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I remember when Trump was shot, the right was accused of being hypocrites on cancel culture for trying to get people fired for celebrating it.
I don't think this is hypocrisy or "my-sideism" at all. The taboo against political assassinations is a load-bearing one for a liberal society with broad free speech rights. If cancel culture was limited to firing people who celebrated political assassinations, I don't think "cancel culture" would exist as a meme at all! I'm happy if the left only cancels people for celebrating political assassinations as long as the right gets to do so too. That sounds like a perfectly stable equilibrium and a well-tailored exception to free speech for a functional liberal society.
But that's not how "cancel culture" became a meme, and we all know that and I feel like I'm being gaslighted by people who should know better. People lost their job for misgendering, or arguing that male and female abilities were different, or supporting conservative ballot measures, or donating anonymously to a legal defense fund and getting doxxed, or casually hanging an "ok" sign out of a car window, or arguing that riots empirically hurt the political cause they were in support of.
The effect of all of these cancellations is to make social discourse dumber, to fence off a chunk of plausibly true beliefs as things you can't say. The effect of cancelling people for celebrating assassinations is to keep assassination taboo'ed beyond the doors of polite society.
Maybe there should be amnesty for entry level service workers. But even there, it shouldn't be too hard to get another entry level service job, and a slap on the wrist from polite society serves as notice to the social taboo.
I'll bite that bullet gladly. I'm happy if you cancel me for celebrating the intentional murder of a political figure. If the price of that was removing all other threat of cancellation, well I would be giddy with a sense of freedom that I haven't felt in 13 years.
My thoughts on this are very simple. The taboo has been broken. Cancelling is fair game now and always for everyone. I 100% do not doubt that if e.g. Gavin Newsom wins a trifecta in 2028 we will be right back to the bad old days of internet deplatforming and cancelling of right wingers (only turbocharged because so many have come out the woodwork). People who throw around the term "woke right" are idiots who still think that this time, if the right presses the cooperate button, the left will stop smashing defect at every opportunity, contrary to all of recent political history.
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I think the question here is this: Is the cancellation of people on the left who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death (or, likewise, bad mouthed him just after he died) any more justified than the cancellations of people during the 2020 George Floyd protests?
Sure, the red tribe will think the cancellations of people in the blue tribe is completely justified, while the cancellations of anyone in the red tribe are immoral. And the blue tribe will only think people in the red tribe should be cancelled. But is that what is going on here?
This series of cancellations post-Charlie Kirk come off as different than the cancel culture we had in 2020. Back then, David Shor was cancelled for wanting to reduce violence. This time around, people are being cancelled (losing their jobs, being placed on administrative leave, etc.) for encouraging violence, as per https://archive.ph/1VUK1
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I disagree with this on baseline free-speech grounds. I think it’s gross and stupid to be publicly posting your glee that a pundit you dislike was killed, but unless you are in an exceptionally public-facing position (like a spokesperson, or an executive, or a government official), or you are actively harassing your coworkers, I don’t think that should have any bearing on your employment. The idea that doing things in poor taste should lead to any consequence worse than social shunning is, in my view, flatly toxic to society. Employers should not be making a judgment that something is intrinsically beyond the pale; the social role of Goodyear is to provide tires, not to act as referee about what is and isn’t acceptable in civil society.
If I found out that an engineer at my company had been fired because he posted “Charlie Kirk had it coming” on Twitter I would be extremely disappointed. Even more so if he was just making edgy jokes about it. As long as he’s not bringing it into the office and making people uncomfortable, I don’t see why my company should give a damn.
If that was the tradeoff, I’d certainly agree with you. Unfortunately in reality this is not an option on the table. Perhaps an escalation of right-leaning cancel culture in a “your rules applied fairly” sort of way is needed, or at least inevitable, in order to get a de-escalation of cancel culture broadly, but that doesn’t make it a good thing.
Does it change if it's a position of authority (such as being a teacher, or a manager)? Should parents have to let their kids be taught by someone who freely posts online celebrating the death of someone with the same views? Should employees be in a situation where the person who does their performance reviews and controls their salary and assignments will cheer because people like them are dead?
I'd argue "yes" to the latter, "no" to the former, personally. I'm fine with holding public servants - especially those with power beyond merely being a part of the government bureaucracy, such as teachers or police or public defenders - to a higher standard of at least pretending to have a fig leaf over hatred.
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I agree with you on this. As much as my libertarian-ish heart hates the idea of government meddling in the free market, I do grudgingly admit that the EU is onto something with their regulations prohibiting employers from taking any adverse action in response to an employee’s personal social media activity.
Since it’s a matter of EU law, companies no longer have to worry about policing this shit: they can just throw up their hands and (rightly!) say “wellp, nothing we can do”. And naturally, this implies that the activist class (on either side of the culture war) can’t rack up any wins by threatening to boycott some company unless they fire so-and-so for some unconscionable post on InstaBlueTokBookX.
