Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13hr ago
I am not sure I follow. My comment was not meant to suggest these people deserved to be shitcanned; it was meant to provide well-known examples of people being cancelled for their actions. That in turn was meant to substantiate my point that Jiro's proposed definition of being cancelled would exclude many cases we'd intuitive consider to be central examples.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
15hr ago
Off the top of my head: Gina Carano (or Chuck Wendig :V), Louis CK, Bret Weinstein, and James Damore were all censured for things they said/did, not for tangential association with someone else.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
17hr ago
This definition would exclude many, if not most, prominent examples of cancellation.
The right can and has canceled people all the time, no assassinations required. A cursory inspection of FIRE's databases on campus speech will reveal no lack of incidents coming from the right (830 of 1760 incidents), and that is purely focused on campus speaking events.
The major asymmetry is that there are a significant number of people on the left who oppose cancellation as a matter of principle; their counterparts on the right are either fewer in number or vastly more passive. Right-wing opposition to cancellation is overwhelmingly centered on right-wingers getting canceled.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
19hr ago
Cancel culture didn't start in 2015 or whenever you, the reader, became woke to it. It is not a left or right wing phenomenon. It is bad behavior, but it is also a corollary of freedom of speech and freedom of association. You could make a case for political views being a protected class, but nobody with policy making authority seems quite prepared to bite that bullet.
My take is, contacting an employer with the intent of getting someone fired for something not work-related or fired in the public interest as a 'concerned citizen', by definition, is cancel culture.
The ambiguity here is what does it for something to be not work-related? On the one hand I mostly agree that an employer's interest in their employees' lives starts and ends with the work day unless it directly relates, but I don't think this has unlimited extension. As an extreme example, if I discover one of my employees moonlights for ISIS, I think it is reasonable to fire him even if he has never lets his hobbies impact his work so far. Or, for a perhaps less silly example, if one of someone who operates dangerous machinery keeps racking up DUIs, I would think I am reasonable to worry about his alcoholism even if he hasn't shown up drunk yet.
But once you accept that there are some exceptions, it really becomes an argument about where the line is rather than whether or not there is a line.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
21hr ago
People afraid of anti-immigrant or white supremacist or anti-LGBT violence are far more reasonable in their fear than people afraid of anti-conservative violence. Not only have we had numerous incidents of domestic terrorism to that effect during the Trump era, but under the Trump administration many of these sentiments have obtain implicit or explicit state backing. If you want to dismiss them as irrational, you can, but you can't do it while simultaneously arguing that people like OP are rational in their fears.
(hilariously, in the time since I started composing this, we had an unironic 'kill the poor' statement from a Fox host proposed as a remedy to the problem of mentally ill homeless, so put another tally mark in the 'right-winger oblivious to their own rhetoric' column)
These groups achieved everything they needed by appealing to historical injustices, and they could have left it there.
This is pure revisionism. There was no moment where 'cultural conservatives' agreed to some compromise position on social issues. They have fought every inch of the way. There was no 'there' to leave it.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
Jan 6 will continue to be a major point of contention not for the level of violence in itself, but what that violence (along with other aspects) represents: an attempt forcibly subvert election outcomes. This is sui generis in the history of American political violence.
That seems pretty distant for saying they should be beaten up for the positions they hold.
Firstly, physically manhandling someone against their will is assault. But, to rewind, the reason he is 'clarifying' is that he previously said this:
"I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way. It's time to put an end to this nonsense."
If you consistently characterize peaceful protestors as criminals, suggest the police should be deployed against them, suggest people should take matters into their own hands, etc... then I'm not inclined to be charitable to coy walkbacks.
Do you have examples of prominent right-wingers doing either of this (for cases of unambiguous police brutality)?
Off the top of my head: Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump Jr. both openly mocked the Pelosi attack. Mike Lee mocked the murder Melissa Hortman and suggested the far-left was to blame. I don't know what 'unambiguous' police brutality means, given how lenient the US is to police violence, efforts of state governments to curtail protest rights, and the tendency of right-wingers to equate any form of protest stronger than standing quietly for an hour or two with rioting, but one of the more notorious incidents to come out of the summer 2020 protests was the dispersal of protests in Lafayette Square in DC at the direction of Donald Trump and with the approval of prominent Republicans. We have Ben Shapiro has advocated that Derek Chauvin be pardoned, as another, later example.
On a policy level, you have things like the Trump administration pulling back on civil rights investigations related to police brutality and refusing to enforce oversight, which I would argue constitutes tacit approval for police brutality (as long as the victims are not the wrong sort of people).
For more grass roots expression, I guess you're just going to have to take my word for it that a lot of conservative voters subscribe to the Tango & Cash theory of criminal justice (and can get pretty damn racist about it to boot). Or not.
Alternatively, if you'll forgive the shitty image macro, I think this succinctly captures why left-wingers are unimpressed by right-wing scolding.
(90% of what I know about it I pick up from this website).
