I think the definition of cancel culture and censorship used commonly is too narrow to explain what this actually looks like to the right.
Cancelling could (and should, IMO, to capture the whole means and goals of it) be defined as attempting to impede someone's ability to live a normal life as punishment for speech considered beyond acceptability by the canceller. It's never been just the workplace that's a target, it's also pressuring friends and family to cut ties, pressuring the school the kids of the person go to, etc... By that definition, an assassination is the ultimate cancellation (and a normal cancellation is a limited "character assassination"). What the right sees right now is that a long term campaign of implying that the milquetoast right wing beliefs that Kirk had made him Turbo Hitler made enough people believe that he was Turbo Hitler that the always statistically possible but usually unlikely person with the mix of ability, opportunity, recklessness and belief necessary to succesfully carry out an assassination actually turned up, and then as a response a large contingent (and I'm happy to note it's not all of them) keeps it up, even while saying something they obviously don't really believe like "I didn't really want anyone to kill Kirk..." they keep the cancellation/dogwhistle going with "... but let's not forget he was Turbo Hitler". If you see it that way, then it's not so much that the right has full control of the cancellation apparatus and is using it unilaterally to punish the left, but more of a messy struggle.
pigeonburger
2d ago
Enough happenings in one week for Billy Joel to make a new "We Didn't Start The Fire"
pigeonburger
3d ago
I agree some of it should be counted (almost everything done by antifa/black blocs), but a lot should be counted as opportunistic violence committed under the cover of ideology.
I've known of it for a long time (and actually learned how to sing it in Italian, a language I don't speak) in my tankie/left-anarchist college days. It's significance would be very well known, way before the show, by leftie academic types I would think. But outside of them, I've also heard it sung in friends and family gathering, in random music shows, for decades, and I'm not italian. It's a very well known song in general. Maybe younger people have had more chances of being exposed to it through Casa de Papel, but it's been floating around in general culture for a long time.
pigeonburger
5d ago
It's not necessarily that unfair, because the "ambushed" side has the benefit of chosing whether or not to engage, whereas the professional looks bad if he refuses to debate someone, no one will know about the amateurs that don't show up. The amateur can research the specific point they want to make beforehand, has the benefit of researching the person they will debate beforehand... Knowing that you're going to go against someone who does that professionally, you would assume that they've already encountered every easy surface level arguments. But yeah, some people just look at "easy looking" carnival games and assume that there's nothing funny going on, just like I imagine some people look at a "debate me" event from a pro-gun person and think they never considered school shootings can and have happened. Still, they walked in it of their own accord; and it's a lot fairer than gotcha vox-pop you see on TV.
pigeonburger
5d ago
Middle class. In my age range, I have a salary that's around the 80th percentile in my country, but I do live in big city which skews it. I rent a relatively large 2 bedroom apartment in a safe, quiet neighborhood. Though our finances are stressed from doing so while trying to maintain a middle class lifestyle, I am able to support my wife studying full time. Inheritance aside, on my own, I would be able to afford an unimpressive house in the exurbs. With my wife's help, assuming she has a 50th to 75th percentile salary, we would be able to buy a pretty nice house in the exurbs or an unimpressive house in the suburbs. While I don't have a higher education degree (college didn't agree with me), I fit in culturally with people who do. My parents had higher education degrees, my mother a college graduate, my father a university graduate. My job is in the same field as my father, and I would estimate my career level to be roughly comparable to his at the same point in his life.
pigeonburger
5d ago
It doesn't stop the psychos, sure, but it puts the breaks on the acceleration by making sure it does not seem like an appealing way to achieve your goals to non-psychos. Which is what the real danger is, psychos are more or less a constant, a fact of life, but normalized political violence is the beginning of the end of a civilization.
pigeonburger
5d ago
It is Okay to Think That Charlie Kirk was not Literally Jesus.
Ultimately, the best rampart against this kind of violence is making sure it's counter-productive. I don't care if that requires canonizing a man who didn't necessarily deserve it to make it clear that if you kill a peaceful activist, you risk permanently losing the normies and moderates from your side.
pigeonburger
5d ago
Oh my, I have choice "cultural phrases" to say about this new euphemism
There's unconfirmed reports that the rifle was a Mauser bolt-action, with antifa/pro-trans statements carved on the cartridges found alongside the weapon.
https://xcancel.com/scrowder/status/1966118431511433267
If it is indeed a dirt old, cheap, relatively abundant surplus bolt action, and considering the shooter only had to take one shot, I think it'll be hard to make the usual gun control arguments for this one. At least regarding the weapon.
pigeonburger
6d ago
I am not sure this represents a "vibe shift" (DC and Marvel would always be likely to fire a writer who openly cheers an assassination) but it is interesting how quickly Felker-Martin got "cancelled."
Within hours, Matthew Dowd got fired from MSNBC for implying Kirk brought this on himself. Yeah, it might be premature to say this is the "vibe shift", but at least institutional left-leaning media is enforcing messaging discipline right now, which is something I don't think they would have felt they needed to do a few years ago. They barely did for the attempt on Trump.
I think you mostly have to make sure your regulations actually align with your stated goals and don't become at odds with themselves. Our provincial government chose to legalize only through government-run stores mostly because they wanted the public has a safe product sold in a responsible environment. If your regulations push them back to the black market, then that's a fail in that respect.
pigeonburger
7d ago
Very fast motorcycles are perhaps a better analogy; an unnecessary danger, but pleasurable and alluring.
