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Notes -
The limits of political hypocrisy
Read it here for proper image embedding
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, there have been a wave of conservatives going after anyone they see as “celebrating” the assassination. There have been several scalps, including MSNBC pundit Matthew Dowd, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, political streamer Destiny, and, most prominently, Jimmy Kimmel.
To many, it seems like the Right now has its own version of woke.
I’ve seen some people pushing back against this idea, but their arguments are pretty weak. I’ve seen some people claim Kimmel was really cancelled for other reasons behind the scenes (low ratings, high costs) and that the Charlie Kirk stuff was just an excuse, but there were always plenty of claims that left-wokeness was really about corporate politics as well. I’ve also seen claims that there are voices on the Right saying “hey guys, maybe we shouldn’t do this”, but such warnings are mostly hesitant and directed at specific phrases rather than full-throated condemnations. There seems to be a specific allergy to the words “hate speech” as that was a phrase the Left liked to use which makes the hypocrisy a little too on-the-nose for some, but otherwise people like Ted Cruz are more than fine with “naming and shaming”.
It’s clear there’s a fairly broad appetite for this type of behavior on the Right. And not just against the big targets, but against small-timers too. There was much hubbub about a MAGA doxxing database with over 20,000 entries of random people that were perceived as worthy targets. The website has since been taken down or moved (it had been served at this URL), but not before I took a few screenshots like this one and this one of some of the entries.
As you can see in the second image, they believe something as simple as saying “and the world kept turning” in regards to Kirk’s death is worthy of being terminated from their jobs -- and are apparently willing to go through with their threats too, with the words “CONFIRMED FIRED!” proudly emblazoned on the page.
Matthew Yglesias has written about how the Right is doing a motte-and-bailey here, presenting anyone who speaks ill about Kirk as “celebrating” or even “inciting” violence, when in reality there’s a large continuum:
Threats and incitement to violence may actually be illegal.
Violent ideation and celebration of murder are seriously wrong and worthy of condemnation, but not illegal.
Saying mean stuff about a person in the immediate wake of his death is generally in poor taste, but you’d expect it if the person was really bad.
Sharp criticism of a major public figure is just participation in a free society.
I explained my own take on Kirk here, how I was horrified that anyone is dying in political violence, but that Kirk was hardly some “martyr for truth”. He was just a mundane political operative -- a commentator/e-celeb that wasn’t particularly noteworthy prior to his death. The idea he was “promoting dialogue” was completely hollow when what he was really doing was farming infantile leftists for dunk opportunities that he could then post on TikTok and elsewhere for money and clout. I certainly don’t think that’s evil, but it’s also not some great public service. Is my opinion sufficiently insensitive that people on the Right think I should be fired? Based on the types of people that are being targeted in the screenshots above, I’d say it’s plausible to think so.
MAGA’s turn towards cancel culture is pretty blatantly hypocritical, and its hypocrisy on one of the things that many on the Right felt most fiercely, and which won them many allies (including myself, for a time). While most people are cynical on most political topics, I genuinely care about free speech as an end in and of itself. Seeing this type of behavior for the Right was thus annoying for the same reason it was annoying when it was coming from the Left.
It’s not like I’m completely shocked about this turn of events or anything. There had long been a more authoritarian-leaning Right subfaction that was pushing for cancellations in the other direction. But several years ago, it was hardly certain that they would prevail. I had hoped the Right would just collectively decide to do the right thing, or at the very least that they would be compelled to do so by lacking the institutional soft power required to pull off what the Left had done. It turns out that direct, top-down government action can do pretty much the same thing, while still being ambiguous enough to not get instantly shredded by the courts for violating the Constitution.
It’s great. Fantastic. I love it.
As I’ve discussed this topic with people, I’ve frequently run into the issue of hypocrisy as it applies to politics. The word “hypocrisy” has a negative connotation -- with good reason, I’d add! That said, I don’t think there are no arguments for political hypocrisy. In fact, there are several I’ve seen that can explain it in neutral terms, or even promote it as a straightforwardly good thing.
Why political hypocrisy is good, or at least understandable
Argument 1: Political coalitions aren’t a single person. This should be obvious to everyone but it bears repeating here. It can be tempting to think of political parties as a single gestalt organism, especially when it comes to the outgroup. It would certainly make it easier to debate their ideas at least. But of course it isn’t true -- these coalitions are big amorphous blobs that include millions of Americans, and as is increasingly the case, they include hundreds of millions or even billions of non-Americans as well. Every person has their own beliefs and agendas, and it’s entirely plausible that the people loudly decrying Woke cancel culture on the basis of free speech are a different set than the ones who are gleefully celebrating the MAGA cancel culture sequel.
Argument 2: Catharsis. I don’t think it’s good that people want to see harm done to those they perceive have wronged them, but it’s certainly understandable. Seeing a petty tyrant get their just desserts can feel great. There can be object-level glee in seeing someone fuck around and find out, even if you don’t really agree with what’s being done at a meta-level. I’ve seen plenty of people echo sentiments that were essentially “no, I’m not going to feel sorry for these people after they’ve spent years doing it to us”. We’re several years removed from peak woke so it can feel a bit distant now, but many on the Left completely lost their minds when the mobs were in full swing. Some of my favorite examples include when Bari Weiss was cancelled for saying “immigrants, they get the job done”, as well as Firefox cancelling its CEO in 2014 for a donation made against gay marriage in 2008 -- a time when even Obama was officially against full legalization.
Argument 3: Re-establishing deterrence. If one side discovers a new trick that proves very successful, they can be reluctant to part ways with it for obvious reasons. The only convincing way to promote mutual disarmament in this case is to use the trick right back on them, deliberately inflicting enough pain to get them to feel how awful it is. This gets them to realize what they’ve discovered isn’t some new superweapon that only their side can use, but rather an awful strategy that sucks just as much when used against them. Simply knowing that pain is being caused will always be less persuasive than feeling the pain directly.
Argument 4: Sometimes refusing to engage in hypocrisy is self-defeating. The classic example is violence. We can all agree life would be better if everyone swore off violence categorically. The only problem with doing so is that refusing to engage in violence of any kind leaves you vulnerable to those with less scruples. You can call them evil all you want, but it won’t stop them from beating you with a club and taking all your stuff. The only way to stop them is to engage in the violence of self-defense. And yes, this would make you a hypocrite if you had categorically sworn off violence, but being a bit hypocritical is better than being dead. In terms of politics, if the other is continuously engaging in a tactic that gives them a decisive edge by short-circuiting some of the previously established rules, then staying principled risks a chronically unfair playing field or even permanent marginalization if the issue is big enough. The problem lies in clarifying what tactics are giving the other side an unfair advantage -- this ends up being surprisingly difficult, and I’ll discuss it later in the article.
(Edit: In terms of the paragraph above, I’m using self-defense in a toy example where someone swore off all violence categorically to show why it’s obviously better to be hypocritical than dead. I don’t think self-defense is hypocritical as a rule, since most people broadly agree ahead of time that it’s a necessary evil, and accept it when others do it as well.)
Argument 5: Accelerationism. The idea we have to fight fire with fire. This is a more extreme version of argument #4, which claims that we’re in an “existential” conflict with a uniquely evil outgroup, so we have to use every tool at our disposal to prevail. People who make this argument have completely given up on having principles and are only worried about winning at all costs. To them, accusations of hypocrisy go in one ear and out the other, as all they’re concerned with is creating a larger inferno than the other side.
These arguments are mostly bad
In practice, though, I’m mostly unconvinced by everything except for argument #4. Having principles is a good thing, actually.
Argument #2 (catharsis) can be dismissed out-of-hand as an explanation more than an excuse. Sure it feels good to dunk on your outgroup in the short term, just like it feels good to have the US federal government spend recklessly on elder care. The devil is in the long term consequences.
Argument #1 (political coalitions aren’t a single person) is good to keep in mind, but it shouldn’t be treated as an everything-proof shield. It’s not particularly difficult to find specific individuals (many of them high-profile) that broadly condemned cancel culture when the Left was doing it, only to do an about-face now that the shoe is on the other foot.
Brendan Carr, Chairman of the FCC https://x.com/Thiss_Youu/status/1968469274244075614
Greg Abbott, Governor of Texas: https://x.com/Thiss_Youu/status/1968049619495162204
Laura Loomer, a top Trump advisor: https://x.com/Thiss_Youu/status/1967702598166909309
Matt Wallace: https://x.com/Thiss_Youu/status/1966851592994554300
Congresswoman Luna: https://x.com/Thiss_Youu/status/1966544648966386026
And of course, there’s plenty of smaller commentary accounts engaging in such behavior as well (example 1, example 2, example 3). Some have tried to claim that the Right’s version of cancel culture is different in some vague way that makes these statements not hypocritical, e.g. it’s OK to cancel someone if they’re “celebrating the death” of someone, but I generally find these arguments unpersuasive.
Besides individual examples, there has to be some level of group accountability. This is a messy issue, and of course there are bad incentives for partisans to handwave all their side’s wrongdoings while focusing on and amplifying their outgroup’s. The best compromise I’ve seen people use is to look to both sides’ leaders, and see what they’re condoning and possibly whether they’re getting lots of pushback. Each public figure gets an invisible score that’s higher the more prominent they are, e.g. sitting Presidents are worth the most, then senior administration officials and elected officeholders, then less prominent politicians and major public intellectuals, then local leaders and more obscure influencers, and finally any random accounts at the bottom. The more examples of high-level leaders that you can give that are condoning some action, then the more accepted said action can be seen as at the group level. Under this system, the Right can broadly be seen as accepting of their new cancel culture since many high profile figures endorsed it, while the Left should not be seen as accepting assassinations as a general tactic since no major leaders endorsed the specific act of killing Charlie Kirk, and most went on to specifically disavow it (example 1, example 2). This is a messy, imperfect system, but the alternatives are worse. Being under-stringent means you’ll unfairly tar entire swathes of people based on the statements of a few irrelevant anons on Bluesky or /pol/, while being overly-stringent leaves open opportunities for nonsensical buck-passing where people do the rigamarole of “I don’t condone their actions… but you should probably do what they say anyways”:
Argument #3 (re-establishing deterrence) seems useful on the surface, but practical considerations make it unworkable.
