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I was reading Does the social contract even exist any more?. It starts out with some typical stuff about questionable business models, some people being inconsiderate, some (left-leaning) politics. It mostly seems like a replacement-level post, until we get to the example of Daniel Naroditskys suicide.
This mostly fits the theme (not that paranoid-delusional chess grandmasters are particularly new), and then comes:
Holy shit, thats the normality youre missing? This is the only thing in the post that was actually unthinkable for me, though in retrospect with the amount streamers in the game, maybe it shouldnt have been. Still, in a post about how things used to work, presenting this as the obvious thing to do would still cause some whiplash, even if I thought to anticipate some people calling for it. The author here is an /r/neoliberal alumnus who frequently bangs the "You can just be center left, wokeness is a distraction" drum, and this feels like Ive just seen the manchurian punditate activate accidentally.
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 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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