As the GMU Econ crowd is fond of saying, solve for the equilibrium—IMHO it’s a much more civilized one than what we get in the land of laissez-faire. This is at least as good a case for the role of the state in preventing runaway Molochian escalation spirals as China cracking down on extracurricular tutoring hours.
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I can agree with this post in vague terms, but the problem is with the definitions. What does "celebrated political assassinations" start and end? If it's specifically limited to political violence, then great, but the problem is that plenty of right-wingers want to extend that to functionally mean any criticism of the deceased, or anyone pushing against their narratives. Heck, I'm sure there are plenty who think my post yesterday goes too far by daring to criticize the idea that perhaps Kirk was not as great as MLK x Jesus.
The past few years should have made it clear to anyone that much of the Right's dedication to "free speech" is just as much of a lie as the Left's. For many, it's just a cynical ploy to gain support from moderates while their true feelings are that censorship is actually amazing, and that the Left was just censoring the wrong people.
Like, I could also support censorship of "fascism" in vague terms, but the Left quickly expanded the meaning of that word to functionally be "anyone who disagrees with me".
Nah, sorry. A lot of us were principled free speech advocates until it became clear that we were trying to cooperate with a group of committed defectors. Which, hey, "always defect" is a valid strategy, but when your opponent begins to mirror that strategy, you don't get to rewrite history to claim that they were defectors the entire time.
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It's not just people celebrating political assassinations, it's people celebrating as it happened. It's kind of mask off, in my opinion.
Wait a couple days and make any jokes you want. But pointing and laughing at someone who is bleeding out implies a serious level of dehumanization.
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Everyone is happy to bite the bullet of being canceled for things they don't do anyway. It's called Just Being a Decent Person.
When it comes to celebrating murder of people one dislikes, given that that's slightly more pleasurable and addicting than heroin, I feel like the causality is backwards. The reason the commenter doesn't do it anyway is because they've bit the bullet.
Everyone believes it’s below the belt to say something exciting about someone’s death until Adolf Hitler enters the chat.
I’ll accept the finger waging of the morality police when they can show me they remain consistent in the face of a person with no redeeming element in their legacy.
Some people are confusing my argument. It’s much more practical than me playing the morality police. Celebrating and praising political assassins is a step on the path to ending a liberal democratic society. You gotta have some degree of sanction against it for the same reason LKY banned the communist party in Singapore.
If you want to craft a maximally free society, don’t start with an absolutely free society and look on in a stupor as people find the exploits that will bring it crashing to the ground
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When I first watched Death of Stalin my experience of the movie wasn't laughter at the absurdity of kremlin politics but an appreciation of the tragedy of Lavrentiy Beria, an ostensibly evil, base and degenerate man, who nonetheless was still a man and tried everything he could to survive his legacy only to end up shot like a dog by a sham tribunal.
It's not good for the soul to mock tragic fates, even those of evil men, even those of men that have been built into the very incarnation of evil by your culture.
In fact it tends to make one forget that they aren't that different. Hitler wasn't crazy, special or demonic. He was just a charismatic leader who let hatred of his fellow man consume him and ultimately all that he loved. A historically common story, ultimately.
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The Deputy Secretary of State, on his official X account, said that "praising, rationalizing, or making light" of Kirk's death was grounds for visa revocation, and encouraged Karens to report wrongthinkers. That goes beyond "firing people who celebrated political assassinations" - it is a much broader category of prohibited wrongthink, as well as being a threat of government action. "Making light" would cover a lot of perfectly normal behaviour.
Visas are a privilege with many restrictions. These people have no right to be here and can enjoy celebrating the murder of Americans in their home country. We don't need them to do that here.
First link on Google:
Having a job is also a privilege with restrictions, and in 49 of the 50 states you have no right to keep it.
If you want to make the case that cancel culture is good when applied to resident foreigners but bad when applied to W-2 employees, then you can do so. But cancel culture is still cancel culture, even when it is entirely legal.
I think that "Be careful what you say, Big Brother is watching" is socially corrosive in all circumstances, and accordingly that people should not be cancelled for ill-chosen jokes, regardless of the details of the jokes or the cancellation.
This is comparing like with unlike. There is a general right for citizens to work; there is no non citizen generalized right to travel to the U.S.
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If Ilhan Omar died in a car accident and people were being fired for voicing disrespectful opinions about her, would you feel similarly?
What if she was killed by a confused person for a non-politically articulable reason?
Yes.
She’s dangerously stupid and net-negative for society, but I wouldn’t celebrate her death of any cause. Nor would I mourn her. Silence is so simple.
It’s remarkably easy to just be quiet about such things, and yet! So many people are seemingly incapable of holding their tongue and not being ghouls.
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Yes. Good grief, if nothing else it's just stupid. A dead Ilhan Omar is a closed plot thread. There's nothing to shut down, no final argument to win with a post-buzzer dunk. I'm sure plenty of people wouldn't be able to restrain themselves from husband/brother jokes and nastier comments besides, but it's feeding ammo to the outgroup.