First, there needs to be some discipline in using the tactic just enough to get the other side to feel pain without going totally overboard. The problem is that it’s practically impossible to impose discipline on a large amorphous group. There will always be people pushing to go further, either claiming that there hasn’t been enough pain inflicted yet, or that seeing their outgroup suffer is so funny that it should continue for its own sake, or the accelerationist argument that views escalation as a virtue in and of itself. Just because you might be willing to banish a trick after demonstrating it once or twice doesn’t mean the rest of the coalition is, or that you’d be able to stop them in any meaningful way.
Second, pain will almost always be uneven. Different issues matter at different levels for different people. Moreover, it’s basically impossible to calibrate the level of suffering inflicted to the correct extent, and for it to affect the correct people. Cancel culture in particular can only really hit targets of opportunity, and getting fired for political statements is a far bigger punishment than most of the victims deserve. In contrast, many of the people who had been most ardently pushing cancel culture from the other direction won’t receive any punishment at all, at least directly. They’ll get some minor indirect punishment from seeing their side “lose” in a vague sense, but that doesn’t strike me as especially productive.
Third, equivalent reciprocation will almost always be seen as escalation by the other side no matter what. As an example, tons of people on the Right saw the BLM riots as the perfect excuse for storming the Capitol on January 6th, despite the two being very different. Sectarian grievance talliers don’t typically bother with precision, and this event would be no exception. They simply squinted, saw the BLM riots as vague “political violence”, and used that to justify or excuse the violence of J6. Most reasonable commentators could agree that both events were bad but for different reasons: the BLM riots for the scale of the destruction, and J6 for trying to overthrow the American political process. But for the people on the Right, the BLM riots were obviously far worse, as they’d just redirect the conversation to the issue of scale as that was more favorable ground for them.
As I’ve debated people on both sides, it’s never ceased to amaze me how unaware people are of the sins their own side commits when they can instantly regurgitate ludicrously detailed lists of every transgression their outgroup has committed on a given topic for the past 20 years. I’m guessing this mostly comes down to media diets, as conservatives will receive news endlessly relitigating liberal faults while minimizing their own side’s issues, and vice-versa for liberals. In terms of how this will shake out for the Right’s cancel culture, the Left is going to interpret this through their own biased lens where it will look highly escalatory. An example leftist probably thinks conservative hysteria over cancel culture back in 2017-2020 was severely overblown, that it barely affected anyone, that those it did touch definitely deserved it, and that it wasn’t really censorship since the government wasn’t the main instigator. I would disagree to some extent with all of those assertions, but everyone’s in their own little bubble so it will look convincing to them regardless. Then they’ll get a maximally uncharitable view of what conservative cancel culture is like: the Right wants to cancel basically everyone, it’s a case of racists targeting reasonable people, the government IS heavily involved this time, etc. Obviously that’s going to look escalatory, and so the Left will feel justified going even harder on cancel culture next time, or in using other dirty tricks.
Argument #4 (that refusing to engage in some hypocrisy is self-defeating) and argument #5 (accelerationism) go together. I find 4 convincing while 5 goes too far. Most political discussion spaces are echo chambers through natural sorting, and statements like “we have to fight against the outgroup HARDER!!!” is something that will only rarely encounter pushback. Using the enemies’ weapons against them is an idea that follows naturally, but… where does that end? Should the Allies have set up Jew-operated gas chambers for ethnic Germans as revenge for the Holocaust? I don’t think so.
A lot of the accelerationists are chomping at the bit for a day when they can freely inflict violence on the people they disagree with. There’s a good deal of “predictions” (more like wishcasting) of an imminent civil war in the US. I personally doubt we’ll see a redux of 1861 anytime soon, but I find scenarios like The Troubles or the Years of Lead much more plausible, and I’d like to avoid those if at all possible. Part of it is simply that civil strife is bad in almost every dimension, and part of it is my idealistic view that I don’t find bullets to be a more legitimate way to solve differences of opinion than words.
But it’s also an issue of efficacy. Using the most nasty tricks you can think of alienates people from your coalition. You lose allies who genuinely value principles over dunking on the outgroup. Everyone will draw this line in a different spot, and the further you go the more people who will think you’ve crossed it.
Drawing the line
Basically, if you’re going to be hypocritical, then I think you should be pretty dang certain that it’s going to substantially help your side rather than be neutral or detrimental. To illustrate that point, I have six examples, three of which are for cases where hypocrisy is justified, and three where it’s not.
Situations where hypocrisy is justified:
Gerrymandering: California will soon vote on whether to redistrict itself for the express purpose of counteracting a Republican gerrymandering plan in Texas. The rewards from gerrymandering are extra House seats which could tip the balance of House control -- a tasty prize. Democrats had unilaterally disarmed themselves with bipartisan commissions in many states, but that did little to convince Republicans to ease up. Democrats could probably go even if they play hardball, which is a lot better than the status quo where they’re down somewhere between 8-20 seats depending on the fairness metric used.
Super PACs: Citizens United allowed for vastly increased spending in elections. This used to be an issue the Democrats were strongly against, although with the recent realignment of affluent individuals and corporations towards the Dems I’m not sure that’s so strongly the case any more. But no matter what, both sides would be justified in accepting large donations even if they thought it was bad that Citizens United was decided as it was. Cash is important for amplifying the candidates’ messages to persuade voters. It probably doesn’t mean much in Presidential elections any more -- the marginal impact of either Trump or Harris having an extra billion dollars was probably near-zero in 2024 -- but the impact in smaller elections is still present.
Politicizing SCOTUS nominations: The Left arguably did this with Bork’s nomination, and McConnell’s subsequent revenge-push for conservative justices at almost all costs has borne great dividends. The Supreme Court would look very different if Trump 45 didn’t get the chance to nominate 3 whole justices. Some of that was due to luck (and RBG’s pride), but McConnell’s stalling of Merrick Garland’s nomination indefinitely certainly didn’t hurt.
Situations where hypocrisy is NOT justified:
Pardons: Biden pardoned his son Hunter after saying he wouldn’t as one of the last acts of his presidency, and then Trump came in and pardoned the J6 rioters as one of the first acts of his presidency. Biden’s case was just straightforwardly bad, but I also don’t really think Trump gained much by doing what he did either. Basically every president for my entire life has been abusing the power of the pardon in one way or the other. Either side could stop at any time.
Corruption: Trump has been engaged in an unprecedented number of corrupt-looking enterprises. There is the Trump meme coin scam. There was the Qatari luxury jet nonsense. Recently there was the story about the Trump admin shutting down a corruption probe on Tom Homan. Does MAGA really gain anything by Trump having a scam coin? I doubt it, and that’s why I’d say the next Democratic administration could simply not be openly corrupt, and they’d be just fine.
Cancel culture: Wokes thought they had a new superweapon for a little while, as the short-term gains were readily apparent both in terms of those who were cancelled outright, and from the broader effects on culture. But the long-term impact was horribly, disastrously negative for them. Early wokeness helped pave the way for Trump’s first term, and the hysteria during peak woke caused Harris to say things in 2019 that severely (perhaps even fatally) damaged her prospects in 2024. Additionally, even though we’re in an era where it seems like the extreme fringes only ever get more power within their coaltions, the woke left managed to lose clout in the Democratic lineup, with left-leaning centrists like Nate Silver and Noah Smith recently pissing on their graves to raucus applause.
That’s why I’m confident in this prediction: If MAGA goes as hard on cancel culture as the woke left did, it WILL blow up in their face eventually.
Accelerationists might dispute my examples where I claim hypocrisy isn’t justified. They might say that Trump pardoning the J6 rioters was actually very popular with swing voters, or that it wasn’t but it still “fired up the base” which somehow did small-tent things to win the election. Or perhaps they might say cancel culture was worthwhile for the Left despite some backlash because it changed American culture in ways that justified the cost. I’d disagree with all of those assertions, but in any case I think those discussions would be more productive than vague motioning at how hypocrisy is always acceptable due to how evil the outgroup is.
I think you have plenty of fair points, the realpolitik aspects of whether it’s better to be shamelessly hypocritical or to be principled can be debated forever. There are certainly some people posting mostly unobjectionable things that are getting caught up in the cancellation fervor. Agreed that being a partisan of one side or another makes you blind to your own side’s transgressions. But, as one of those partisans, doesn’t keeping score of the specific behavior matter a little bit…?
Forgetting all of the higher profile public figure type cancellations of the 2014-2024 woke era. In 2020 the national health authorities currently in the midst of recommending lockdowns throughout the country announced that racism was a bigger public health issue than COVID and sanctioned “protests” over a career lowlife felon who died in police custody after swallowing a bag of fentanyl while waiting for the ambulance to arrive. There were riots across the country throughout the summer causing billions of dollars of damage to property, with reporters of major news networks calling them “mostly peaceful” while cars were burning in the background. Major Democrat (and even many Republican, at the beginning) politicians solicited donations to bail out those arrested in the riots, and campaigned for various “defund the police” style reforms in major cities. Rioters were mostly given slaps on the wrist, and the policy changes led to a massive increase in homicide rates. In the midst of all of this, regular-ass people (in addition to tons of higher profile celebrities, politicians, professors, businesspeople) were not only being cancelled/fired/publicly shamed for being unsupportive of the “current thing”, but for sentiments deemed racist years in the past. Regular-ass people were being accosted by minorities and being filmed and publicly cancelled for not kissing their feet. It’s hard to exaggerate how widespread this behavior was. I was in college at the time and there were people making anonymous Twitter accounts posting screenshots of random high school classmate’s Facebook posts from when we were literally 12 years old. There were hundreds if not thousands of students who had college admissions revoked for social media posts from when they were in middle school. There was a professor fired for saying a different word that sounds like the N word. Companies were paying exorbitant fees to DEI consultants to tell everyone they were racist no matter how fervently they denounced racism. In just one example of higher profile news, the NBA players threatened to cancel their season due to an insufficient response to a multiple-time felon being shot while attacking the police with a knife as he was trying to kidnap his children. Shortly after the worst of the Floyd summer subsided, there was a whole other cancel culture brouhaha regarding Covid vaccines where you could be fired from your job for not taking them.
In contrast, you have a few news anchors, an unfunny late night show host and a relatively large number of normies “cancelled” for in many cases publicly supporting or excusing the very recent political assassination. Charlie Kirk, whatever you think of his political opinions or tactics, was an upstanding citizen participating non-violently in political discussion.
