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My claim: cancel culture was bad when the left did it and is bad when the right does it. Our norms are fragile, and are worth protecting. Allowing people to speak freely means that there will be some people who say horrible things. Some of those horrible things will be false. Some of those people who say those horrible false things will even mean it.
And yet, the societies that try to silence the people who say horrible false things seem to invariably also start trying to silence the people who say inconvenient-to-power true things. As we witnessed just a couple of years ago.
At that time, many on the right seemed to understand the value of free speech, actual free speech and not "you're free to speak and I'm free to blackmail your employer into firing you with threats of a media shitstorm". And last year, there was a shift, and people started to recognize (out loud) the excesses of the "woke" era. Norms turned against people trying to "cancel" each other for insufficient wokeness.
I mean go look at the discourse about "alligator alcatraz", the people saying "I voted for this, self-deport" whenever there's a report of ICE illegally detaining legal US residents in atrocious conditions or trying to sidestep court orders, this very forum with the dark hinting about how the left has made the right angry and you wouldn't like us when we're angry.
To be clear, I support the right of people on the right to say these things. I oppose any attempts to try to be cute and get their employers to go after them.
But I notice that the right seems to be trying to bring back the worst parts of 2021 era cancel culture. And so, in opposition to that, I claim: cancel culture was bad when the left did it and is bad when the right does it
Cancel Culture: I said the word faggot on Facebook in 2006.
Not Cancel Culture: I a person in trusted authority (such as a doctor) publicly celebrated the death of someone who represents half of America.
Yes Cancel Culture
So apparently saying "Charlie Kirk died the same way he lived: bringing out the worst in people" is now "attempting to glorify" the Charlie Kirk assassination. Obviously it's in poor taste. But firing teachers for saying, on their own time and not even to their students, things which are in poor taste is a bad idea. We just went down this road. It's not a good road. The right saw that it was a bad road when it was their people losing their jobs over saying things that were true but unpopular and tactlessly stated, but apparently forgot what they learned the moment they had the ability to do unto others instead of having others do unto them.
In any case, I'm not super interested in getting in a pissing contest over whose cancel culture was worse. The Floyd era cancel culture from the left was clearly worse. But the trend is in a bad direction.
"The twin towers fell as they lived, a monument to capitalist excess and oppression of the Muslim people" would get you pilloried by both left and the right in the weeks following 9/11. The average American understands that in the wake of tragedy you have to either being showing a tremendous lapse in some combination of judgement, insight, and impulse control or you have to be defending what happened using plausible deniability. In a few months it may be a different story but for now you have widespread bipartisan figures going "the republic is going to fall if you don't stop saying "neiner, neiner" and supporting terrorism and plenty of people went "bet."
Cancel culture was mostly firing and oppressing people for mainstream opinions, stuff they did years ago and stuff they straight up didn't even do.
Dancing on the burning corpse of democracy is not one of the above.
Is the right likely to take it too far? Will they be justified in doing so? Different but important questions.
You want to talk about those talk about those but stop pretending this is in the same category.
The parallel is stretched, but yes I agree that's what would have happened after 9/11. Also what would have happened after 9/11 to expressing doubt for the "WMDs in Iraq" narrative, which is rather my point. "We cancel speech which is insensitive but allow speech which goes against the narrative on factual grounds" does not seem to be a reachable policy, and so "we allow all speech that is not a direct call for violence" seems like the best achievable norm.
"I didn't like Charlie Kirk as a person but he shouldn't have been shot" is a pretty mainstream opinion. I agree that adding the "I didn't like Charlie Kirk as a person" bit is in poor taste after something like this, but "privately or semi-privately expresses opinions which are in poor taste" should IMO not result in a mob contacting your workplace.
Likewise, in terms of "stuff they straight up didn't even do", I give you Elkhorn Area School District principal falsely accused of making inappropriate Charlie Kirk comments: The district said they have received 800 voicemails, some including death threats
So yes, this does seem to be the same sort of righteous mob mentality that drove the post 9/11 insanity and the post-Floyd insanity. I don't think it's categorically different just because different people are doing it this time.
Edit: and I just noticed I'm arguing with a burner account :/
Let's try this.
We are in the midst of a "real world" political moment.
