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I always thought that was flicking someone's nipple. You learn something new everyday.
I remember Thomas Hobbes made the interesting analogy of how the Leviathan pacifies the worst impulses and instincts in men and how that deceives them into thinking this veil of civility has made man less barbaric than he otherwise is. In reality, it hasn't. The legal code has just become the new battlefield and substitute for one man to conduct warfare against another. Inter-tribal political warfare has never stopped and will likely never not remain an intrinsic feature of human beings.
Even in ideologically purist societies like Communist China, there are massive internal divisions and all manner of factional infighting between different power brokers and their respective spheres of influence. The Jiang Zemin faction and Xi Jinping faction hated one another. The Hu Jintao faction was independent of both. And all these parties try and use the organs of the CCP to gain leverage and assume power over their rivals. To this end cancel culture is nothing new and I fully agree with you. It may be an anathema to how we conduct our politics in the west but even so, it isn't new.
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