Some number of these cancellations are wholly unjustified I’ll agree, but people are not being successfully cancelled for being democrats, not being republicans, being democrats 10 years ago, or not being republicans 10 years ago. Normies are not scared that they tweeted an unrelated left-wing opinion when they were 12. They aren’t in trainings at their job about being too anti-white. Pro-assassination posts on normie Twitter still routinely get 300k likes from face accounts. The wokes did have a super-power for a while, they got a significant contingent of the country to support their policies, won the 2020 election, and had normies completely afraid to publicly disagree with them for years. It wasn’t until Elon bought Twitter and Trump narrowly missed having his head blown off that the vibe shift occurred. It’s hypocrisy in that it’s “cancel culture” sure, but also not really. I think a norm that you shouldn’t publicly celebrate the assassination of political talking heads that are otherwise upstanding citizens just because they have the same political opinions as your boomer uncle is good. I think a norm that you shouldn’t do things that circa 2020 woke morality deems racist is wrong. No hypocrisy.
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I think there is a strong case for canceling particularly egregious forms of political responses to the death of political figures simply because of the radicalizing effects of being on social media especially those curated by algorithms and that act as filters for content. To be blunt we are not only radicalizing people, but normalizing it, and now celebrating the deaths of political opponents. Unless we very quickly return to the norms of civility and decency that used to exist — where you could disagree with people and even fight for what you believe in, but you also respected the other side and didn’t treat it as a death-match. I find it unfortunate to have to resort to cancellation, but I can’t really think of any other effective means to force de escalation here. Letting people do happy dances on TikTok celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk and letting people normalize extreme rhetoric about political opponents is simply lightning the fuse on whoever (left or right) is going to tick off the opposite filter bubble the most. Firing people is extreme and shouldn’t be done lightly or for mere opinions, but I also think it’s perfectly reasonable and appropriate to fire people for promoting extremism or violence or celebrating violence.
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Elected officials or "Influencers?"
Leftists are an interpersonal social hazard despite not having any elected politicians apart from AoC.
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You forgot to add #6 - that argument from hypocrisy is an age old argument, which considered as one of the weakest ones in any debate, the official name is tu quoque fallacy. I will give some reasons why this argument will not win many people - including in this very same debate where the right is now digging up quotes from AOC or Kamala Harris calling for cancelations and showing how they are hypocrites. It is a weak form of ad-hominem. You are not attacking the argument, you are attacking the person giving the argument. For instance even an active heroin addict can rail against taking heroin. In fact he may have a unique position as an active user to effectively argue against it. Just pointing a finger that he is an addict and thus his argument is invalid may not be the best one.
Here, I can show how you are a hypocrite. Are you against cancelling people from their jobs if let's say they have a past of engaging in pedophilia? Are you actively against public sexual offender registry or against people requiring to offer proof of clean criminal records which exists solely to cancel people from any potential jobs or buying property etc.? If not, then you are a hypocrite and you are in fact for cancel culture. So shut up and delete this post you fucking hypocrite.
I don't consider it one of the "weakest ones" and I often find that people trying to argue against hypocrisy are extremely low credibility, it means they don't care about contradictions in what they advocate to others, which is such a foundational property that I think anyone reasonable would have it -- it's not about some inverted argument from authority.
The central example is obviously something more like people taking a pseudo-neutral stance of a rule while applying it only one way in practice, or politicians saying something in public and doing the opposite privately. It is so useful that you could not discard it and I view it with suspicion when someone attempts to call it weak or dismantle it.
You do not even get the point, which is that even people arguing for hypocrisy are 100% hypocritical in some of their beliefs. In that sense they argue against their own argument.
So you have never in your life do anything like that ever? If you did, you are a hypocrite and thus you should stop arguing by your own admission. Unless I am talking to the second incarnation of Jesus Christ.
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Railing against heroin while taking it isn't a very good example of hypocrisy. A more clearcut example would be criticising others for being morally weak enough to take it, while you claim the moral high ground and secretly take it yourself.
Even then, you can be a heroin addict openly admitting that you take it and that everybody who takes it including you is morally weak and you can be correct. You can fulfill the dictionary definition of a hypocrite to perfection and still be correct, as the validity of your argument is independent on your own person. That is why it is a fallacy.
Hmm. The Cambridge dictionary definition:
"someone who says they have particular moral beliefs but behaves in way that shows these are not sincere"
Your example does not seem to show the heroin addict is insincere in their belief, but rather that they suffer weakness of the will.
Hmm, Merriam-Webster dictionary definition
My example of heroin addict perfectly fits this dictionary definition.
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Some definitions include it; some don't. There's a reason I didn't say I wasn't being a hypocrite below. It's definitely a highly-noncentral case, even if included.
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I agree there's a definite overreach and some of the reaction is clearly overboard.
I will say, though, that Destiny is different to the other three cases you mention. Here's the video. I'll transcribe it for those, like me, who prefer to read (and because the hardsubs in that vid are inaccurate):
*For clarity, this is pronounced as the adjective, not the verb.
So, um. He's publically endorsing the political strategy of murdering conservatives, as a class, until they are afraid enough to make political concessions (there's a word for that strategy), and saying that it's "unacceptable" that it hasn't succeeded yet. This is going well beyond "celebrating murder" and into "incitement of murder".
This is a scalp that needed to be taken; he has sown the wind and he shall reap the whirlwind. I don't think Destiny streamed this on YouTube itself, but rather Kick, so I'd quibble that YouTube isn't the proper authority to enforce this (Kick is, and the criminal justice system is; to quote Elon Musk in regard to this matter, "He can resume streaming when he has served his term."). But yeah, there is a very direct and legitimate public interest in not having calls for terrorism in the public square; as @zeke5123a alluded to, this is the real Paradox of Tolerance where even a libertine like myself thinks this crosses a line.
(NB: Just in case somebody's been keeping notes from years ago and other sites and is about to accuse me of hypocrisy: yes, I've crossed that line myself on a couple of occasions, it's one of the worst things I've ever done, and while I haven't actually been punished for it I wouldn't complain if I were. This is repentance, not "rules for thee and not for me".)
EDIT: If someone can find me a longer clip of that stream (in particular, one starting a few minutes earlier), I'd be appreciative.
That isn't a call for terrorism, it's a call for not turning down the temperature when Trump and many on the right fail to do so. He's not calling for anyone to commit acts of terrorism, he's saying that it's kind of dumb that all the democrats are turning down the temperature when half the republicans are declaring that they're at war with "the left" which sounds pretty similar to punch a nazi type rhetoric. He doesn't want his side to apologize for a shooting that it doesn't own unless the calls for turning down the heat are shared.
edit: found the stream link boy was that a pain in the ass. Here's some pretty relevent context a few minutes earlier:
I don't know what it is that's just so mind broken with the like ...
that like they just have to run to the fed posting. we should disavow violence as soon as the president of the united states does, that's it and then they're like
[weakman voice: "So that means you .. telling me to go kill people?!?!"]
No, listen to what I just fucking said, I don't know why that sentence is so hard for people to understand
Thanks for the link.
You've certainly got me less convinced than I was. I will note that there are two ways to read what you posted - one is that he doesn't like people trying to rip away plausible deniability and extract a straight answer - but earlier than either of these he does shit-talk someone as a terrorist supporter.
The bit that had me convinced was the first sentence:
...because the scenario he's describing is specifically the terrorist wincon and can only be achieved by terrorism. I edited in the request for earlier context because I thought there was a possibility he might be explaining what you actually need for terrorism to succeed (to demonstrate why it's a bad idea; I've made this exact point when people ask me "why aren't you blowing up datacentres?"). The obvious historical example is Yamamoto Isoroku's letter:
...which is very much saying that this is a stupid and unworkable idea.
But there's no context like that; Destiny seems to just have chucked this out out of nowhere in response to a guy who's condemning violence. So I dunno what's going on here. Maybe Destiny went temporarily nuts, said something crazy, and didn't catch it because he was streaming; livestreams do have that hazard. Or maybe he's treating the US political landscape as effectively being a civil war, and is saying he doesn't want to lay down arms unilaterally (that's still crossing the line, though).
Like that time he admitted to almost murdering someone (and his family): https://x.com/Anc_Aesthetics/status/1967993916478853354
And he's promoted and defended violence before. This guy is not temporarily nuts, but permanently so, just hiding it most of the time.
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He seems to want the whole story to be about blaming trump for the raised temperature. He thinks Trump and his admin are defect bot and will take any attempt by the democrats to lower the temperature as an admission of guilt. The right doesn't claim any of the political violence against democrats and never apologizes for it so he doesn't think the left should.
My understanding from a bit more of the like 29 minutes I watched is that he does live events and worries that with all the rhetoric on the right about being at war he might get killed and wants the right to feel the same way so that they'll stop doing what he believes to be encouraging violence.
Um, that plan is called terrorism. Or rebellion, I suppose. The whole point of rule of law and the monopoly on force is that nobody except the state gets to control people's behaviour by threatening to shoot them. Promoting this plan is asserting that "now we're all sons of bitches", the social contract is unconscionable or has failed, and let's start fighting the insurgency. And, well, as noted this is very bad.
Pretty standard terrorism justification structure too. Very few advocacies of ideological terrorism are direct calls for terrorism. Part of the advocacy process is to frame it as a necessary response to the other side's obstinance/extremism/oppression, which includes the allegations of the outgroup suppressing the group who is being urged to more radical resistance.
This works even when allegations/belief of suppression outstrip the supply, or even if one's own side is responsible for the overall trend of raising the temperature / starting the defect tit-for-tat defect spiral, and so on. It doesn't actually matter, for example, if Donald Trump actually is to blame for raising the temperature- merely by fighting back, this can be claimed to be defect back behavior and thus [audience being appealed to] should make no apologies for.
Part of how the framing works as a radicalization tool is that it leads the audience towards a desirable conclusion, but without making the argument completely. This keeps it on the legally correct side of 'not a call for action,' even when it shares significant structural overlap. This allows intended/successful audience conversions to reach the conclusion, at which point no explicit call for action is required, while sympathetic-but-not-converted audiences can deflect on grounds of Exact Words rather than addressing leading arguments or the soundness of the foundational assumptions being used to frame the leading argument.
When I was drafting that post, I said something about this basically being how being a terrorist feels from the inside. But, well, I didn't feel sufficiently qualified to make that claim.
