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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   38814 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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Wow. Trump Derangement Syndrome has killed Tenacious D. On stage in Australia yesterday, when asked to make a birthday wish, Kyle said "Don't miss trump next time."

Today, Jack Black cancelled their tour and appears to have killed the band.

I've found the reactions of intense disappointment that Trump wasn't murdered to be really disappointing but unsurprising. My parents (who I was with when it happened and I broke the news to them) immediately expressed disappointment that he was still alive. Watching people post these sentiments publicly online as if they are completely unaware that advocating for the assassination of your political opponents is really bad and completely unacceptable has left me amazed. How can people not realize that it's a bridge too far? They're literally saying that to preserve democracy, they need to assassinate the leading candidate, a level of cognitive dissonance beyond anything I've seen.

That said, I also find the current cancelations hilarious. The very people who are calling Trump "literally hitler" are now pearl clutching that it's not okay to try kill Hitler. The catastrophizing wasn't acceptable before either - maybe this snapped people out of their delusions?

I was surprised by my own reaction, too. I was a lot happier that he survived, and a lot more impressed with his immediate response than I expected to be. Trump grew in my esteem a lot.

More than anything, I hope that this episode sparks a return of a seemingly long-lost role in society: the apolitical entertainer who just wants to make people feel good, and who is loath to alienate any significant portion of their potential audience. A return to the old “Republicans buy sneakers too” approach coined by Michael Jordan.

There has been much speculation about why such a role has disappeared - why even formerly apolitical entertainers have seemingly felt compelled to start making extremely divisive political statements.

One explanation is that such individuals have always actually been very politically opinionated individuals, and that being permitted to be open about that has been a sort of liberation. An embrace of authenticity which allows them to cultivate a more intimate, real relationship with their fans. “Now you see who I really am and what I really believe. Can you still support me, even knowing that? If you can, you’re a real fan. If not, then you were only a fan of the character I was playing.” With the rise of social media and the subsequent shift to a more parasocial model of celebrity, this makes sense. And as someone who once thought about pursuing a career as a public entertainer, one of the big things that dissuaded me was thinking about how careful I would have to commit to being with my public statements and behavior for the rest of my life, for fear of alienating people or damaging my PR. I can see why for someone like Kyle Gass, just being able to let loose and say what’s on his mind, and to expect to be in a cocoon of people who would embrace it and not take it super seriously, must be a very psychologically-important thing.

The other explanation for why there are so few apolitical celebrities is that entertainers are being compelled, either by explicit top-down coercion or by simply overwhelming social pressure, to assume vocal stances about issues. One could argue that this is the case for Taylor Swift, who received relentless criticism from certain circles during the earlier stages of her career for “not using her platform to advocate for important issues.” The most egregious example of this, to me, is the example of novelty pop-rock/ska band The Aquabats. They’re about as squeaky-clean, apolitical, and family-friendly as can be; they dress in silly superhero costumes, sing songs about things like pizza day at the school cafeteria and how worms make dirt, and in fact the frontman created a popular children’s TV show. Nobody is going to these guys for serious commentary about anything! Yet, after having crowd-funded an album set to be released in 2020, they scrapped the release of the album and started sharing various links to BLM- and CRT-related “resources” and encouraging their fans to direct their money and attention to those causes instead. Did they do so because they’ve been undercover progressives the whole time and felt morally obligated to speak up? Or did they do so because they were afraid of the optics and potential backlash of raising money for a goofy ska album when black people are literally being murdered and they need your money to save their lives? (Or is it some combination of both?)

The way in which public figures whom I once cherished have beclowned themselves and alienated me and other fans with right-wing sensibilities over the last decade has been so incredibly demoralizing to me, and I’m just praying that this Tenacious D thing might finally slow the momentum at least a tiny bit. I’ve started insulating myself from the risk of being exposed to awful political takes from my favorite celebrities by just assuming they’re all libtards and assiduously avoiding reading any of their public statements, looking at their social media, etc. If this situation at least encourages entertainers to keep their political commentary sequestered in places where someone like me can avoid seeing it if we want to, maybe that will be enough of a stable Schelling point to help the culture heal a bit.

As to your two explanations, I expect it's a combination of both, but would say the latter is probably the much larger component.

