The takeaway for most is still that "my opposition deserves to die for their crimes" and it does endanger the target, just not as much as an unqualified call for violence.
"Does, but not as much" is a massive understatement. Someone who wants Joe Biden put on trial won't lead to anyone hurting Joe Biden. Someone who wants right-wingers to be assassinated increases the chance of people assassinating right-wingers. These things are significantly unalike to the point where putting them in the same category is sophistry.
And you seem to agree that Kirk "literally [advocated] for violence"?
Assuming that the Biden quote is correct, only in a noncentral way. If state violence counts, everyone on themotte has literally advocated for violence.
Jiro
1d ago
The difference is that a lone shooter has a chance of shooting Biden, but a lone shooter has no chance of putting Biden on trial for treason. Advocating state action is literally advocating for violence, but it's not advocating for the kind of violence that a vigilante can do, so it doesn't endanger the target in the same way.
Jiro
1d ago
Also there’s the fun phenomenon of GOP officials fearing right wing violence.
Your links are spin. They are deliberately mixing up fear of "retaliation" (meaning standard politician stuff), Internet death threats of the type every celebrity gets, genuine death threats that are not from right-wingers, and maybe something that actually qualifies but is cherry picked.
Jiro
1d ago
I occasionally donate to GiveDirectly because I believe in their premise: that the administrative efficiency of just distributing cash directly is so high that enabling the occasional bad behavior is outweighed by all the good behavior it promotes and bureaucratic behavior it avoids.
Widely distributing cash changes the incentives. Cash works precisely because giving it out is rare and thus people are not incentivized to behave badly in a way enabled by it.
Jiro
2d ago
If that was true, I could call trans people by any pronoun I want and face no problems for it.
Jiro
2d ago
Granted, not extra-judicial violence, so
This is like the Monty Python sketch about non-illegal robbery. Granted, they're not actually doing the thing people are complaining about, but....
You have to go through a pretty substantial amount of double checking for a conviction.
"The law makes it possible to charge a lot of innocent people, but it's okay because the system will probably use discretion and not put them in jail" is a recipe for tyranny.
The usual scenario is where the government wants to get you anyway, either because they hate the actually-legal things you're doing, because some prosecutor or cop knows in his heart without evidence that you're guilty of some crime, or because finding you guilty will cover their asses after some kind of mistake, or because it would be good publicity to catch a criminal. Then the double-checking miraculously vanishes. Three felonies a day is a little exaggerated, but it only takes one felony to ruin your life.
Jiro
3d ago
also wasn't fired (he resigned)
Being constructively fired counts as being fired. So does being blacklisted or constructively blacklisted.
suppose Damore had made unambiguously fireable remarks to a fellow employee over his lunch break.
His lunch break is outside his job; actions in his lunch break are not performance of job duties.
Like, hypothetical: someone makes a film disparaging MLK Jr (or whoever; it doesn't really matter). Outraged social media mobs lobby to have showings pulled and the director and producer blacklisted. Under your criteria, this would not be cancellation.
It would not be cancellation if they pulled showings of this particular movie. If they tried to get him removed from producing anything, even movies unrelated to MLK, it would be cancellation. Each movie counts separately, even if you could phrase it as saying he has a single job to make movies.
Jiro
4d ago
He didn't say they weren't very religious, he said they weren't very Christian. Obviously the "Creator" refers to God. But not to the Christian God.
Jiro
4d ago
I've seen the people on Discord.
The pendulum has maybe slowed a bit. It certainly hasn't reversed direction.
Also, it may look like the pendulum has reversed because people are being publically called out for supporting assassination, but that isn't the pendulum reversing. It never was acceptable to support assassination, it's just that supporting assassination was about the only case left where the right kept enough influence to object.
The equivalent to "banning a movie for the contents of the movie itself", for people, is "firing someone from his job for things said in his role in his job"--writers publishing books that say bad things, politicians making speeches that say bad things, celebrities saying things during publicity for their films, professors teaching bad things in their class, etc. None of your examples are like that and thus are not excluded by my definition.
Damore posted things in a forum at his job, but posting there wasn't part of his job duties. (And even if it had been, he had been assured that he could speak freely.)
Jiro
4d ago
"Cancel culture" does not mean "moral crusade".
Wanting to ban a movie because the movie itself contains inappropriate content isn't cancel culture. It would have to be something like "wanting to ban an innocuous movie because it was produced by someone who used inappropriate content in a different movie".
Jiro
6d ago
I don't think people should be debanked at all except for organised crime and terrorism.
I would further limit it to people who are out of the country or otherwise unreachable. Otherwise debanking becomes an end run around due process. If you think someone should be punished, arrest him and put him on trial. If you don't have the evidence to put him on trial or if he hasn't done anything you can try him for, then you aren't supposed to be punishing him.
Jiro
6d ago
Cancelling people for racism is heavily prone to motivated reasoning to use it only against one's enemies, since 1) accusations of racism are partisan and 2) whether an incident is racist has a heavy subjective component. Genuine opposition to assassination would oppose it when done by both sides of the political spectrum, and it's easy to tell when an incident is an assassination.
Jiro
6d ago
Both sides do it,
Both sides don't have equal access to the media. The practical effect is that the left gets to use lies a lot more than the right.
Jiro
6d ago
Expressing glee over very unpleasant opinions you have about others means you’re human.
Plenty of evil things are done by humans and are part of the human condition.
Jiro
6d ago
When I think of "Special exemption" I mean something like "I'm white and you're black, therefore I'm allowed to beat you."
"I'm the defender and you're the offender. So I'm allowed to hurt you."
Creating a category that you count yourself in that permits you to do things to people outside that category.
"Defender" is literally a category that you count yourself in, that permits you to do things to people outside that category.