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That's not what I said. He's talking purely about rhetoric. If Trump's response to political violence is to do more violent rhetoric then he wants to play tit for tat with the violent rhetoric. He is saying to do what he claims the republicans do any never apologize for violence committed by crazies and only agree to wide condemnations of violence if the republicans are willing to do the same. If all the "Charlie was the nice one, you won't like what comes next" borderline fed posting on the right isn't terrorism then neither is whatever he's advocating for.
So, what, his plan is for progressives to chuck out a bunch of violent rhetoric and hope none of their own side will act on it but that conservatives will get scared of it and back down, without any more actual conservatives getting shot? Right after an Antifa did, in fact, shoot a conservative?
You'd like to think nobody could be that stupid but... okay, I can kind of see how somebody could twist himself around into 4D chess logic like that.
holds head in hands
I think his idea is that any time someone demands a democrat denounce the shooter they should respond with something to the effect of "I'll call for an end to political violence when the president does" . He describes the denouncing and bending over backwards to denounce violence against republics when the republicans never return the favor, in his opinion, as "cucking". Like charlie brown and the football.
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Of all the things I've heard said on the subject, this has got to be the dumbest. The only one that comes close is that TikToker getting giddy over how Kirk is not martyr material.
Even if you accept the premise that all of this is because of Trump, it shows just wide the inferential gap between the tribes is.
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I think your characterization of Kirk is doing him a disservice.
He wasn't a mundane political organizer, he was an exceptionally talented political organizer in party that's lacking in them.
He was only 31 and was arguably the most important Republican under 40. You can easily imagine him getting into the Senate then launching a Presidential campaign in his 50s.
He wasn't a public intellectual, which definitely hurts his image around here, but that doesn't usually lead to success in politics.
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There is no such thing as consistency of principles in politics. Politics is about group interest, not ideas.
This is yet one of those errors caused by looking at politics through the mythic liberal prism of mistake theory, this idea that we are all in this together and we just need to talk things out and everything can actually be solved peacefully. That is not what is happening, and if we want peace we actually need to recognize this.
The liberal will look around and see endless amounts of people using rhetoric that is wholly inconsistent with their actions, especially over time, and be puzzled. How could these people just lie when we're all trying to solve the same problem?
This is because he presupposes the nature of the object he looks at, and is thus unable to see this widespread duplicity for the feature of what is actually going on: war.
The fluidity in what is considered an acceptable tactic is an absolutely normal feature of conflict. Dancing around the acceptable and the expected is the font of tactical success.
And that is what politics is, or at least what it has become now that the people with potential access to power actually have substantial disagreements
The right wing didn't want cancel culture to be an available weapon and the left wing did, because the left controlled (and still controls to some degree) all the institutions that decide what is acceptable in society. The right failed to enforce this ban because what it was backed by (the judiciary) was already subverted by the left through previous conquests such as the Civil Rights Act.
This resulted in what we all saw and were at times victims of: total hegemony of the left over discourse.
Of course they made some mistakes and the right was able to capitalize on them. Notably the left forced Elon Musk to take over twitter which was a powerful stronghold of theirs, working under the delusion that they could push him around the way they pushed Jack Dorsey around. We all know what happened afterwards.
Now that the right has access to some cultural coordination and that the window of acceptable discourse can be acted upon by both sides, it's become a liability for the right to deny itself the weapon its enemy wields on the regular, and so the norm against it disappeared.
The more scary prospect is that there exists a similar one way norm that makes actual terrorism only acceptable for the left (the Weather Underground people would be rotting in prison like Breivik if they were right wing, and Luigi's right wing equivalent wouldn't get terrorism charges dismissed in a million years).
I fear that this norm too may eventually go, and that's the point where you get into the Troubles.
This is all to say that advocating for consistency of principle, whilst philosophically useful, will not produce any results. The people who are making political decisions are not operating under the rationale that they can convince their enemies at this point, if ever. You are asking soldiers not to shoot back at the enemy in the name of peace. This is futile.
Only when both sides are armed with the same weapons and expect to gain nothing from using them is disarmament possible. Censorship is negative sum ultimately because it destroys the ability to find the truth, but all fighting is negative sum, yet we still fight, because we need to survive.
Ironically, the idea that we can benefit our own interests by engaging in political activity out of group interest is, itself ... (pause for drama ruined by the spoiler at the start of the sentence) ... an incredibly idealistic idea.
If you're lucky enough to be registered in a swing state, the odds that your state carries the crucial electoral votes multipled by the odds that your vote will break a tie in the state is only as high as 1/10,000,000. Most of us are closer to the 1/1,000,000,000 range.
It sounds irrational to fight for an idea even at short-term cost to your group, but anybody who expends time and effort on politics without being paid for it has already self-selected to be the sort of person who will fight for at least one romantic abstract idea, the idea that they can and should try to sway the course of the whole nation even at the expense of their own self-interest. The other abstract ideas we try to make win, like "free speech is good even if I disagree" or "deaths are bad even among people I have no connection to", aren't nearly as irrational as anteing up to play the game in the first place.
This isn't to say that ideas are useless. They exist for a reason. As organizing principles uniting a coalition.
The problem comes when people start to believe that the ideas are valuable in themselves, and thus become unable to maintain anything but a single form of coalition, and when it becomes defunct they impotently try to invoke their propaganda as if it were an unchanging law of the universe.
Free speech is something that can exist, and something that I desire. But it is only possible if a powerful group of organized men agree that it benefits them to maintain as a norm, and in no other possible circumstance.
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What a weird thing to say. It feels deeply reductionist. It sounds like a straw-man atheist saying "religions are hostile memes infecting the population which stabilize social hierarchies, sometimes they call their gods Huitzilopochtli and sometimes Jesus, but in the end it is all the same".
Nobody is denying that group interests are a useful lens to look at politics. Cut subsidiaries for farmers, and the farmers will vote against you. Or take people voting along ethnic lines in Iraq after Bush ousted Saddam.
The problem is that there is plenty of behavior unexplained using the group interest lens. Why does the white college-educated woman care about an unemployed black man getting shot by the police? Why do grown adults care about the abortion of fetuses which are not family, for the most part? Why were so many intellectuals Marxists?
War is famously the continuation of politics with other means. And sure, some wars can be adequately explained by group interests. Two knights feuding might indeed be just a zero sum power struggle between two groups. But to frame the US war of independence as simply a group conflict between the colonies and England while ignoring all the ideological differences seems overly simplistic.
Human life today in the Western world is a lot less shitty than it was in Sparta. Part of that is technological progress. But a lot of it is also ideological progress, e.g. the long term aggregate result of politics.
People sometimes do what is good for them and their in-group. But they also have beliefs, religious or otherwise, and sometimes these beliefs guide their actions. Ignoring them will severely limit your predictive powers of human behavior.
You are denying however that it is the only useful lens at a foundational level, which is my claim (well really, that of Machiavellians).
Because they are in a political coalition that relies on the black vote. When they were not, they did not.
Because they don't want to be murdered and attacks on the sanctity of life undermine their security, and that of their community; moreover it has been banned by their religion, which is an organizing principle of their socio-political interest group.
In Europe, similar groups with similar interests don't find this to be a political issue despite holding similar principles. Because neither they nor their enemies would benefit from upsetting the compromises made. And insofar as they benefit, European politics start to look more like America's on this issue.
Because Marxism is a movement that primarily serves the interest of intellectuals.
I disagree with Clausewitz here. The natural state of Humanity is not peace. It is diplomacy that is the continuation of war by other means.
Nonsense, the ideology was an entirely self serving framework to organize a revolt desired by a specific class with specific interests with the support of the English Parliament. And evidence of this is plain: many of the ideas of self governance that were claimed as such were totally destroyed in the Federalist coup that ensued against the Articles of Confederation.
This is as ridiculous as saying the French Revolution was caused by the Enlightenment instead of both being downstream from the ascendancy of the Bourgeoisie.
Unlike Liberals like to believe, this does not change the nature of politics. Fukuyama was wrong. Liberals didn't win so hard they broke the game, their Reich won't last a thousand years. It's just a passing fad, as every political idiom that believes itself eternal has been.
No. People have individual and collective interests, and they use ideas to justify and organize those interests into coalitions such that they may act upon them.
It is wrong to believe that ideas animate people. And many political phenomena disprove that theory. The only way to hold onto it is to claim that exceptions are simply vices. As a scientist I refuse to entertain moralizing as an explanation framework. Politics is.
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What exactly are you referring to here please?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
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Jimmy Kimmel is back!
He was "suspended indefinitely", but quickly in talks with ABC to come back. Early rumors suggested ABC expected an apology for going over the line, and Kimmel instead preferring to target the area with Molotovs. But now:
At least, he'll be back in some places. ABC affiliate station owner Sinclair is refuses to air Kimmel, and will run news programming instead.
Sinclair previously "...called for Kimmel to issue a direct apology to Kirk's family and to make a personal donation both to the family and Kirk's organization, Turning Point USA.
Sinclair plays both sides. Sinclair Quietly Backs Out of Airing Charlie Kirk Special People are floating around X that it is due to threats made to Sinclair stations.
At least one ABC station was shot up by a leftwing, anti-Trumper teacher's union dude. Three bullets into the front lobby, no injuries.
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I do agree there's some degree of hypocrisy here but also this particular unique issue (A literal political assassination of a major popular youth figure on one of the sides) is unprecedented in modern American politics and therefore should be handled differently. It's fairly telling the main line of comparison for this is the George Floyd saga and with all due respect for Floyd's body of work an extended period of national mourning and unrest for a career criminal who might not even have been 'murdered' is silly in comparison.
You essentially have to be willfully blind of the difference between Popular Demagogue shot on stage versus the overwhelming majority of recent Left cancellations for wrongthink.
Political violence is still fairly rare in the US, but it's not clear to me why that should be grounds for broad cancellations. The Right didn't think this was the case when Paul Pelosi was attacked with a hammer, for instance.
Okay willful blindness is your preferred tactic.
The wikipedia page on DePape having an extensive 'misinformation and disinformation' page about people speculating about his motives in the first 48 hours is somewhat hysterical when there's no entry for either on Jimmy Kimmel's page for his also-entirely inaccurate random speculation.