I find myself once again referring to the "Mrs. Britten's English Zone" page on Characteristics of Puritan Writing

Early literature written by Puritans in America often appeared as first person narratives in the form of journals and diaries. Early American colonists wrote their accounts of immigration, settling in America, and day-to-day life in journals to pass their stories down. Many Puritans also wrote letters to send back to Europe to family and friends they left behind. Very little fiction appeared during this period; Puritans valued realistic writing with an emphasis on religious themes.

…

Puritans wrote with specific purposes in mind. Even the letters they wrote to friends and family in Europe performed more of a purpose than simply communicating about their lives and keeping in touch. Puritans' religious beliefs affected their lives on all levels, and their writing illustrated their religion's values, such as the importance of the church and the influence of God in their lives. Writing often became instructive, teaching Christian values. The Puritans did not believe that literature was for entertainment; therefore, they frowned upon "entertainment" genres such as drama (plays) and fiction novels.

Replace the letters and diaries with emails, chat, and social media, and the Protestant moralizing with woke DEI moralizing, and you've got a rather familiar type, no? And note the skepticism of fiction: works done for entertainment's sake are inherently suspect, and moral messaging is the priority in any communication.

Hence the criticism of much current "woke" media, and of many attempts at right-wing "anti-woke" media, both paralleling the classic criticism of much "Christian media" of the Veggie Tales sort: that they put The Message above storytelling, above quality, above being entertaining. If your show or your music or your writing isn't ad maiorem DEI gloriam (if I may be forgiven this horrible wordplay), then what does that say about its morals — and thus your morals? If you're not constantly displaying Christian virtue in your words, and exhorting everyone else to do the same, then you're not really a proper Puritan, are you? If you're not signaling how "woke" and pro-diversity you are, and reminding everyone to check their privilege and practice tolerance, then how do we know you're not secretly some sort of reactionary bigot?

Didn't Scott have a post where he made a point along these lines, about how this is what we get when people with "hectoring Church Lady" personalities grow up in secular Progressive spaces?

Yet, after having crowd-funded an album set to be released in 2020, they scrapped the release of the album and started sharing various links to BLM- and CRT-related “resources” and encouraging their fans to direct their money and attention to those causes instead. Did they do so because they’ve been undercover progressives the whole time and felt morally obligated to speak up? Or did they do so because they were afraid of the optics and potential backlash of raising money for a goofy ska album when black people are literally being murdered and they need your money to save their lives? (Or is it some combination of both?)

I know nothing about these folks beyond what you wrote in this comment, but isn't there a 3rd, IMHO more parsimonious, option, that they are recent converts and display the fervor present only in such people? Certainly in the past 20 years, I've seen no shortage of people who have recently converted to this particular faith with the result being going from fairly neutral apolitical/milquetoast generic liberal to single-minded fanatics cheering on violence against dissenters and denigrating peers for not clapping loudly enough at the latest stunning and brave person/organization to stand up against the Oppressors. This kind of blowing up an existing project and replacing it with calls to funnel all the resources towards supporting the organizations that run this faith would fit right into that same pattern.

I've always had the theory that Tenacious D started as a joke band, Jack Black's acting career took off but he felt an obligation to keep it going for Kyle and kind of always wanted to shut it down.

My guess is that Jack Black knows he has more at stake then Gass. Black stands to be recast in the inevitable Mario sequel, and lose whatever other acting opportunities he has. Black is probably playing damage control with his own career, for fear that Gass's comments are cancellable, by trying to seem repentant and distancing himself from Gass.

Overall, it seems like this particular incident has given some power of cancel culture to the conservatives again. Which I guess is a somewhat positive development? I'd prefer that no one cancels anyone, and no one weilds that super weapon, but maybe it's better to have both parties have the power to some degree. I don't yet expect that this is a long-term development, but we'll see

Overall, it seems like this particular incident has given some power of cancel culture to the conservatives again.

Alternatively, everyone just always agreed that some things were cancellable and celebrating assassination right after an attempt happens remains in there.

I guess. That might not be too different from what I said, in as much as it's something that the conservatives actually seem to want to, and be able to, cancel people over.

I'd always wondered how it stayed running so long.

My main guesses were:

  1. Jack Black actually liked the band and was having fun.
  2. Kyle was very good at guilting him into coming back.
  3. It was a way for Jack to stay in an active performance role between movies and to keep him sharp.

