cancel culture in the sense that someone is getting fired for what they are saying, but what they are saying matters.

You can easily come up with something that both the left and the right will say is unacceptable for someone to say in public associated with their own identity (even if you have to pick a left darling to do it too).

Celebrating and advocating for domestic terrorism should be one of those things. Somehow it isn't to a lot of the left and the fact that it isn't is also how we got here.

Criticisms of cancel culture were never centered on the idea you can always say anything* without consequence, it was on the fact that the things that generated consequences were ridiculous or exaggerated. That's cancel culture.

*If you disagree - I think effectively everyone agrees that child pornography constitutes unacceptable public conduct.

The current wave of behavior is excessively more morally odious than what the left was cancelling over, and is also significantly more destabilizing to society.

It’s cancel culture but a good version since not supporting political murders is by definition what we need for a stable society not descending to into civil war

People forget what cancel culture really was and how bad it got during its peak. It’s nothing like this current example; which is frankly pretty tame firings for what should be obviously out of bounds behaviour

Relevant tweet: https://x.com/xwanyex/status/1967271515185160632?s=46

We can try to imagine a reversal of the scenario. If a pro-immigrant pundit were slain by an illegal immigrant, would conservatives make callous remarks on social media? I think so, yes. I don’t think they would “celebrate” it, but they would definitely make brusque political comments online. I recall reading comments like that after the Mollie Tibbetts story (illegal immigrant killed progressive American girl). We can’t say that it’s different because one side is objectively wrong about things, because polite politics requires that we pretend / believe that this isn’t the case.

But Charlie Kirk’s death is also unusually significant. He was a household name for anyone tuned in to youth politics. He was being groomed for leadership in the conservative movement, so it’s the equivalent of killing a political candidate (you can’t replace someone like Charlie Kirk). His death was unusually public in our uncensored social media environment, and also wildly gruesome. And his show was a symbol of open political discussion, even if only at the surface level. So there’s a sense in which Charlie Kirk’s death is more of an apolitical public tragedy. There’s the political dimension to it, but there’s also the apolitical tragedy dimension. As both parties would be happy to fire anyone who made light of the Boston Marathon Bombing after it happened, it comes down to how Kirk’s assassination ranks up against other objectively sacrosanct public tragedies. I actually don’t like him but I would say it’s something of a sacrosanct public tragedy because of the aforementioned incidental memetic properties of the event.

Wildly gruesome even more so because he got assassinated while talking during a public event. I think only JFK's assassination comes to the same level of shock because JFK got assassinated in a public parade. Meanwhile, others in American history that were assassinated I can think of like MLK Jr, RFK, weren't assassinated in such a public manner.

I looked through the list of assassinations in the US and these are the only ones I could see that I think would qualify as deliberate assassinations in public venues with many on lookers

  1. John F Kennedy on November 22, 1963 - Assassinated in a parade

  2. Malcom X on February 21, 1965 - Shot in front of 400 before beginning his speech

  3. James E Davis on July 23, 2003 - Politician, killed in front of the New York council and dozens of attendees

  4. Alberta King on June 30, 1974 - Mother of MLK, shot while playing the organ during service

  5. Dimebag Darrel on December 8, 2004 - Musician, shot by deranged fan during a performance

I'm sure there's some I missed since I picked this list based on the description on the table, but most assassinations, at least in the US don't take place during public events with many onlookers. Most happen at the victim's home, or it may be in public in a place like a hotel.

I honestly think if he was shot at his home, it wouldn't have been nearly as tragic. This was as public as you can get. It would've been in the same category as the assassination attempt on Trump, except Trump had the fortune to survive that one. I think after Trump having survived multiple assassination attempts, I began to think that assassinations won't actually happen, the attempted assassins are too incompetent, security will get better etc. Clearly, I deluded myself.

I've seen a lot of gore videos on the internet. Stuff with organs showing, beheadings, torture, etc. I had just seen footage of that Ukrainian girl being stabbed on the bus like a week ago. Watching the footage of Kirk being shot was the worst I ever felt. The location, the timing... I don't think anything I've seen compares.