Never going to convince anyone in these measuring contests. The heuristic I use that strongly indicates that
society isinstitutions are bent to the left is the ration of self-identified Marxist/communist professors vs Nazi professor. Communists have practically infinitely more power and influence in this country than Nazi. When a fascist terrorist get's tenure maybe I'll change my view of the world.When I was in physics grad school, which wasnt so long ago (in the last 10-20 year range), there was a professor who talked about how people said the Nazis were bad, but when they came into his house when he was a boy, they were nice and always took off their boots. I do not know of any self-professed Marxists that were in my physics department.
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That feels like comparing the number of followers of Odin to the number of followers of Jupiter in the US, and concluding that society is clearly leaning Norse.
If communists were in charge of US economic policy, I promise you would notice.
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What? My argument wasn't about misattributing motives, it's that political violence isn't so uniquely special that it justifies what the Right is doing with its attempt at cancellations right now.
Kirk is like an 8.5/10 where a successful Trump shoot would be like a 10/10. Everything else in recent memory has been like a 3.
So 9/11 would be 20/10 and Pearl Harbor would be 100/10?
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The best way I've seen it put is that the Right isn't actually against cancelling those outside the Overton Window, they were just protesting the arbitrary narrowing of the window by a handful of powerful state and corporate actors. In that frame, the recent cancellations make sense and look less hypocritical.
That's... not what they were saying back during Peak Woke. The Right often made explicit appeals to free speech in their critiques of cancellations. And if we are just talking about "narrowing the Overton Window", then how is the Right's behavior any different in this case? It's not like they were being particularly scrupulous and only going after people who were inciting violence. They used terms like "celebrating the death" that were highly ambiguous and thus expansive to almost anyone who said anything bad about Kirk.
The right isn't routinely engaged in terrorism or advocacy thereof from its side. The left is.
True tit for tat would be for the right to stop suppressing their paramilitaries and let them start assassinating people, praise them when they do and get them off in the courts and land them cushy university jobs afterwards.
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I think there are many diverse opinions on the Right, some who are Libertarian free-speechers. But there were some who have been honest from the start.
Tim Pool told Jack Dorsey that he was introducing a bias against conservatives through Twitter's policies. Ironically I think Pool is more Libertarian, but the point he makes is specifically that the "neutral" policies mostly harmed normal, ordinary conservatives. Not that there shouldn't be moderation at all.
Kevin Dolan was up front about supporting cancellation over a year ago: It's different when we do it
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I would agree with that description of what they are doing, and agree that some truly detestable opinions should maybe be cancel-able. But I think the most common form of hypocrisy is not saying what you mean. That is, when you declare a pretty unambiguous rule (don't cancel people for their personal opinions), and then when it comes time to actually test it you suddenly declare an exception. Because the obvious assumption is the outgroup is simply going to continue to declare exceptions until fair rules become "my rules."
I am generally against cancellations. But even during the height of the woke cancellations I feel like I remember some careful Republican criticisms of "its insane to cancel people for saying something that half the country believes". So I don't feel like their stance was ever fully principled free speech.
I do have one exception for cancellation: if you've cancelled others then you yourself become fair game. Jimmy Kimmel was fair game. Roseanne Barr, and apparently some band that was on the show were both things he was happy to cancel.
Yeah, progressive cancellations would occur over issues where the population was 80-20 against. What would that even look like on the right? I guess if they started cancelling people for saying that global warming is real or something.
You don't even need to guess. Cancel culture is all about the views one finds morally offensive and thinking others should not be able to express those ideas publicly. That is, actively punishing people for their views on LGBT, Israel/Palestine, or criticism of the right.
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Your whole post could have been reduced to just that single sentence. Of course if you're going to handwave the differences and not really address them, then there are no differences that matter. That's pretty much tautological!
That's also why you had to claim that initiating violence and responding with violence is a type of acceptable hypocrisy. If you said that it isn't hypocrisy, that would be because the two situations are different, even if they are both violence. If differences don't matter, the only choice is to put them in the same category and call it hypocrisy.
Why do you think this situation is materially different than what the woke Left did back in 2017-2020? Nobody's been able to give me a compelling response to why we should accept what the Right is doing now, but that's different from what the Left was denounced for. It's all either:
Also, I'm not sure what your point about violence is. That was a toy example I included to show that it's obviously better to be hypocritical than dead, not that I thought any self defense is hypocritical as a rule. Most people understand self defense is a necessary evil, so we accept it ahead of time, and accept it (to some degree at least) when others do it, so it's not hypocrisy.
Make it one or two (but not 20 or 30) steps broader, and that's pretty much it. I haven't seen the Right get anyone fired for cracking their knuckles, or because a relative used a slur, or they donated to a currently-unfavored cause that Obama supported at the time (maybe flip that one), or they wore a shirt with anime characters on it.
I don't think I stuck to your four-year window, but yes, it is different. I'm not arguing against Right-wing cancel culture because it's mild enough to ignore, unlike the Left-wing version.
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So exactly what explanations have you heard that you don't find compelling?
You are being excessively literal. Can you link to some people actually saying such things, instead of paraphrasing them?
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Thank you for summarizing it so succinctly.
Arguments built on gerrymandering definitions and framings are tedious. Doing so to re-re-litigate the aftermath of a political assassination is... I'm not sure what the right term is.
The same response I gave to Jiro applies to you too. You vaguely claim I'm "gerrymandering definitions", and then don't provide any definitions of your own. Where specifically do you think I'm misrepresenting what the Right is doing?
So if I take you at face value, you would be against any social cancellation for any reason that is let's say currently not against the law? What exactly is the threshold? What if somebody just repeatedly posted on his tiktok that he hates niggers and faggots? What if somebody was sentenced for pedophilia, but is out of prison now and it all got public knowledge? Is there any threshold for cancellation in your eyes - which would of course make you hypocrite as you would fall under argument #4 where you just carve some exception. Or you or are you some free speech anticancellation purist?
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In your selective conflation of unlike categories via gerrymandered definitions, such as the one Jiro quoted.
This was not particularly ambiguous in the post you responded to, nor is it a point that needs your concession or concurrence to be valid.
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In most cases, using defensive violence is not hypocrisy, because there is a clear moral difference between violence of aggression and violence of self-defense (though things can get murky in practice, sometimes). For example, Ukraine is not hypocritical by both complaining about getting invaded by Russia while also invading parts of Russia in retaliation.
I think that there are some actions where tit-for-tat is fine, and some where it would still be horribly wrong.
For example, "their military is trying to incapacitate our military personnel, mostly by killing them" is something which can be answered in kind. By contrast, "their military is rounding up and shooting our kids" is very much not a reason to respond in kind. (Which category "they are nuking our cities" belongs to is difficult.)
In politics, things are even murkier, partly because there is no single entity making all the strategic decisions. Ideally, political competition should be about genuine differences in terminal values. If you are willing to sacrifice any values you hold on the altar of victory, the race to the bottom will result in a meaningless competition of almost identical parties.
One terminal value I feel strongly about is genuinely trying to make world models more accurate. Unlike slander, Sarin, doxxing, rhetoric, assassination, cancellation, which work equally well for any side, this is intrinsically an asymmetric weapon:
Cancellations are incompatible with truth-seeking. (So are assassinations, but the median supporter on either side does not support them. Small mercies.) I think that a lot of the differences between the blue and the grey tribe from the SSC era come down to that.
And as far as truth-seeking is concerned, MAGA is not an improvement over the wokes. While wokes have long twisted the truth hard to their ends and engaged in groupthink, Trump is completely detached from simulacrum level one. He will make whatever sounds he thinks will help him best to secure his power, if they happen to sound like a statement about the world that is completely incidental.
When I look at woke, I see an evil monster which had started out with some virtues but long been turned evil by its lack of other essential virtues. At some distant point in the past that creature had some minor redeeming qualities. When I look at MAGA, it seems like someone had taken all the vices of the woke monster, doubled down on some of them, then inverted its surface level beliefs. But fighting a particular evil by being just as evil is still evil.
Good luck. Putting Truth, Logical Debate, or some moral Good ahead of winning seems like a good way to get plowed under. I hope you find a way to highlight how these Good things can be leveraged for winning more successfully than the Evil things that are currently being done instead.
In a contest between societies, I can very well imagine the one that sticks to virtue coming out the stronger. But in a Culture War within one society, I doubt it somewhat. If the past decades are any indication, then being manipulative, vindictive and combative are the qualities that let one dominate, whereas sticking to more benign qualities just lets your enemies dictate the order of the day.
I hope to be wrong.
Edit: @IGI-111 explains this much better than I.
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Killing Kirk was a direct attack on free speech. The goal was to silence his voice. Celebrating the murder is anti free speech. This is where you actually get into Popper’s tolerance paradox. If we want free speech, the first rule is you don’t support murdering people for speaking and if you do then you aren’t allowed in polite society.
Large patches of the left celebrated the death (ie were anti free speech) and then are claiming to be champions of free speech. Chutzpah to say the least.
In fairness I think the people on the left currently mocking Kirk's death were also mocking the idea of free speech (or freeze peach to use their infantilising and credibility-subtracting language).
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This distinction is a good one, and also shows why the whole free speech argument is a death spiral. There is no freedom of speech. There is just the idea of freedom of speech.
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I don’t think Argument #4 (refusing to engage in some amount of hypocrisy is self-defeating) is as strong as you seem to think. To continue with your example of non-violence, you could just adhere to the non-aggression principle: it’s categorically wrong to initiate violence, but responding to violence with violence is justified. Boom, now you have a principled rationale for self-defense without any hypocrisy!
Sure, people were misinterpreting my toy example there as if I always thought self-defense was hypocritical, which isn't true for the reason you listed. I've added a note to the original post for clarification.
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Sometimes, "hitting them back first" via a preemptive defense is justified, but things get really murky in terms of certain knowledge.
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Maybe I'm heavily biased, but as the user of a website that has faced numerous deplatforming attempts for several years over completely legal speech, I find it hard to genuinely care if people get censored for saying the wrong thing about Charlie Kirk. In reaction to his death, some may say "and the world kept turning", and in reaction to people who are targeted for saying things like that, I say "first time?"
Is this hypocritical? Maybe. But my position is that going after people for completely legal speech has been a thing for a LONG time now. I'm not saying it's a good thing that people are having their lives ruined for making comments about CK, but I am saying that people have been raising the alarm bells over free speech for YEARS and yet basically nothing has been done about it. So I'm not surprised to see this happen and the only thing I have to say is: What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do to ensure that America is a place where anybody can speak their mind freely? Because this is very, very far from being the first time something like this has happened.