No offense, but the TheMotte is literally a forum for right-wing culture warriors and a handful of contrarian gadflies who like arguing with them. Even for the people who aren't far right, they're almost always people with progressive-critical views. It is in no way representative of American political culture, or even of normie conservative American political culture. It gives you a very one-sided view of the state of affairs, e.g. persistently highlighting RW grievances with academia while ignoring or downplaying influential right-wing media figures and general bad behavior. (If one were to base their impression of US politics purely on Motteposting, one might conclude that the right has virtually no media presence, rather than the reality that there's a massive right-wing media ecosystem).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
Not only that - we've had several domestic incidents stemming from ideas that are fairly normal on the Motte (e.g. Great Replacement Theory).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
I'm not sure what the lesson is there
Debate is a skill. Most people overestimate their ability to assemble an argument on the fly, overestimate their knowledge of a subject, and even when theoretically prepared overestimate their composure when an unfriendly interlocutor starts pushing on them.
You can loose an argument to someone who is obviously, comically wrong because they more prepared and more composed in the actual debate.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
If you have certain values, and you express them, there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who would love to see you get decorated with your own blood, watch you exsanguinate, a chunk of mineral tearing through your vital structures, turning you into a pile of meat instead of a man.
Interesting.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to put this on you, specifically, but this is exactly how many of those people have felt for years or decades - Like conservatives want them (or their friends/family) to not exist, and would shrug and make excuses (if not cheer) if they were murdered. Looking at the rapidity with which many conservatives started calling for blood (and in particularly renewing already intense animosity against trans people), it's, uh, hard to blame them for thinking that.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
There are people like @JeremiahDJohns or @ArmandDoma [1] [2] who are very critical of the far left, but also seem to not understand how Kirk isn't "far right".
TheMotte's idea of far-right and YIMBY twitter's idea of far-right are two non-overlapping circles.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
But once it does happen, celebrating this happy turn of events is perfectly wholesome.
I am personally of the view that celebrating someone's death is bad, even if the person was an asshole, because exercising sadism is bad for you. I understand why people aren't tearing their clothes and gnashing their teeth. I likewise understand (and basically agree with) why they push back on efforts to lionize Kirk. However, even with all that, to actively celebrate it is too much. Most of us have negative or inappropriate thoughts, but you should aim to tame them, not cultivate them. There are instances where I might cut you some slack (e.g. NYers cheering OBL's death), but it is not wholesome.
What sticks in my craw about pearl-clutching from conservatives over less-than-decorous reactions to Kirk's death is how one-sided it is. Trumpism is a movement literally founded on turfing out respectable conservatives in favor of tribal nastiness. A significant part of Trump's initial appeal was that he was a loud and proud asshole who didn't care about decorum, and that has carried forward through his entire movement. The aesthetic of cruelty, a gleeful willingness to offend ("facts don't care about your feelings") has been a central element post-Trump conservatism*. The reason you're not supposed to celebrate Kirk's death isn't a generalized principle of decency or respect for the dead. It's because Charlie Kirk is a Good Guy and you're not supposed to make fun of Good Guys. It's totally cool to celebrate death and misery as long the subject deserves it.
*It was always present (e.g. Rush Limbaugh), but under Trump it came to the forefront.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
In addition to the Helldivers bit others mentioned, I'd note that nowadays the Three Arrows has been picked up (seeming without irony) by a number of far-left types.
Do you have evidence of this?
Jan 6 will continue to be the premier example. The conservative reaction basically split three ways between "it was a false flag", J6ers are heroes, and it was actually no big deal. Eventually this consolidated on a hybrid of the latter two positions (e.g. the lionization of Ashli Babbitt). You don't have to go dumpster diving for groypers to find this. It will come up relatively frequently on gun/hunting forums or other conservative-dominated space where they feel they are 'in private'. I mean, shit, it comes up here from time to time.
However, to your opening paragraph: half my point in this thread has been that American right-wingers don't process their support for political violence as support for political violence. When Tom Cotton calls for people to beat up pro-Palestinian protestors, or they laugh about a guy nearly beating Paul Pelosi to death, or they cheer for police brutality, they don't think of that as supporting political violence. When someone plows a truck into a crowd of protestors, they shrug and say "shouldn't have been standing there" (while laughing behind their hands). When it becomes unignorable (as in the Minnesota case), they shift the blame to mental health or somehow try to make it the fault of left-wingers.
You mention not disassociating from the 20%, but for American* right-wingers the 20% includes much of their senior leadership.
(I also want to note that this is not a new phenomenon; conservatives have been joking about murdering Democrats for decades)
*I have to specify American right-wingers because I don't think this is some timeless quality of conservatism; Americans in general seem a lot more comfortable with violence than their European counterparts
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
But he did seem rather nice and kind in how he tried to persuade people of his evil opinions.
Did he? I get the general impetus to not speak ill of the dead, but unless he'd taken a turn very recently that I'm not aware of, Kirk was not doing good-faith outreach. He was generating content.