Just nod to yourself to acknowledge the changed landscape, do the "Thoughts and Prayers with her family" ritual and move on to the next battle.
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I think the case of celebrating someone’s death of natural or accidental causes is completely different. Assassination is a possibility in a free society with lots of soft targets and we only get to have that society as long as assassination is massively ostracized.
Singing “ding dong the the witch is dead” when Thatcher died of old age, as awful as it was, doesn’t create the same kind of threat to our free society
I appreciate this articulation of a distinction I felt but I was having trouble formalising. I thought the comments about Thatcher were in poor taste but not fundamentally harmful.
With Kirk, I am even sympathetic to those the "reaped what he sowed" variety of comments, because they are at least not unambiguously in favour of political violence (and from the non-US, non-pro-gun point of view there is a sad but also delicious irony in a gun rights advocate who argued that occasional deaths were a price worth paying himself paying that very same awful price himself)—but I am appalled by those who openly celebrate the murder of another human in any circumstances (save perhaps a very narrow exception for those who present a clear and immediate danger of doing the same or worse to others).
Charlie Kirk might have been a reprehensible shill for a harmful and destructive political movement, but no sane person should be pleased to see people being gunned down for their beliefs.
As they say: send not for whom the bell tolls.
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Yeah it's really silly and something I've been pointing out over and over that constantly the "don't speak ill of the dead" and "Just because you don't want them dead doesn't mean you have to glaze them or not make dark jokes" switches back and forth constantly depending on who dies.
Basically any pundit you can find scolding right now you can find doing after-death criticisms/mockery and basically every pundit you can find after-death criticisms/mockery you can find times when they've scolded.
Great example how so much of claimed morals is really just signaling though, and honestly I think the main signal part is the "don't speak ill" side on both ends since when there's bipartisan agreement it's pretty much always for criticism being okay and dark jokes being funny.
Also the US in general is a country that loves being contrarian, the more you scold or try to censor the more they just love doing what upset you. The left didn't realize this from left wing cancel culture and the right censors might have to learn the same lesson.
It's the timing that made it bad.
Cheering it on as it was happening is different than telling a joke one week later. Like, give it a day.
I think a lot of people are making political hat out of this mask off moment. Turning this into a slippery slope ignores that.
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Couldn't agree more. The "don't speak ill of the dead" reasonably applies to the deceased's immediate family, but trying to do mass censorship of all online discourse on the topic is just ludicrous. So yeah, it'd be incredibly rude to go up to Kirk's parents or to his funeral and call him a shithead, but that does not apply to the internet at large for the same reason most Americans don't really care about dying orphans in Africa: empathy falls off rapidly with distance.
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Yeah. I simultaneously believe it is disrespectful and gross to talk ill of the dead, especially over mere political differences, but that it's outrageous to fire someone or try to marginalize them from society for doing so. I recognize these are somewhat contradictory. I am American AMA.
They're not so much contradictory as in conflict. all values held are naturally in conflict whenever a trade off is introduced.
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This is a seductive argument, but some people would argue that the norm against lynching black people is load-bearing for a multiracial integrated society. Then anyone posting crime statistics in response to a white guy killing a black guy is cancelled for defending lynchings. Suddenly speech doesn't feel all that free anymore. Is it even okay to call for the expedited execution of suspected black murderers of white girls?
Let people speak. Bluesky is collapsing under the weight of their own speech codes.
Cancelling people for racism is heavily prone to motivated reasoning to use it only against one's enemies, since 1) accusations of racism are partisan and 2) whether an incident is racist has a heavy subjective component. Genuine opposition to assassination would oppose it when done by both sides of the political spectrum, and it's easy to tell when an incident is an assassination.
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Isn't Bluesky federated? Can't people just leave and migrate their account to a different host if they don't like one's "no celebrating assassinations" rule?
As far as I understand when Bluesky launched they announced plans to support federation but they have yet to materialize (if ever).
Edit: looks like their idea of "federation" is rather limited - https://old.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/1axebtz/bluesky_federation_goes_live/krpp87x/
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I could be wrong but it seems the “hypocrite” accusations are a lot more muted this time around. I think centrists are waking up to how radicalized a lot of people are becoming, especially as it comes to light that the shooter was indeed a leftist.
I think we had this fight already last summer and no one around here is really interested in relitigating the question.
Relitigation is literally all we do
No it isn't.
(Yes it is.)
If I'm going to argue with you, I must take up a contrary position!
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Theres a lot of it on reddit right now. The top post (now locked) on /r/games is about some dev who got fired for supporting kirks assassination and half the posts in the thread are calling conservatives hypocrites for doing a cancel culture. These posts have thousands of updoots.
Yeah I was referring to centrists, maybe I should’ve been more explicit
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You fail to mention that the majority of the top comments are actually decrying people celebrating the assassination as a dumb move.
It wasn't when I posted that, I suppose either a bunch were deleted or updoot ratio changed.
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