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He was the main voice of the online and young right.
He was more noteworthy than every political pundit from: late night shows, main stream media (cnn msnbc Fox News), etc possibly put together.
Add up his followers / listeners or TPUSA numbers and see how noteworthy he actually was.
His death will not be a watershed moment because we are going through a transition from the 50’s-9/11 to whatever the fuck is going on in our world right now. But it has the feel of it if you have an understanding of his impact.
I’ve never listened to the guy, not once! But I can look and see what his impact is / was and what he actually did.
I do not think your lookey look into his life post death is accurate whatsoever.
What comes to mind for me (not about you … I’m just pontificating now) about Kirk is: they will call you a Nazi, then they will kill the Nazi, then they will cheer the Nazis death, then they will be outraged that people are aghast at their own behavior of cheerful murder of completely mundane people.
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Why defend someone's speech?
With the case of Kimmel getting canceled, 1 and 2 do not apply, so only 3 applies. But we do not have that general culture of free speech, and so there is no general principle to defend. Gina Carano never got rehired, the NY Times never apologized to Razib Khan and rehired him, Middlebury never apologized to Charles Murray and never brought him back, etc. etc. Like, if the right had said, "you should not cancel people" and then the Left had said, "You are right, we were wrong, we will rehire those people and stop canceling rightists" and then the right got into power and started canceling leftists ... ok that would be reneging on a deal and hypocritical. But that is not what happened. So what we are left with is that I am happy Kimmel got suspended because what he said was bad. Maybe it wasn't firing worthy, but he should apologize. Lot's of comedians have apologized over the years fro crossing the line. And last I heard the reason for the suspension was that he wanted to double-down instead of apologizing.
So essentially your argument has to come down to that for the right, a strategy of pacifism is better than tit-for-tat; that sticking to the cooperation corner even after the left has defected is ultimately going to be more successful. I don't think that would have worked, but I don't think tit-for-tat is going to work either. I expect things to continue to get worse.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that with the woke cancellations it was mostly twitter mobs pressuring private companies. By contrast, with Kimmel it was directly the head of the FCC applying the pressure, not MAGAs cancelling their Disney+ to make them fire Kimmel.
So this is not tit-for-tat, but (tit+1)-for-tat. Expect the next D president to apply an FCC commissioner who will try to revoke the license of Fox News at the slightest provocation, and spend tons of public funds to ruin them in the legal system if they do not comply.
More generally, moral constraints, refraining to go tit-for-tat for some things, can serve as a foundation of a positive identity. If the other tribe puts your tribes kids on the BBQ whenever they catch them, but your tribe holds a principled objection against cannibalism even if it puts them at a disadvantage, that would cause me to like your tribe.
Whenever Trump does something bad, like being corrupt af, cancelling people and so on, the main response I get from his defenders here is that this is just tit-for-tat for the evils of the other side. It is about as convincing as hearing someone loudly complain about the child-eating monsters of the other tribe while munching a baby's leg.
I think it was actually mainly a twitter mob here as well. At 9-10am on wednesday there were already angry re-posts of the prior night's kimmel monologue, signal boosted by Elon to millions of views. So Kimmel was basically already the target of the day, for people who had been having a lot of success against their targets over the previous few days. That's why Benny Johnson had the FCC chair Carr on and why they were discussing Kimmel, which got posted that afternoon right before the affiliates announced they were cutting Kimmel.
Everyone who has told a more simplistic story about it being obviously due to a gangster FCC chair threatening ABC, or Nexstar having ulterior motives trying to butter up the administration, seems to ignore this part of the story that the outrage was already well under way on wednesday. (unless I got the timeline wrong myself)
edit: I think I did get part of the timeline wrong, and the monologue was apparently from monday night? Still, it was getting heat on wednesday morning from Elon & twitter.
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Attacks on free speech have been coming from both sides for some time here: the Biden administration leaned on Facebook and others to censor user posts about COVID vaccines. Biden also nominated Gigi Sohn to the FCC, who had previously tweeted strong negative opinions about Fox News (the Senate did not confirm the nomination). We also had the short-lived "Disinformation Governance Board."
Separately: Is Fox News even broadcast OTA anywhere? They don't need an FCC license to exist on cable networks. I know Kimmel is/was, and the "official" statement said gave OTA channels pulling the broadcast as the cause.
Yep exactly, the regular broadcast Fox stations just do regular down-the-middle local news like ABC/NBC. Fox News channel is completely different & separate, set up as a cable channel for exactly this reason (avoiding FCC regulation).
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But beyond that, it was governments pressuring banks. Like, Operation Chokepoint was a thing, and arguably it continues to be a thing with the credit card companies still being pressured by plausibly-deniable paragovernmental organizations (that whole porn ban thing).
I don’t think it changes much that it’s blatantly public, though it certainly does for others who are not aware that their pressure wasn’t just the people power they think it was.
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How would, or would you at all, add a differentiation between the state and private organizations pursuing the above?
I would suggest including the practice of jaw boning as an action that is considered done by the state, where a threat from the state suffices. Examples: (1) the Biden administration motivating multiple social media companies — ostensibly competitors — into all suspending the New York Post’s accounts on their platforms within short order of one another, in response to the Post publishing the Hunter Biden laptop story, and (2) the Trump Administration motivating the owners of large numbers of ABC broadcast affiliate stations to pressure the network to bring Kimmel to heel.
Jawboning is 100% fine per Murthy v. Missouri, Jimmy Kimmel will never again face firing over his reaction to specifically Charlie Kirk's death, so he has no standing to complain. :bland smile:
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Who was president when the NYP broke the Hunter Biden laptop story? Who was president when the accounts in question were suspended?
That’s fair and I should have specified potentially incoming.
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/in-the-news/facebook-execs-suppressed-hunter-biden-laptop-scandal-curry-favor-biden-harris
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Relevancy? The government did it. The problem — if you believe in democracy — is that the government did it clearly against the wishes of its elected leader.
Well UnopenedEnvilope specified it was the "Biden administration" that did it so I'd appreciate some clarification on what that refers to, given the "Biden administration", as the term is colloquially understood, didn't exist for another 3 months.
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At this point, I think any corporation that has employees with the job of "compliance" is de facto an arm of the state. There are always a million ways for the state to get you. After Elon bought Twitter and turned it into a haven for "right-wing misinformation and hate" suddenly his companies were under a half-dozen different dubious investigations. And don't forget the CIvil Rights Act, which has been twisted in a way that it basically mandates every corporation with more 50 employees police the speech of its employees! Was James Damore fired because Google was under pressure from various sex discrimination lawsuits? Impossible to know for sure, but it has to play a role.
I don't think we really have worked out how the First Amendment is supposed to work in a world where every significant organization with a "printing press" also has a compliance department. And really, the parties are simply too far part at this point to negotiate a truce over a new set of norms and boundaries about free speech.
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When we're checking for hypocrisy, I think it's important to remember what original 'cancelations' and cancel culture entailed, even if that sometimes comes off as quibbling over degree. Plenty of your post still stands even if we're talking about minor retribution over speech, but some relies on the weight of what we knew as 'cancel culture' that just isn't applicable IMO.
Rather than just being a synonym for 'fired', 'canceled' was instead typified by the twitter phrase "wait, why is this person still being heard from? Didn't we cancel him?" It wasn't just getting someone unemployed from their current job, but instead attempting to actively make them unemployable. A complete salting of the earth by the mob, an ongoing blacklisting from society, kept up by dozens of psychos on twitter keeping tabs on targets for years on end (and rallying the troops if there was a new sighting). If Louis CK or Warren Ellis bounced back with a new sitcom or movie, that company would have been eating a ton of shit and facing boycotts. Pressure was put on their friends, family, and past colleagues to denounce them personally. Ethan Van Sciver was a top artist at DC, but he was openly republican and celebrated trump winning in 2016. For that he was hounded out of DC, and definitely wasn't going to be allowed to jump to Marvel or Image. The SJWs (not really 'woke', which is more of a high society new religion, though we conflate these now) wanted him bagging groceries or working fast food, or preferably just killing himself, and said so. He and some others had to jump to independent crowd-funded comics projects, and then got kicked off Kickstarter from this cancel culture pressure (until finally getting to Indiegogo who held tough).
If Jimmy Kimmel gets a new cable channel show, or tries going independent on Rumble or Substack, and rightwingers follow him around everywhere trying to him fired off those as well ("Do you know what he said about Charlie Kirk in his previous job? He can't be given another platform"), then there's a good case that we've entered right-wing cancel culture. Did people track the Home Depot lady to what job she got next, and go after that one too? Until that point, these seem to be pretty limited acts of retribution, rather than "canceling" people.
This is a valid point, although I'd (lightly) push back in a few areas:
Well, are there many examples of people who bounced back into other (non-independent) jobs after being canceled by the mob? I think Roseanne and Gina Carano never worked again except for some Daily Wire stuff? But part of this is just definitional I guess, where I'm suggesting that a cancellation means it's more serious than a one-time 'eye of sauron' moment of fury. In your post you said Bari Weiss was canceled, but that was just a story about her getting 'dogpiled on twitter' for a tweet a year after she joined NYT, and then she eventually ended up resigning from NYT 2.5 years after that for other reasons. I just wouldn't define that as a cancellation in even a weak way.
I think you're right about the institutional power. Wikipedia is an underappreciated tool here where the skew can range from slight to major, and it really functions as a kind of 'final say' on people's stories.
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What would you say is the distinction here? To me they were interchangeable, SJW was just the older term that didn’t achieve offline usage
Yeah they're interchangeable at this point, especially from the perspective of everyone understanding basically what you mean. And the 1-syllable version is certainly easier to be workable offline rather than the 5-syllable one.
I just think there was meaningfully something different being gestured at with the "warrior" part of it that we were seeing in the mid 2010s, while 'woke' was more like new elite manners or religion that especially spread among coastal urban white people who were susceptible to guilt tripping or were looking for meaning. I don't know why it works, but being told that you have the original sin of being born white and thus being intrinsically racist (even if you don't consciously think you're racist), but that the good news is you can repent and strive to actively be anti-racist and elevate PoC in your life while spreading this awakening to others...somehow this did actually work on a lot of people. So at least the way I saw it, there's usually a well-meaning core to wokeness. A lot of these people actually did think the non-woke were simply lacking education about historical injustice or something, while other older boomers maybe just shrugged their shoulders and went along with it to avoid status loss, like "I guess this is where society is going now, I can adapt".
