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This sounds like the debate over if wokeness is just a list of object-level political opinions, or if wokeness is also a set of social conformism techniques.
Maybe the author agrees with Cancelling People, but just haggles over the price. Woke rebuttals to "wokeness is a set of social conformism techniques" include that Hollywood blacklisting communists was also cancel culture, and that we have always lived in a cancel culture. From here, we should see wokeness as just a list of object-level political opinions, including novel high speeds of vibe shifts.
The problem with "cancel" as a strategy was always that it was an argument in favor of bringing back blacklisting communists. Which I thought we all agreed was a bad thing, but apparently not, so here we go...
Only if you treat tactics as inherently good or bad. "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." "Good guy with a gun" and "bad guy with a gun" are very different things, morally.
No bad tactics, only bad targets. HUAC and the Hollywood blacklists were bad not because the tactic was inherently wrong, but because it was Evil Right Wingers wrongfully persecuting poor, innocent, well-intentioned Communists; the same tactic is good when used by Good Left Wingers to rightfully drive out the deplorable bigots.
It's simple: there are Good Guys, and there are Bad Guys. Anything the Good Guys do is good, anything the Bad Guys do is bad… even when those are the exact same actions, because the morality of deeds is determined by who is doing unto whom.
I believe the traditional phrase is "once you pop, you can't stop." You can socially normalize a direction but not a concrete set of standards.
Nobody's ever in complete control of how trends develop. And only a fool would concern himself with the philosophy of a mob.
Yes the notorious Epstein quote.
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The comparison to pervious conformism isnt relevant here, because this is not about Who Started It or is violating political norms or such. The vast majority of things wokeness has canceled people for, "normal" leftists agree that it would have been better not to do that thing, at least by a little. They disagree what to do about it, and object-level opinions about surrounding facts certainly play a role in that, but just increasing the willingness to demand conformity gets them to play along with whatever the wokes do (whether or not that makes them woke themselves is, again, not relevant here).
Theres also a difference in which things you enforce conformism on, and what you enforce it with. Removing the title here seems to me like something that used to be out of bounds. And I doubt anyone was removed from chess over communism - there literally where competitions with the USSR at the time.
Maybe this is a specific reference I didn't get. I understood you as saying: "This author prides himself with being center-left and not a woke psycho, but he still demands a formal cancellation by an institution for personal moral shortcomings." Was I misinterpreting? All I was saying was this author could think Kramnik's offences rise to Cancellable but (say) the Young Republicans don't.
So it's really hard for me to find examples of FIDE revoking titles for moral failings! Andrejs Strebkovs appears to be the only example I could find, and that is recent.
This might be the issue! Johnson is barely talking about the past, and indeed he says returning wouldn't fix everything; he also explicitly says some norms are bad and should be changed. He is just venting about things, and all this 'social contract' stuff is just to give his opinions some sense of legitimacy.
I do appreciate you bringing this up. I do not like people's willingness to Mean Girl their way into what ought to just be objective accomplishment-tracking. I wonder if it is more generally related to the Great Feminization.
Yesnt. I think a lot of left-leaning people arent "actively woke", but will go along with it, for various reasons - no enemies to the left, "but come on all the people agruing against this are bad", etc. They say they dont have the woke beliefs, and they dont, because those decisions arent made based on those. They would/could not, themselves, start it, but they will be one the woke side, when it starts. And that case seems to me like that programming triggering somewhere non-political.
The manchurian candidate is not a secret agent hiding his true beliefs, he is sincere but can be mind-controlled with a passphrase.
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