Even without the public nature of the assassination, Kirk is the most significant political figure to be actually murdered (as opposed to just being shot at) since the Days of Rage. Part of the reason why the public response is so controversial is that a lot of people, particularly on the left, don't get why the MAGA right see Charlie Kirk as a much bigger deal than two state legislators and their spouses, and the MAGA right don't get why half the country is treating this like the murder of a controversial podcast bro.

The location, the timing... I don't think anything I've seen compares.

My guess is that part of it is that you can see the exact moment he's gone.

Most violent videos on the internet are much more vague - the focus shifts, it's partially censored, somebody gets stabbed a couple of times and "the one" wasn't clear, it's a door cam footage of a shooting at a distance, the person gets dumped in an ambulance and goes away and oh god how did they survive that???...

But no with him it's up close, good quality footage, an ugly wound, and clear that he's gone.

On. Then off.

That one moment is existentially hard and one of the big reasons for excess of substance use in healthcare workers.

If a pro-immigrant pundit were slain by an illegal immigrant, would conservatives make callous remarks on social media? I think so, yes. I don’t think they would “celebrate” it, but they would definitely make brusque political comments online.

I don't have links handy but I recall a spate of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" type comments on Twitter after Ryan Carson's stabbing. Further back and less parallel to what you're getting at, there was that couple beheaded while bicycling through... Afghanistan? that got similar comments. People continuously point out the Paul Pelosi gay jokes, but I haven't come up with a similar example of the right celebrating in the Kirk, Trump, 10/7, etc way.

it’s something of a sacrosanct public tragedy because of the aforementioned incidental memetic properties of the event.

Good way to phrase it.

...is "killed by an illegal immigrant" meant to mirror "killed by a gun" here?

…Of course. Charlie Kirk would still be alive today if America had strict gun control. There’s only a tiny chance that this terminally online dude would be able to acquire an illegal firearm in Utah, and still only a tiny chance that he would successfully assassinate him through some other means. The gun is a causal factor in his death, in the same way open borders is a causal factor in the illegal immigrant example. In both cases, the victim reasonably believes that policy decision effects a greater good which supersedes the risks and harms.

I of course totally disagree that we should care about illegal immigrants and pretty much agree that we should have guns, but that’s opinion.

…Of course. Charlie Kirk would still be alive today if America had strict gun control.

Your argument is entirely bogus., and even @TIRM's refinement below cannot save it. Japan has extremely strict gun control, but it also has high social cohesion and a population sharing highly cohesive values. If half of Japan actually wanted to murder the other half, there is no reason to believe their gun control laws would prevent this.

Japan’s 1/1000th rate of gun crime is not invalidated by one outlying case of assassination. The assailant in question planned to kill a cult leader for 20 years, tried and failed to obtain a firearm, built his own firearm, then spent a year planning to kill Abe only because he supported said cult. This was a highly unusual event all around.

Japan’s 1/1000th rate of gun crime is not invalidated by one outlying case of assassination.

Japan's low rate of violence generally comes from a highly values-cohesive culture, among other things. Murdering people you consider evil is rare there, because most Japanese do not appear to consider most other japanese evil. When a japanese person did come to view some of his fellow citizens this way, bang, you got a gun murder, even when he had to make the gun himself.

I do not believe even the strictest gun control implemented in America would reduce our rate of political murder. People who want to kill each other will find a way to make it happen, and values-incoherent politics is exceptionally good at inducing the desire.

The most plausible form of 'strict gun control' in the USA is one like in Latin America, where badly-written laws are sometimes enforced in major city centers- largely at the discretion of local police- but most people who want to own guns just own them illegally instead of bothering with paperwork requirements, regardless of their personal intentions. Criminal gangs already flagrantly violate gun control laws and the pro-gun-control party has no interest in cracking down on straw purchases or making firearms theft(the two most common avenues for criminals to evade gun control laws) a major priority for police.

Japan or North Korea strict gun control maybe. Typical developed nation gun control no.

In most countries with strict gun control, buying a .30-06 Mauser is as easy as being part of a gun club or holding a hunting license, sometimes easier than that. Bolt action rifles are old enough technology you can buy them through mail as antiques and barely even have to produce ID in some cases. And essentially everyone owns something like it in the countryside, for obvious reasons.