So in my opinion, wokeness is enough to ruin movies/shows/fiction, or to make events or press conferences annoying with land acknowledgements or massive split-screen sign-language translations. But it took some real coordinated meanness/nastiness of self-styled social justice warriors to actively cancel people and salt their earth. This had a different level of commitment where these people knew they were down in the trenches of the culture war and had enemies.
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This is a very important point now that "Cancel Culture" has become a generic term. Part of the reason, I think, is that the cancelled ecosystem has grown strong enough that it's not as easy to drum people out of society. For a timely example, Blake Neff was canceled and fired from Tucker Carlson's show in 2020, then hired by Charlie Kirk. Of course, there were attempts to keep him canceled, but Kirk didn't care.
Still, even though the situation has improved greatly in the post-covid era, it's important to remember that canceling didn't originally mean punishment, it meant unpersoning. I suppose, too, that the belief of cancelers that they would be able to keep their targets canceled forever was inextricably linked with the Great Awokening belief that their total, eternal cultural victory was inevitable. Whoops.
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I will maintain my position that the Right has always had its version of woke (meaning in this context, an impulse towards moralistic censorship*) and has always been fairly weak on free speech. Notably, basically every free speech advocacy group is staffed and supported overwhelmingly by liberals. Conservative groups will support conservative causes on 1A issues, but as far as I can tell there's no right-wing equivalent to the ACLU representing the Nazis and there's long been right-wing groups eager to wield social pressure (and state power) to suppress viewpoints and ideas they don't like.
Cancel culture was always a thing, but it became a Thing with the emergence of a faction of illiberal progressives that had the clout to actually apply pressure and a desire to do so. This inversion of the 'proper' order of things was deeply upsetting to the many conservatives who saw themselves as rightful hegemons of American culture.
Helpfully for RW culture warriors, they have something of an advantage in wielding social opprobrium and would probably be even more effective if they hadn't unilaterally retreated into a bubble. They tend to be appealing to a moral lowest common denominator against marginal targets, whereas progressives tend to be morally capricious and avant-garde (which makes them hard to support and leads to frequent circular firing squads).
Aside: Bork is a great example of how differences in perspective lead to mutual perceptions of 'defection'. The Republican view of Bork is that a perfectly qualified candidate was rejected for political reasons. The Democratic view of Bork is that he was utterly disqualified for his role in the Watergate scandal and the GOP was defecting by nominating him in the first place.
Which is why the cooperate/defect paradigm of political analysis is often heavily deficient. There's this tendency to treat political factions as unitary actors who might have different values and goals but at least have the same basic understanding of reality and the 'rules', but that is obviously nonsense. What one side sees as justified retaliation for some infraction, the other sees as unprovoked escalation that demands retaliation in turn.
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*censorship is being used somewhat carelessly here - this phenomenon is driven primarily by social pressure rather than actual censorship, though the state does occasionally weigh in
Losing hegemony was being mocked on every late night show as the party of schoolmarms and people who hated the poor. Utterly losing swathes of the academy and other important cultural institutions. Decisively losing a cultural issue like gay marriage and so on. It wasn't fun and people did complain.
When you declare such and such is beyond the pale and is not even to be seen let alone heard you're not denying them hegemony. You are denying that they should even have the same stake in the country and where its discourse goes.
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Have you heard of this group called "the Libertarian Party"? You may not think they are broadly on "the Right" and while calling them "conservative" is going to be a stretch, it is broadly correct to characterize them as being on "the Right" for most of their history. There is and has been a broad network of right-aligned "liberty" groups in the US for quite a long time.
Cancel culture has existed on the Right for a long time and until recently was pretty strong in being able to gatekeep groups and people from "the Right," from the John Birch Society to the Paleoconservatives to those who aren't sufficiently supporters of Israel, with figures like William F Buckley being key components of canceling (and gelding them into beautiful losers) on the right for many years. "Racist" has long been used to cancel and purge wrong-think from various institutions like the media and academia, but "Anti-Semite," has also long been used to purge people and groups from the Right.
Didn't the capital-L Libertarian Party have some rather ugly schisms and infighting in the last couple years? Did that ever get reasonably resolved? I stopped following them some time around then.
I haven't followed the Libertarian Party in quite a long time. My surface-level understanding I've absorbed through my social group is a group of Ron Paul people calling themselves the Mises Caucus took control of the party from beltway Libertarians, but then they lost the presidential nomination and the LP picked some left-coded covid hysteric who no one has heard of.
As far as I know, it wasn't resolved and most of the Mises Caucus people had no interest in supporting the covid hysteric. I think the Mises Caucus still controls the majority of national committee seats and the chair, but I'm not sure what that means in practical terms.
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I'm curious about this part. What do you mean by "conservatives saw themselves as rightful hegemons of American culture"? Are you talking about things like evangelical dominance during W Bush's administration?
Among other things, but not only that. My observation is that (some) conservatives are much more likely to try and 'gatekeep' Americanness and call things they don't like unamerican (progressives occasionally try, but their heart never seems to be in it); they often frame opposition to wokeness as 'reclaiming' or 'taking back' the country. In general, they seem much more inclined to pushing forward a prescriptive vision of American culture than other factions in American politics.
Some of this I will freely admit is a vibes-based assessment that a lot of conservatives were really disoriented and angered by being on the other side of the enforcer-transgressor dichotomy. By contrast, progressives were also disoriented by the flip, but had previously been quite comfortable in the transgressor role and often seem to prefer it.
A thought on this: the definition of 'conservative' is being on the enforcer side (the act of enforcement is tautologically conservative), and then you have the reformers and reactionaries on the other side.
Progressives have been under the pretense that they were in the transgressor role (and to a degree inherit a movement that is axiomatically transgressive, which is why they, and traditionalist-leaning reactionaries, erroneously call them 'liberals'), but transgression and entrenchment are indistinguishable to any faction that depends on entrenchment.
Progressives have had them beat on that front since at least before the Civil War. (Why else do you think the faction opposed to them still uses the stars and bars?)
It is useful to be able to point out that even classical liberals will act like conservatives once they manage to get into power. "Maximally correct" is not a viable political identity because as soon as the conditions are right to enable rent-seeking on what was a mostly correct answer, that is what gets entrenched, and it remains that way until enough social activation energy accumulates such that it is pushed back by a new truth. Which then entrenches, and like the tides, the cycle repeats.
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Having been made unwelcome or outright banned from virtually every hobby space I enjoyed since I was a wee child in the 80s by pure dint of being conservative, this is rich. Also requires ignoring Biden's rage speech where he repeatedly described "MAGA" as the greatest threat to America. IMHO describing the opposition party as a threat the nation ranks pretty high above merely describing their policies as unamerican.
Yes, but the Left is universalist. It wishes to push forward a prescriptive vision of Being A Decent Person™ which should apply globally. @Skibboleth was making the point that this is different from the Conservative focus on defining Americanness.
I would more or less agree with this, though part of my thesis is also that progressives are, if not happy, then at least comfortable with the idea of being outsiders (and indeed seemed to struggle with the idea that they had real power even when they were getting people fired), whereas conservatives viscerally hated it.
Conservatives were never really powerless. Even at the height of progressive influence, they still ran half the country, had their own parallel media institutions, etc... (It must be noted that the people most affected by progressive cancel culture were other progressives). But they were in a situation where mainstream cultural institutions gave virtually no deference to their sensibilities (a major change) and where expressing conservative opinions on sex/sexuality, gender, or race risked real social disapproval (not just having a blue-haired college student impotently yell at you). Illustratively, in a very short time frame you went from risking censure for being publicly gay to risking censure for being publicly anti-gay.
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Not in the 1960s, but FIRE today is somewhat right-coded and has taken over the old ACLU's mantle of representing without fear or favour.
FIRE is full of classical liberals. They are the political tribe that cares about freedom of speech as a principle. These days being a classical liberal means you caucus with the right. I think the last couple weeks have been eye opening to CLs(it was to me) that many right-wingers aren't really into freedom of speech either. They were/are just mad they were the bootee instead of being the booter
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I think you dismiss justification #3 too easily. Some degree of "Tit-for-Tat" has long been recognized as the Game Theory correct move. If the right just moves on and says "okay, cancel culture is done" then they have let the left have a decade plus of abbhorent, anti-civilizational behavior for free. This shouldn't happen. Hard lessons are the best learned, and a few years getting their noses bent out of joint and prominent leftists fired from media jobs and cancelled off of social media may actually force some self reflection on the left (and about a trillion posts worth of whining about facism, but that will probably happen anyway).
If the right just lets sleeping dogs lie, then the norm becomes "cancel culture is a weapon that only the left gets to use, some of the time." In the long-term interests of free speech, this should not become a norm.
Tit-for-tat might work when it's only one individual vs another, or if it's something like nuke strikes where only a handful of people have access to the Big Red Button. But it's just flatly not going to work in cases of big amorphous coalitions for all the reasons I listed. Also, the Left hardly had their behavior for "free", they plausibly lost 1-2 elections because of it, and the specific woke subfaction that is most loving of cancel culture hasn't been this politically irrelevant in a decade or more.
Tit for tat leading to large diffuse groups wanting to come to the table obviously happens. It’s so common and predictable that we have a term for it: “war weariness”. War weariness is not just leaders deciding to compromise, it’s an attitude shift in the entire population. It takes a lot of time and a lot of pain, but it does happen. Cancel culture may not be high intensity enough to induce war weariness between the right and left, but you can’t dismiss it out of hand.
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If you're saying that game theory doesn't apply to groups or coalitions, then I have to disagree. If you're saying that the grudger strategy specifically doesn't work, well, sure it does. It may be mathematically non-optimal but it is a strategy that fits into most people's moral intuitions.
As they say, hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue. The old social trust has been dynamited: there is likely no escape from this partisan cycle. This is the post Christian world that the postmodernists wanted. We now hate our enemies and wish the worst for them, as the president says.
This is true, on both sides. Only a small minority of actual liberals hold to anything else, but no one is listening to them anymore. Your arguments are made to a people whose ethos no longer exists.