I think the reason this is getting this much attention is because it's on video
I don't think that hurts, but I think the main reason is that Kirk was a prominent right-wing figure and you already had a lot of people champing at the bit for an excuse to crack some heads. Similarly, Floyd's murder tapped into a pre-existing resentment of police brutality that we'd seen flare up in, e.g. Ferguson and NYC (and also you had hundreds of millions of people with cabin fever).
By contrast, there's no political factions around school shootings. There's no opposition to mobilize against, and to the extent that there's a national conversation to be had, we've already had it.
Your mileage may definitely vary. I've grown up listening to right-wingers not-as-coyly-as-they-think cheer for all manner of violence against their enemies. There's a lot of stuff I ignored when I was inside the tent that I reflect back on and realize how casual support for violence was. It certainly wasn't everybody, but it was quite common and encountered very little pushback.
And these were normies conservatives and that was before Trump came in the scene and started actively riling them up.
Certainly you can find people like that on the left. IME the biggest difference is that when there's left-wing political violence, normie liberals will usually say "that's terrible" and when there's right-wing political violence, normie conservatives will split into thirds along the lines of "it's good, actually", blaming the left, and just pretending it didn't happen.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
The guy also had a bunch of "no kings" anti-trump fliers
Which do you think is more likely: that this guy who was specifically targeting Democrats was also carrying fliers for a normie resist-lib protest because after he finished up murdering his way through the MN state legislature he was going to pass out some literature? Or that this guy with a history of right-wing views (pro-life, anti-trans, evangelical, etc...) was trying to throw people off the scent?
Boelter was not just an unhinged guy (he is also an unhinged guy, but that's just table stakes) who intended to pull the trigger and see what happened. Even if he didn't expect to get away with it, he clearly planned to.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
Well, we're already in hell. Now what?
We're not. We're barely above baseline. This is America. We shoot each other a lot. What we are is acting like we're in an apocalyptic struggle.
When a right-winger does it, they get denounced by everyone.
When a right-winger does it, everyone on the right acts all mystified as to how their constant violent fantasies could have led to violent action. They shift the blame to mental health while half of them snigger behind their hands.
This quote really sums up my experience with the asymmetry here:
My feed is filled with statements from elected democrats condemning the shooting which is obviously good but I have a sneaking suspicion it will all be forgotten when someone named like MyLittleCommunistPony got 100k Likes on TikTok for saying “Good” or whatever
Except that when the tables are turned, instead of MyLittleCommunistPony it's senior Republican leadership. Perhaps one of the most prominent examples would be Trump pardoning J6 insurrectionists. But also Mike Lee claiming the Minnesota assassin was a radical left-winger. Or, uh, Charlie Kirk.
(And all this is leaving aside the reality that right-wingers outsource most of their political violence to law enforcement and cheer from the sidelines)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
it's going to backfire on whatever political positions the perpetrator holds
I'm going to reiterate the bit where a right-wing nut murdered two Democratic politicians in July, planned to murder more, and the right just brassed it out and said he was secretly a leftist. Why moderate? What's the point? Who will be swayed by it? Their enemies won't care and won't respect it.
You misunderstand me. RWers never, ever own their violent extremists, no matter how blatant it is (I mean, seriously, the guy was going down a hit list of democratic legislators). The blame is always shifted onto mental health. This despite how much time the far right spend fantasizing about violence (shit, the most common far-right response I've seen to Kirk's murder is "this is our Reichstag fire, time to break out the jackboots")
I found this remark from Ben Dreyfuss illustrative:
My feed is filled with statements from elected democrats condemning the shooting which is obviously good but I have a sneaking suspicion it will all be forgotten when someone named like MyLittleCommunistPony got 100k Likes on TikTok for saying “Good” or whatever
Except when it's a right-wing extremist, instead of MyLittleCommunistPony saying 'good', it's, like, Mike Lee, and right-wing commentators invent cope about how the guy was really mentally ill and we can't really know what was in his heart.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
Oh, wait, I forgot. When a right-winger does it, it was actually a mental health issue.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
And the fact you have offered this alternative take makes it impossible for me to believe you believe your first claim
Willingness to consider alternative explanations makes me untrustworthy?
Nice talking to you.
Providing basically all of the intellectual defense of free speech as a principle. Organization like FIRE, for instance, provide legal backing in First Amendment cases on a broad, non-ideological front despite being founded and run by liberals. The vast majority of signatories on the famous Harper's Letter are liberals or leftists. Few are conservative, and virtually none are associated with the populist Right that dominates the Republican establishment.
By contrast, right wing "free speech" defenders have mostly been massive hypocrites, e.g. Musk making a habit of suing critics or anti-BDS laws in Red states. Likewise, there are no real conservative equivalents to organizations like FIRE (or even the ACLU, despite its serious institutional decay) that make a point of standing up for free speech regardless of who the speaker is.
Can you be specific as to what you're expecting? If speaking out and providing legal support doesn't amount to anything, I'm not really sure what would count.
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