The gun control angle makes absolutely no sense and is completely retarded in this situation unless one is proposing to ban private ownership of firearms outright with no exceptions.

Came up in a different thread, but an urban college student is very unlikely to be allowed to buy a bolt-action rifle in the UK without being asked searching questions about why he needed it. He might have been able to manage anyway due to his family, but it wouldn't have been trivial:

https://www.themotte.org/post/3126/smallscale-question-sunday-for-september-7/363028?context=8#context

Utah isn't urban though -- hunting is probably ten minutes away from this guy's house.

Not sure that there's really comparable locations that have colleges in the UK, but I'd guess that a student living in Aberdeen or someplace would be able to get a stalking rifle?

St. Andrews is pretty rural I think.

My impression is that getting a rifle is more difficult, because it's easier to use as a weapon and also just easier to accidentally kill people if you don't watch where you're firing. Shotguns are much more common. He might be able to get one but it wouldn't be easy and he'd probably need notes from a stalking club or something.

Yeah especially when Tyler's experience with and access to guns is all downstream of his family. He likely doesn't have the experience or awareness to pull this off if his family and upbringing wasn't like 98th percentile pro-gun

if Utah has strict gun control

I’m not a gun guy, but wasn’t the weapon used the kind of single shot deer hunting rifle a grandfather would use? IOW, the kind of firearm that would still be easily available in almost any plausible form of “strict gun control.

It’s one of the cheapest and most widely commercially available hunting rifles in the world. A single shot, bolt action hunting rifle.

The kind of firearm that is available even in countries with strict gun control.

The idea that gun control would have prevented this is nothing short of farcical.

It’s the firearm equivalent of like… a common chef’s knife. Or a two door sedan. A claw hammer. Or bleach. Or gasoline. All incredibly common things that can nevertheless be used by a determined attacker to kill someone.

and also wildly gruesome.

This is the key factor. Had he died in a car accident ,it would obviously be different. But OTOH, dancing on the graves is something of an American tradition and maybe even intrinsic to humanity, probably going back to the Revolutionary War. Or when Lincoln was shot, many confederates had the same feeling. https://www.vox.com/2015/4/15/8414239/abraham-lincoln-death

Confederate lawyer Rodney Dorman called the killer “a great public benefactor” and felt relieved at Lincoln’s assassination. (In his diary, he spelled Lincoln’s name “Lincon” to emphasize the “con” he felt Lincoln was.)

Minor nit. “Con” as a shortened form of confidence game or man didn’t appear in the vernacular until the late 1800s. Vox is probably wrong about that reading of the spelling.

It's absolutely cancel culture, and the worst kind. Many of the people being cancelled didn't even "celebrate" his murder, they just said negative things about him. So they are being cancelled for failing to show sufficient reverence for a podcast host. I think it was fair to give the excuse about avenging leftist cancel culture for a few months after Trump was elected. But that time has long passed, and it's time for these people to either stand up for free speech or admit they don't believe in it. I say the same thing to feminists who continue justifying misandry because society used to be really sexist in the 70s.

It's cancel culture and it's bad, and employers should refuse to listen to (all) such complaints in the same way one refuses to negotiate with terrorists.

On principle, a rando calling in to get someone fired should be treated as inadmissable evidence.

It is cancel culture and what's good for the goose is also good for the gander.

There was a book I read years ago and for the life of me I can’t remember who the damn author was or what the title of it was, but it was by a prominent American Jewish lawyer (not Alan Dershowitz).

He was a radical advocate of social and economic laissez-fairism. To such an extent he thought if you were someone who harbored racist beliefs and wanted to hang Neo-Nazi slogans on the window of your business, you should be able to do that. Or if you were a prejudiced business owner who wanted to refuse someone because of their religious beliefs you could turn away anyone you wanted for any reason.

I think there’s a point where unconstained liberty brings you far too close to the breakdown of society and it just becomes unworkable. Large segments of society refuse to cooperate with each other. Everyone is suspicious of their neighbor. People have to travel far out of their way to buy groceries or make a living. Violent retribution is always a looming concern. Corporations may refuse to provide power to your neighborhood’s electric grid. Who knows, police may refuse to help you if you get into trouble; depending on who you are. But at least you have freedom of speech and expression.

