@gattsuru comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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gattsuru 4mo ago · Edited 4mo ago

I do have a lot of sympathy!

Jokes and 'jokes' about violence aimed at specific politicians have always been sporadically enforced, and as much as it's unfair that there's been less notice aimed at the left for the last few decades, it means quite a lot of people genuinely don't have fair notice when the closest thing to ramifications was Kathy Griffin (and even she didn't get booted from Twitter) for almost two decades. Some people do genuinely just have a morbid sense of humor, not just when people they don't like are involved. And it's not unusual for a lot of the enforcement to really be 'about' some more tedious local drama leading whoever starts the cancel campaigns to bubble things up, or because some especially-neurotic town asshole decided to Make An Example of someone.

I just don't have arguments, or at least any not-laughable ones. I've been trying to write up some of the recent libertarian Barnett-Sandefur discourse on related topics, and it's just empty.

That conservative formal opposition to social media censorship might result in even-handed de-escalation is kaput, an ex-argument, no more, ceased to be. I point to VioletBlue because she was one of the first examples I've offered in MotteSpace, literally no one but the strict free speech advocates noticed, and literally a week after her cancellation she using it as justification for broad censorship.. But it's not like that's nutpicking: Ozy's literal example of the Good Feminist argued that all that open-minded tolerance from Excluded only applied to "perspectives/experiences of marginalized groups", ie her side (and Ozy's significant other joined with the NYTimes cancel campaign against Scott). MorlockP's tolerance for sex worker twitter might have been crude, but it says something that it also came after said sex worker twitter wanted him banned from the platform and kept wanting it afterward. I have a hard time coming up with any examples of progressive targets of cancel culture who, after getting any support from conservatives, haven't turned around and bit back.
That conservative uses of cancel culture will give ideas to progressive ones is runs face-first into the extent that there are almost-exactly overlapping examples, often longstanding ones. I bring up Corcoran above because it's an almost exact copy of this and, even if Correia doesn't mention him, he absolutely remembers him, and it's the room temperature. People have been thrown off projects they've run for over a decade for liking a tweet critical of a trans school shooter with the threat that if they did not leave other people on the project would have to pick between continued collaboration and their jobs. There's a guy who got fired for legal donations to a someone who was later found innocent and were only revealed because of hackers. A kid got his college invitation rescinded because he said bad words in Google Docs. Teacher's unions called in the FBI over people being a little rude at school board meetings; Canada declared not!martial law over truck horns. There's nothing new happening in any of the conservative-lead campaigns, and I'm pretty skeptical that people like LoTT could even come up with something inventive.
That conservative uses of cancel culture will provide additional justification for progressive ones doesn't have any traction, either. Here, in this thread, we have people pointing to social conservative bans on homosexuality that are reaching back decades; in the past, we've had people explicitly drop back to 1950. And those aren't philosophies specific to here and now. Even if stopping today would reset the shot clock (not a given!), it would literally exceed my lifespan before we'd clear those existing time spans -- and as I've highlighted that conversation with SlightlyLessHairyApe, it's not like people have to or have stopped at 1950.
((The other common example is McCarthyism, and it kinda merges all of the above problems. In addition to its age, anti-McCarthyism was and is explicitly sold and taught as a universal principle about the importance of free speech from both government and corporate interference, vital to protect everyone, until it turned out to protect anyone outside of the Left, and then became Freeze Peach..))
Does it hit the innocent or those on my side? Ignoring for now the difficult question of whether I have a side, there's no evidence here that anyone who's been hit is. Working at Home Depot doesn't make or require you be a Trump fan, conservative, or even Red Tribe, and this particular person was sickened by Trump's first month in 2017 in the local Press-Republican (no link, because it does actually spell out her name rather than mumble it, and I don't like this); while we don't have as strong evidence for Gass's political leanings as Jack Blacks, he's been calling a Trump victory dangerous since 2016.
Should we only hit cancel culture advocates or participants? It'd be nice to have a good clean fight, but it's increasingly unclear such divisions exist. Forget indirect stuff like the extent it's gotten baked into HR at work; participating in progressive cancel culture is exceptionally common and these people are all pretty heavily online. I can't show that all those that LoTT is targeting today participated in 2020 cancellation efforts (and I know she doesn't care!), but I was able to find a couple with just a few minutes search.