The literal shooting war started at least a year ago and now a good chunk of America has woken up, realized that this is real and many are trying to abort the war before it gets worse.
The world of political ideals is wonderful but not usually compatible with enemy action and real life - those who are inflexible and sclerotic get wiped out by history.
I kinda like America, and while I'd like to be implementing political action with sensitivity and specificity of 100%....those things don't exist in the real world. In medicine we still do screening tests even though we know they aren't perfect, because the benefits outweigh the harms.
We know the police will be wrong some of the time, but we accept them because society falls apart without them (and the left has been demonstrating this for us!).
The hate we are seeing, violence, and authoritarian anti-americanism isn't the disease. It's the symptom. The disease is the death of the marketplace of ideas, killed by the left. They knocked of the stalls and kicked the right out of the market and for a long time the right had increasingly minimal place in our institutions including critical ones like school, universities, social media, and popular entertainment.
This radicalized an entire generation on the left who grew up hearing insane ideas with no consistency and never any pushback and it radicalized some on the right who thought that shit was crazy and got isolated as a result.
Now the federal government is going to come in and try and bus in right leaning stuff into the marketplace of ideas at gunpoint. Some stalls are going to get kicked over but the result is going to be me more free speech.
The left already killed free speech in America, it's stupid to get mad at the right for forcibly reinstating it, would you rather it stay dead?
Monopolies are bad.
Additionally this needs to happen absolutely fucking NOW Jesus Christ. People in their 40s and older, maybe some people in their 30s. They'll come back once political winds change. They remember a before time. People in their 20s and younger spent most of their critical developmental periods in milieu of insane political obscenity and a good chunk of those are at high risk of staying there.
Communist revolutions provided a blue print for what happens when cynical elders teach words words words knowing not to take them literally, but those taught do take them literally - chaos and destruction result.
Lastly, categorically the left is more of a threat than the right because of the prior victories. The extremities of the left have gone functionally unchallenged for over a decade. Yeah you can slice out segments that have been speaking out, but overall they captured most of it. The right has been roundly criticized for any moment of failure or excess, by the media, by the courts, by the universities, by popular entertainment. It would be a decade long project to change that if it is even possible. The right will continue to be under a microscope that prevents things from getting bad, the left will continue to be a slavering rabid dog whose owner thinks is just precious and can do no wrong.
I think one of those is significantly safer to steward a realignment.
How has this worked out in the past? The most salient examples I can think of of this in the past are
But in fairness to you, are there some specific times in history where a government came in and forced specific views into the marketplace of ideas at gunpoint, and this went well? Maybe it's just a failure of historical knowledge on my part, and this is usually a strategy which leads to a free and flourishing nation.
Again - the marketplace of ideas and free speech are already dead. CPR does not have a good success rate but we do it because you can't get worse than dead. CPR is ugly. You feel the mangled flesh of their chest and feel like you are going cut your hand on their fractured ribs. Doesn't mean you give up.
Especially important because the people who killed it have oppressed me for the last ten+ years (or at least, I identify that way), some of them appear to be publicly stating they want me dead (see: polling, public statements by left leaning influencers), and we've seen what happens when you put these people in charge (marxist and socialist thought in China, Russia, etc).
You mention the cultural revolution - Trump has zero percent chance of making that happen. None of what that is or the environment that brings it is represented by Trump. Meanwhile the left has already started their cultural revolution.
You want the cultural revolution that has zero chance to happen or the one that is already picking up steam?
Rumors of the death of the marketplace of ideas are greatly exaggerated. Exhibit 1: we are posting on a site where holocaust revisionists speak freely (and incessantly). Free speech norms aren't as strong now as they were in the late 90s, but they are not entirely dead, and (up until the Charlie Kirk murder) were moving in a mostly good direction. A lot of right wing ideas have been winning in the marketplace of ideas recently (e.g. around immigration, trans, parental rights). In many cases, I am not happy that those particular ideas are winning - but I am very happy that the marketplace of ideas seems to be recovering. Let's maybe not throw that away.
I get that you feel personally wronged, and that you want revenge for that. You likely genuinely were wronged. The people you are trying to take revenge on, though, are not the same people who wronged you, even if both sets share a broad ideological tent.
Which one is picking up steam, in your view? Are you sure you're not living in 2021 still?
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