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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.
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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