And usually this category is 'arbitrary' and doesn't actually suffice to justify special status.
Of course. But everyone thinks, or at least can convince themselves that, the categories they are using aren't arbitrary. "I'm not arbitrarily saying that only right-wingers deserve to be shot, I'm saying it because right-wingers are promoting very destructive policies and left-wingers aren't."
Yes, you can fix up the principle by adding "... as long as the categories aren't arbitrary". But once you add that, you no longer have a principle that can be universally applied. You have a principle that can be applied only if you are correct at the object level (about whether the distinction is arbitrary). The whole point of stating it as a principle is that you're trying to apply it to everyone without having to look at the object level.
Also, I am very skeptical of claims of "you are really agreeing to X" about someone who isn't literally agreeing to X. No means no; if their lips say they don't agree, you must treat them as not agreeing, even if they "imply" a yes.
Jiro
6d ago
"It's an understandable emotional response" isn't an excuse. You need to be acting and reasoning in good faith, and I don't believe that the people celebrating Charlie Kirk's death are. I'm not demanding that they be correct; good faith doesn't require correctness. But there comes a point where people are so blinded by hatred and so careless about their reasoning that good faith is no longer present.
If anything, when you're trying to decide if someone needs to die, that's when you need to take the greatest care, not the least.
"Self-Defense" is actually quite simple. "I will not use violence against any person... UNLESS they use it against me first." Both defense and offense are 'using violence.' But generally speaking, offense is the one who initiated, and defense is the person responding to it.
But the issue is that you are not allowed to have a "special exemption".
If a "special exemption" is something that includes another person but excludes you, then adding the clause "unless they use it against me first" is adding a special exemption. It gives you permission to use violence against another person, while it excludes other people from being permitted to use violence against you (assuming you don't plan to use it first).
Rephrasing it as "unless defense" doesn't help either, for exactly the same reason. You've said that there are two categories, one of which doesn't apply to you ("people who use violence offensively") and another of which does apply to you ("people who use violence defensively") and allowing only the people in the first category to be valid targets of violence. That's a special exemption that excludes you as a target. It may be a special exemption that you like, but it still is one.
Just because you can otherwise justify self-defense doesn't keep it from being a special exemption under that definition. (And if there's some other definition of "special exemption", I'd like to see it.)
Jiro
6d ago
I do. Its a simple application of the silver rule. If someone treats YOU in a particular way, then they're basically implying they agree it is fair for them to be treated that way. Unless they're carving out a special exception for themselves, which I would LOVE to hear their justification for.
This needs to be a little more nuanced than that.
The problem is that "in a particular way" and "special exemption" is doing a lot of work. What is a special exemption? It can't just be a category that includes someone else but excludes me--that would make all sorts of things special exemptions like killing in self-defense (nobody needs to defend themselves against me), jailing bank robbers (I don't rob banks), and prohibiting 6 year olds from drinking alcohol.
(And you may be tempted to respond "well, if you did rob a bank, the bank robbery rule would apply to you, so that isn't a special exemption." Which doesn't work; compare "well, if you did say something right-wing, a rule about censoring right-wingers would apply to you".)
Jiro
7d ago
If we accept those principles, we shouldn't carve out an exception for people who don't accept those principles; otherwise, we'll just categorize everyone who we dislike as "rejecting this principle,"
There are degrees of clarity about whether someone rejects principles.
It's like punching Nazis. Punching Nazis has the same problem--people tend to categorize everyone they dislike as Nazis so they get to punch them. But we don't want to say "the US shouldn't have invaded Nazi Germany in the 1940s. After all, if you make it permissible to hurt Nazis, you'll end up calling everyone you hate Nazis".
Jiro
7d ago
To be clear, all of these are tasteless and (in my opinion) poorly thought-out, but they are well within the bounds of civil discourse. None of these are beyond the pale. None of these should get one fired from one's unrelated job. None of these are even close to inciting or advocating for violence.
That's fine in theory, but that's not how people in the real world actually behave. People saying things like the above are gloating over the shooting. The statements have the grammatical form of (poorly thought out) arguments, but they aren't motivated by an attempt to reason about the things he said, and they won't be understood by their intended audience as such, except by a few weird high-decoupling quokka rationalists. They are poorly thought out in the first place because the people who say them don't care about making their arguments good; they're not doing it to search for truth, they're doing it to support the violence.
Don't parse the literal words like a computer and say "I don't see a call for violence in there, so it isn't advocating violence". Of course it is. Even if Scott never understood that.
it was the Orwellian psycholigical tyranny of not being able to express nuanced or contrary feelings about a tragic event
The sort of statements you describe aren't nuanced feelings.
The equivalent for Floyd would be something like "Floyd wanted people like me to die. Well, it turned out to be people like him instead. Sucks to be him but that's what you get for being dumb enough to flee the police while on drugs". I presume that your feelings about Floyd were not expressed that way. Even if you had some similar ideas, sending messages that are not in your literal words is done through tone and phrasing.
In a free society, people should be able to express their thoughts and feelings on major events, even if they aren't entirely thought-out or sanitized.
This is where I invoke "my rules > your rules, fairly > your rules, unfairly". Right-wingers get cancelled over things far more innocuous than supporting violence. Supporting specific acts of violence is pretty much the only left-wing statement that can get you cancelled at all (except for inter-left conflicts, like left-wing antisemitism). I'd like a principled world where nothing you say in private can get you in trouble, but short of that it's preferable that cancellation not be one sided.
Jiro
8d ago
By the way, @gattsuru, I guess this is where I should clear my throat and say "Political violence is bad and I condemn the killing of Charlie Kirk"?
Actual demands that people say this are usually because they've been making statements that support the assassination with some plausible deniability. You don't need to say this out of the blue.
What do you suggest the IDF do instead? Let them take all the food?
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