But without the metapolitical and social prerequisites that allow a shared community to flourish, it’s ultimately worthless. It’s why when the program of economic “shock therapy” was introduced into Russia under the Yeltsin era, hitmen and assassinations were a readily available service in the Russian free market.

I mean this is just feudalism.

Which is fine, hell I like it, but let's not act like it's some newfangled oddity. A society built out of ad hoc contracts between everyone is one of the most common ways of human organization historically speaking.

... hell I like it...

Aside from the fact that I've actually met libertarians who are fine with privately own cities operating as if they were corporate fiefdoms and see that as the highest form of social organization, in reality it'd be a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it.

privately own cities operating as if they were corporate fiefdoms and see that as the highest form of social organization, in reality it'd be a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it.

Lots of people want to live in Dubai. This place has its own problems, it is not exactly known as land of freedom, but no one described it as "full of hate".

Dubai has Sharia And Civil Law dude, it’s not a socioeconomic laissez-faire society.

In libertarian world, society is as laissez faire as owner of the society (technically, land where the society is) wants it to be. Do not like it? Pull yourself by your bootstraps and build your own society.

In libertarian world, society is as laissez faire as owner of the society (technically, land where the society is) wants it to be. Do not like it? Pull yourself by your bootstraps and build your own society.

And in the real world, don't blame people for not following in lockstep with the libertarian fantasy when they decide to pull themselves up by their bootstraps by pulling out a gun and robbing you of your personal property. Otherwise, have fun homesteading on the eastern plateau of Antarctica. This is why the "libertarian world" will never become what we can the "real world," at any point.

But like he said, lots of people want to live there. And who wants laissez-faire anyway?

But like he said, lots of people want to live there.

Then why does he keep responding to an argument I’m not making?

… it is not exactly known as land of freedom…

“Yeah yeah, I understand what you’re saying but I’m going to ignore it and replace your statement with one you didn’t make and reply to that instead.”

My entire statement was about a socially and economically hands off, laissez-faire society. That is absolutely ‘not’ what Dubai is, and not by a long shot.

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Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

I've personally chosen to live in one of these and it's been a massive improvement to my quality of life and that of my friends and family. Mostly out of not having to worry about constant petty crime anymore. But in fact I've observed the exact opposite of what you're claiming. People are a lot nicer and more respectful of cultural differences than I've seen in supposedly enlightened liberal democracies.

I choose to trust my personal experience over your conjecture.

I've personally chosen to live in one of these and it's been a massive improvement to my quality of life and that of my friends and family. Mostly out of not having to worry about constant petty crime anymore. But in fact I've observed the exact opposite of what you're claiming. People are a lot nicer and more respectful of cultural differences than I've seen in supposedly enlightened liberal democracies.

You live in Tamaulipas? Because we definitely aren’t talking about the same thing if that’s not the case. And I don’t know of any rich trillionaire that owns an entire city outright, so I’m going to call it that you don’t live in such a city.

I choose to trust my personal experience over your conjecture.

You have quite the unheard experience from anyone on planet Earth if that’s the case.

I'm not sure what to make of your evaluation of what's a common human experience if the concept of a king is such a novelty to you.

There are people that have whole nations as their estates, it's one of the most common government forms in history. And you'll be hard pressed to argue that nobody has ever enjoyed such an arrangement.

I understand new worlders are fanatically down on aristocracy, but that's not a bias everyone shares.

Look at what you replied in agreement to.

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privately own cities operating as if they were corporate fiefdoms

I mean, there is a reason Nick Land decided to immigrate to Shanghai.

There's clearly something I'm missing here. Shanghai isn't Hong Kong last time I checked.

Some have argued that it is not the same thing, due to the disparaging comments being immediate, vs old comments dredged up in an attempt to cancel someone.

Yeah, no, this is cope. If you're going to do it, own it. It's perfectly defensible as retaliation and deterrence, but it's lame as hell to put shit under a microscope to come up with whatever difference you can find, and claim it's salient in a totally not ad-hoc fashion, so you're justified in whatever you're doing.


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