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TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2hr ago
This is a valid point, although I'd (lightly) push back in a few areas:
- To what degree was this actually true? I definitely remember it happening in at least some instances, but I also remember people saying that cancel mobs had short attention spans. Sure, you might get a few wackos keeping tabs, but the vast majority of the fury was a one-time deal.
- Right wing cancel culture is still new, and there's a chance they could do this too. I... kind of doubt they will to be honest, but I would guess the reason would be due to a lack of institutional power rather than a lack of wanting to do so. Granted, that would still be a difference, no doubt.
Browser
2hr ago
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.
LateMechanic
2hr ago
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.
zoink
2hr ago
Never going to convince anyone in these measuring contests. The heuristic I use that strongly indicates that society is 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.
how is the Right's behavior any different in this case?
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.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
3hr ago
I hate having Tylenol in the house. It was one of the scarier parts of pregnancy and neonates. My 2 year old slurped up half a bottle while I was trying to dose the 3 month old and I called poison control crying. Couldn't sleep all night from shaking, though they told me it was below their threshold for going into the ER. An overdose is a miserable death.
That said, pregnancy sucks and you have to be able to give women something. If they can't take willow bark tea, can't have a shot of brandy, can't take anything more modern, they're going to come up with something. And that something is likely going to be dangerous.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
3hr ago
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.
Quantumfreakonomics
3hr ago
If we had organ markets we would be able to track the damage in real time.
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.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
3hr ago
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.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
3hr ago
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
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3hr ago
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.
birb_cromble
3hr ago
medical community will instantly go blindly anti-Trump obscuring the issue.
I wonder if we'll see an overall increase in mortality due to consumption of Protest Tylenol over a six month period.
Jiro
3hr ago
Nobody's been able to give me a compelling response to why we should accept what the Right is doing now
So exactly what explanations have you heard that you don't find compelling?
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
3hr ago
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:
"Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country," Disney said in a Monday, Sept. 22, statement to USA TODAY. "It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday."
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.
However, most ABC stations in the U.S. are owned by independent station groups, and Sinclair is the largest owner of ABC stations, with 38 across the country, including WJLA, the ABC affiliate that serves the Washington D.C. metro area.
It was pushback from Sinclair and Nexstar that sparked Disney’s decision to pull the show in the first place, with both station groups telling Disney that they would preempt the show in response to his comments last Monday night about Charlie Kirk’s killer. Sources say that other ABC affiliates had also expressed concerns.
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.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3hr ago
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?
cjet79
3hr ago
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.
Quantumfreakonomics
3hr ago
It means they didn't find shit.
Of course, they can't say that. You saw how the base treated Kash Patel and Pam Bondi when they came up empty-handed after the Epstein investigation. Much easier to put-out some face-saving press release. "Uh, it was the uh, the pills. You know, the red ones. That's where autism comes from. Tylenol. Yeah..." No one ever got fired for telling pregnant women not to take drugs.
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:
- Reasonably limited, like "we should only go after people who are inciting violence", but that's not representative of what's actually happened (i.e. the Right certainly hasn't limited itself to just that); or
- It accurately describes the Right's actions, but is excessively broad, like "it's fair to go after anyone saying mean things about Kirk".
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.
aldomilyar
4hr ago
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.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4hr ago
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.
UnopenedEnvilope
4hr ago
That’s fair and I should have specified potentially incoming.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4hr ago
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.
Bleep
4hr ago
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.
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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