What's left?

Principles? Clearly these aren't shared values to the left, but worse than that it's far from clear they're even held by any opponent of cancel culture. Even among self-identified Big-L Libertarians, there's no shortage of big-name people who flirt back and forth from XKCD 1357. It's not that SlightlyLessHairyApe was coming up with increasingly threadbare excuses for why This Didn't Count; it's that the people who write entire legal treatises about the First Amendment and cancel culture struggle to handle whether turning the shop radio to the wrong should be a (required-to-be) fireable offense.
Appeal to the center? @TracingWoodgrains might believe that the "the center... has been the only group consistently mobilizing against the phenomenon writ large", but a sizable part of my frustration is that, having spent well over a decade, I'm pretty far from convinced. For all the center might be shocked by the excesses of aggressive cancel culture, the resulting policies demonstrably changed minds far in excess of any backlash. In no small number of cases, the center absolutely loves it. We both, specifically, are beneficiaries of the illiberal stridency and cancel culture against homophobia, and today that means gay marriage is a 80%+ thing! Nobody cares about the 'f-word' getting people fired. And as much as I'm personally a fan of "don't beat up gay people" even if I'm far more mixed on jokes about gay people, "don't try to assassinate politicians" is pretty good as a goal if I'm far more mixed on joking about it.
Hegemonic Swarms and the involved drama are Bad? That's a great argument for not doing it in Matt Parlmer's shop, and I've been lucky enough to find some places that try something at least along the same lines, but they're far outliers. Everywhere else has been quite happy to not merely tolerate but invite Progressive Hegemonic Swarms; whether the right does it or not has no impact on whether it shows up there.

I'd love to see reasons why. I've been looking! I'm not willing to join in, both for my principles and for the what did you think tolerance meant vibes posters reasons. But the best arguments I can find for anyone else to behave differently don't look very good.

Context

wemptronics gattsuru 4mo ago · Edited 4mo ago

Example bullet points are convincing and demoralizing. Do you have vast bookmark archives, or is your recall that sharp? I will bump an absolute banger of a post with junk and an AAQC report.

The behavior is better than literally burning witches and heretics. So, in a sort of Pinker-esque perspective it's not so bad. If we can't recognize any useful tools, people, or mechanisms, then hope or acceptance may be better than chasing the dragon.

Principles? Clearly these aren't shared values to the left

The left-left? They jettisoned, or were stripped of, any sort of practiced ideological pinning that shares any of the relevant principles. Progressivism consumed liberalism among city dwellers without much resistance.

Left of center people will still recall these principles. Their voices, politicians, and institutions even still give lip service and faithfully repeat the right platitudes. Until challenged by their moral betters with the most tepid amount of heat applied to their feet. Still, if those principles become apparently useful then something will change. Once upon a time, left-leaning Jewish lawyers rallied a hell of coalition to espouse, then enshrine such principles.

Appeal to the center?

I'm not sure what Trace means when he says centrists. Inasmuch as centrists supposedly can mobilize they are not in a position to be a prominent voice, nor equipped to actually do things writ large. Unless we define major institutions as inherently centrist, as a leftist would, then they may as well not exist except for a number of grey tribe weirdos. The moderate liberal does exist. I'd include a hefty slice of the aging center-left and some right of center folks. Powerful folks, even, but not cultural movers. They are cowed all the same when the hot iron is applied.

For as long as centrists are boring and culture warring fun they will remain cultural irrelevant. Politics, partisanship, and being mean to enemies is fun. Having enemies you won't die to is fun. The stakes aren't high enough for enough people to be stripped of fun. How do you compete with fun? You either take power to enforce boring, win a cultural victory via memetics like principles, or-- you wait for a terrible self-afflicted catastrophe that allows moderate temperaments to have their day in the limelight. Take advantage of the aftermath of some awfulness that reminds people why the responsible centrists are so eager to tell you why you're ruining stuff.

The radical, backbone-having centrists needed to start their march through the institutions 15 years ago, but they didn't, because they don't exist. They can't be real until the landscape changes to allow them to exist.

But the best arguments I can find for anyone else to behave differently don't look very good.

Christians have some good reasons. People in positions of authority have good reasons. Each individual person probably has one or two good reasons. LibsofTikTok has few good reasons.

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