Yes because Christians were famously tolerant of their enemies. Human's have hated their enemies since we had enemies to hate. The thin veneer of civilizing flavor has never been much of an impediment.
This would be a good example of political hypocrisy, thinking that one's side is near blameless and is full of virtue and the other side is daft villains and rapscallions.
Christians were tolerant, and that's where the social trust came in. They were tolerant of those they still saw as their own. One side decided they weren't Christian anymore, which was one thing. Then they decided they weren't just non-Christian, but anti-Christian. Then they decided that whiteness (not necessarily white people, but kind of) was the problem. A smaller segment wasn't just non-white, but blatantly anti-white. Another small segment wasn't just non-straight, but effectively anti-straight. Then another segment decided they weren't capitalist anymore, but seize the means of production anti-capitalists. The right wing has its fair share of insanity and intolerance, but nearly all of these newly held philosophies on morality and economics and race are all on the Democratic side.
We were a flawed unit that, despite our differences, saw each other as part of the same group because we all basically had the same moral, and somewhat social, and somewhat cultural foundations. That rug was completely ripped out from under our society. We decided to teach our kids critical thinking for years, and boy are they critical now, of everything. They grasp onto ideas over material reality. Hop on over to reddit if you need a reminder of how important critical thinking (critical theory) is to those people.
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I never said game theory broadly doesn't apply to coalitions in any scenarios, I said the fundamental assumptions that would make tit-for-tat a dominant strategy are broken. Most game theory arguments assume a small number of competitors and perfect information. Cancel culture of one coalition vs another is a case of millions of competitors sort of half-playing the game (along with dozens of other games simultaneously), also the pieces and the board are shrouded in fog.
This type of stuff is accelerationism, which I addressed in the post.
What are you talking about, the most famous prisoner's dilemma is actually built around absence of information. You have games which are so huge that they are named as social dilemmas with potentially millions or even billions of players such as tragedy of commons.
The classic prisoner's dilemma is one of complete/perfect information about the game, including the opponent's payoff information. There are a variety of incomplete/imperfect information games (some people distinguish between the two), where a player may lack information about the environment, their own payoff, other parties' payoff, some form of secret goal/intention/capability/etc.
You are right that there is one piece of information that is lacking, namely, what specific strategy the opponent will, in fact, choose. Given that this is generically a feature of almost all games that are considered in the field, it is usually not a feature that gains the moniker of "incomplete/imperfect information". That is reserved for those other games, and things like the classic prisoner's dilemma are, indeed, called "complete information games".
Games in which one knows what specific strategy the opponent will pick are, in my own view of the field, not even properly called "games". They are simply optimization problems.
Sure, you however even have variants of prisoner's dilemma that are mapped for real world situations - such as iterated prisoner's dilemma that can be used to study problems like nuclear arms race. You can even include various real world information asymmetries - e.g. lack of information about opponents capabilities, their confidence and information about your capabilities, their level of "spite" so their willingness to act erratically etc. You have different games modeling economic behavior used to construct various types of auctions between many players etc.
The point being, that your original claim of how most game theory arguments assume a small number of competitors and perfect information is incorrect. In fact you could model the cancell culture as an arms race variant of group prisoners dilemma between two coalitions.
I was not the original commenter, so I made no such claim.
The extent to which game theory maps well to real world situations with humans participants is hotly debated, even among expert practitioners. My experience is that it is phenomenal how you can sometimes get abstractions for some particular problems that are quite beautiful and genuinely aid with intuition. However, as you increase the realism and complexity, many methods run into difficulty. Naturally, that's why we have a lot of work in those domains, to try to extend the set of formal problems where we have methods that work. There might be upper-level undergrad courses which can somewhat survey the simpler settings and mayyyybe touch a bit on the rest of the field, but I think it's most likely going to be a grad class, if one exists at your uni (you'd be surprised how rare they are), and honestly, it probably is still difficult to really survey the lot of it.
I don't know what the other commenter would say, but I personally have seen a ton of extremely shitty appeals to game theory when it comes to politics or morality. I haven't harped on the former yet (though it's been on the back of my mind to do so for a while), but I've definitely harped on the latter. The vast majority of folks who appeal to it for these purposes do not have any idea about these features of the field. The vast majority of them have, like, heard of the prisoner's dilemma. And that's sort of it. They know approximately zero more and just imagine the rest of the effin' owl in their mind.
I'll note the kind of funny bit that the classic iterated prisoner's dilemma is two participants, complete information. Yes, one can do imperfect/incomplete information or multiple-player, and there's a lot of interesting work there. Good luck if you think you're going to find someone in a forum like this who has a reasonable sense of the state of those parts of the field and is able to use it to usefully inform their view of politics/morality. It's always, over and over again, just repeats of arguments about chump-level understanding of variants of the iterated prisoner's dilemma.
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The fact that its a big, amorphous coalition that has differing values just indicates the retaliation has to be stiffer than might otherwise be required, and that appropriate targeting is required.
The problem the left has at the moment is that moderates just don't matter- they are drowned out by the extremist voices, and policy proposals become about pandering to the loudest wing nuts.
Cancel all of the far left nut jobs, and you give space for the center left to actually have a reasonable conversation.
I think its pretty big stretch to say cancel culture actually lost the left any elections. Maybe didnt have as much of an effect as they were hoping, sure. But outside of some cheap "they tried to cancel him! Next they'll cancel you!" propaganda, I dont know what concrete bemefit it actually provided to the right.
This just exacerbates the third point I made why retaliation to re-establish deterrence doesn't work: it'll be perceived as uncontrolled escalation by the other side. At this point you're just throwing gasoline on the fire.
This is so much less true today than during peak woke (roughly 2017-2020).
The mainstream left is protecting leftists who are calling for the murder of right-wingers. Moderates still don't matter aside from being complicit by staying quiet.
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I am once again stepping up to remind everyone that political hypocrisy is almost always a symmetrical phenomenon. AntiPopulist focuses the entire post on the right (because of course), but the last week has also seen countless leftwingers get their own pro-canceling, anti-free speech rhetoric thrown right back in their faces.
For example, in 2018 Rosanne Barr tweeted a plausibly racist comment about Valerie Jarrett and Kimmel's own network, ABC, rejected her apology and fired her before turning her show into a vessel for leftist propaganda. Kimmel himself said "I want to say kudos to my bosses at ABC for doing the right thing and canceling Roseanne’s show today. It’s not an easy thing to do when a show is successful, but it’s the right thing."
Kimmel himself was reportedly offered the chance to apologize, and was taken off the air after declaring that he would instead drop yet more incendiary comments about Maga. Bold move for a man whose show is almost certainly not "successful" by standards such as "not losing money". Let's see if that pays off for him.
It's truly a shame. Leftwingers being held to their own standards (or any standards) are the real victims here - just ignore the body that was just laid to rest.
The right-wing website Townhall has a long list of people on the left who advocated cancelling getting cancelled themselves now that the pendulum has swung the other way.
I do not believe any of the people who signed Harper’s Letter back in 2020 during peak left-wing cancel culture have been cancelled for saying inappropriate things about Charlie Kirk, but if anyone has examples, let us know.
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I don't disagree.
I wasn't aware of this, so thanks for posting it. It seems Kimmel got a little bit of what he deserved then.
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I disagree that California's independent commission constitutes unilateral disarmament. In 2024 the difference between the percentage of the vote that went to the out party (Rs in California and Ds in Texas) an the percentage of house seats they won was more "unfair" in California, and a commission which is 1/3 D 1/3 R and 1/3 "neutral" parties who all agree with the D side all the time is not exactly the platonic ideal of fair districting. And there are D states where Rs are wildly underrepresented, but the district lines look fair and the Ds say "well its not gerrymandered, what do you want?" as if the problem was squiggly lines on a map and not the unrepresentative outcomes. I am not saying that refusing the gerrymander and have independent commissions is BAD, but getting worse outcomes than Texas and then acting holier than thou about Texas's districting is laughable.
The correct solution for all states with more than 1-2 seats is multi-member districts which would get the ratios better and allow everyone to be represented, but that never seems to be on the table unfortunately.
First off, it's not correct to just take a simple percentage and say something like "if party A won 40% of the vote, it should get 40% of the seats". It doesn't work like that. Think about it: in an FPTP system, if voters were totally uniformly distributed, then a party that won 60% of the votes would get 100% of the seats. The reason this doesn't happen in practice is because of sorting. The simplest rule for "fairness" that's used in academic lit is something like the following:
You can go to this link for more info, specifically under the 4 definitions of fairness.
While you're right that it's not like the Dems have totally disarmed themselves from using gerrymandering, the important point is that they're not pushing nearly as hard as Republicans have done over the past few decades. As I said, R's are up 8 to 20 seats depending on the fairness metric used.
But this IS the reason that gerrymandering feels bad, the reason that people instinctively dislike it. Its not that people hate the squiggly lines in and of themselves, they dislike that the lines lead to unfair vote distributions. So it is not immediately obvious to me why having even worse distributions without squiggly lines is better.
Well sure, people dislike unfair representation, but 1) a lot of that is due to FPTP, not gerrymandering, and 2) they don't really care enough to do much about, certainly not enough that it'd be worth 8-20 House seats to continue being unilaterally semi-disarmed.
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Everyone always talks about gerrymandering at the level of congressional representation, but I think it's far more insidious at the city level: in the city I live in (and I suspect this is true of many cities in the country), the '24 presidential vote shares (which haven't changed much) were somewhere around 65-35 blue-red. But wouldn't you know it, every city council district voted for a blue candidate (even notionally "non-party-affiliated", but as far as I can tell everyone is aware of the alignment from the messaging), and there was no shortage of complaining when a single red candidate won a special election for a truncated term a couple years back.
As far as I can tell, this statement describes almost every moderate-size or larger city in the country.
That can arise naturally from FPTP without gerrymandering. If a 65-35 city is reasonably homogeneous, then every district will be roughly 65-35 and a majority-party sweep is the default outcome.
They usually aren't reasonably homogeneous, though. And this same logic has been used to forbid at-large representatives under the Voting Rights Act.
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I think a decent chunk of the popular opposition to gerrymandering is specifically being upset at majority-party sweeps or over-representation, so I'm not sure I feel better about that.
I agree that it is a bad outcome. But the solution is proportional representation, not redrawing districts.
I think this is the only real answer to gerrymandering, so I think we agree.
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