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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 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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