Also, what if legalizing (due to those imposed regulations) increases the price. Essentially, what if requiring drug producers to not lace their products, etc. makes it prohibitively expensive for the main population that is seeking out these drugs, meaning there will once again be a black market for them.
Even after we had cannabis legalization here, my province in particular passed laws capping all cannabis products sold legally in the province by the government-run stores at 30% THC. While this is plenty THC for flower, it pretty much nullifies as a category concentrates (hash, wax, shatter, resin, rosin, THC crystals... as well as THC vapes). For an alcohol comparison, it's like they made alcohol legal only as long it was at most 10% alcohol (20 proof), the alcohol percentage of a strong beer. The result is that, when I was a regular cannabis consumer, I would get those products from the black/gray market, despite legalization.
Price was, though, comparable between the government-run stores and the black/gray market for flowers.
pigeonburger
9d ago
I think my main gripe with the retvrners is that there's a poorly defended (IMO) assumption that the good times of the second half of the 20th century were an unstable position, merely a breather at the top of a slippery slope. Maybe it's because I'm a pure product of it, but I don't find the ideals of that era hard to defend without slipping into postmodern madness. I think those ideals have been betrayed, they didn't fail on their own terms.
pigeonburger
9d ago
I'd add somewhere in your list a feeling of guilt towards historical wrongs and a feeling that sacrificing their own countrymen's welfare in favor of immigrants' is somehow helping make up for it.
pigeonburger
12d ago
Yes, I am too a civic nationalist, and would like for this to work. But I find few liberals are okay with enforcing the clear us/them distinction, because it doesn't "feel" liberal to do so.
pigeonburger
12d ago
The Nazis.
Hence the lack of coherency, as it doesn't escape the public that the average modern "Nazi" has more in common with them and with good western liberals than an average practicing Muslim, and that the practicing Muslim has more in common with the historical Nazi (including strong hatred of Jews, totalizing politics)
pigeonburger
12d ago
Maybe Biden was never truly president in anything more than a ceremonial sense, and was essentially understood consiously or not, as simply giving executive power back to the administrative state that the Obama administration installed.
Sure. Basically I think the purpose of a state is to be a back-scratching club: designate an ingroup, and then work to benefit them.
Here you imply what is the main issue I have with the western liberal's version of this, and why they are unable to apply it in a way that actually functions; an ingroup implies the existence of outgroups, or at least of people not in the ingroup. If extremely illiberal Muslims are supposed to be in our ingroup, who isn't? If people are denied a coherent definition of their ingroup, they cannot believe it will scratch their back, so they fall back on base individualism and all the civilisational gains that were achieved by nationalism slowly decay.
Honestly, I truly believe that the only thing that could potentially unite humanity in the way globalists dream of is the discovery of alien intelligence advanced enough to exclude from our ingroup. Because there is never an us without a them.
pigeonburger
19d ago
The way I envision it is not large payments, it's small payments by a large amount of mules that would fall below the threshold to trigger alarms that would accumulate into the same OF provider's account.
pigeonburger
19d ago
Coin tumblers is how they can be laundered. The coins are deposited into a big common pot, you get a code to get your coins out, and can cash them out from a new (clean) address. As long as you don't do something stupid like match the exact amount going into the pot when you withdraw, or withdraw immediately after depositing, then the coins on the outgoing side can't be traced to their origin.
But those coins are of course traceable to a tumbler you still need to find a way to spend them that won't block you for having used a tumbler.
pigeonburger
19d ago
This just made me think about how easy it must be to launder money through OnlyFans kind of services.
pigeonburger
20d ago
Giving good advice starts by making the person feel good about accepting it. If your advice sounds like a reproach, if the advice is framed in a way that makes the receiver feels stupid for not knowing before, it won't be accepted. Your "Fun Facts" and "Winning" categories are easier to give accepted advice in because they are not inherently negative. But if negativity cannot be avoided you need the insulate the reciever from it; such as you did in the "Tough Love" example, by saying it may not work for everyone, because if you didn't you'd be implying that they're lying if they percieved themselves as having tried it and the results didn't follow. If insulating the person doesn't work, or cannot work because the advice inherently implies that they've been deluding themselves, then you need to put yourself right there next to them taking on the implication, so that they don't feel it's their personal failing. So instead of saying "you think you're cutting out carbs but I've seen you eat tons of sweet desserts", go with "when I was trying to cut carbs, even when I thought I was doing it properly, I wasn't counting my desserts properly and turns out they amounted to more than I thought they did".
If this was published in 2011, it was a year away or less from being shattered by Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind", which, among other things, explain very convincingly why western liberal morality fails to resonate with most people outside of western urban centers. Spoiler alert: it is the western liberals that are the moral mutants, with a narrower understanding of morality than pretty much every other human being on earth that ever lived. Doubling down on narrow morality is not going to help progressives communicate better to the masses, on the contrary.
But I guess if you define progressivism as that narrow morality, and everything else is conservatism then yeah, tautologically you can't really argue that expanding it is not letting in filthy conservative values into people's brains. But it's not driven by understanding the world, but by being blind to the idea that other concepts of morality exist and no, they're not all inherently conservative.
*EDIT: And I include myself very much in the western liberals here, even though I disgree with them more often than not, it's how I grew up, and having been made aware of and understand them intellectually, I still struggle to link the feeling of the violations of those moralities to intellectual condemnation of them.
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