Jack cancelling the tour makes me wonder doubt the fun explanation and makes the other two explanations sound more likely.

Kyle always kinda confused me. It seemed like he just super lucked out being next to Jack Black early in his career and otherwise didn't have the talent to keep up. Any of their stuff together Kyle is just sort of a way for you to take a break from laughing at Jack.

Tenacious D, and Kyle’s role in it, play to a very obvious male fantasy. You’re a normal schlubby guy who can play a bit of guitar, and all of sudden a Real Live Superstar who oozes charisma picks you up and makes you a celeb as well.

he keeps saying kind of as a joke that you’re a king among men and a sex god and what do you know, a bit of it rubs on you as well. Guys see you on the street and go ‘Heyyyy, Rage Kage! Love you man!’ You can probably get cute women with a fair bit of ease despite, again, being a schlub.

Of course, it’s also knowingly a role Kyle has assumed and built together with Jack Black, but it’s a fantasy, that doesn’t matter. There are obvious dividends for Jack as well, as can be seen from how many guys are angry at Jack for betraying his friend.

For sure it's #1. One of his breakout movies was School of Rock, which made it pretty obvious that he dreams of being a rockstar. Tenacious D allowed him to live out that fantasy.

I mean the whole point was that it was a comedy/joke band, I don't know Jack's feelings towards it though.

In a way I think Gass’s response is somewhat rational. If you truly believe that Trump is a unique threat to our political system, why wouldn’t you want him assassinated?

I think there is also some meat here in that if Trump had been assassinated, most of the rest of the GOP would just have adopted his policy positions but dispensed with the insane hysteria and backlash Trump the Character generates. You don’t have to be Trump to win this election and maybe even the next election when the democrats are this incompetent. Trump ideas packaged in a more media and PMC-friendly face would be a political juggernaut, I think.

Hot take but it might have been better for people who believe in his platform for him to have actually been assassinated. Not only would it give the platform a sympathetic halo but let’s be honest here that Trump the Character is uniquely toxic for American politics. His job is done, he’s stamped the GOP in his image and realigned them, but I think his personality is holding them back at this point.

Trump ideas packaged in a more media and PMC-friendly face would be a political juggernaut, I think.

The whole point of the Trump era is that literally no one else would touch those ideas, because the media meaning-making machine made them anametha. You could not be anti-illegal immigration or anti-NATO or whatever without inherently drawing earth-shattering criticism. This is why no one else tried it. You have to pass through the wall of overwhelming media coverage, hostile donors funding every manner of opposition, prosecution, lawfare, and pushback. Literally no one else would do this.

Exactly, expressing the idea that maybe unlimited immigration from absolutely anywhere, or unlimited free trade from absolutely anywhere are not unalloyed goods is, or was, outside the overton window regardless of who said it. Anyone who would express it would have gotten the same treatment. Trump noticed a majority of people still largely held that opinion even if they could not express it, saw an opportunity there, so he went and stood outside the window, drawing all the aggro to him. And since he's a legendary tank, to keep the MMORPG allegory going, he's somehow doing fine, and now the overton window is a bit wider than it was before. Outside of the specifics of his first and presumed second presidency, of whether he's too pro-Israel or too close to Russia, or of whether he's capable of wielding the executive bureaucracy effectively, at least his ability to take the slings and arrows is unmatched, and his forceful widening of the overton window was probably a necessary first step for any actual move to the right (or neutralisation of leftward drift).

The GOP was ready to fold after 2012. It's unclear that anyone without the independent profile of Trump (and the catnip it represented for the mainstream media) would have gotten the same attention for swimming against the tide like that.

A less agreeable person, or someone more beholden to the donors and party might have ended up like Bernie or Cruz, even with the same policies.

That said, now that you have people like Tucker and Vivek and Vance maybe the movement no longer has need of Mohammed.

IMHO this is a crucial period for whether an America first ruling principle takes root, or it doesn't. Trump needs the mandate of heaven and four more years to cement his legacy. Otherwise, as amazing as Tucker, Vivek or Vance may be, they will be relegated to cult crank status like Ron and Rand Paul. Sure, a Freedom Causus exist, and even has some extremely marginal influence in outcomes on the fringe, but otherwise completely feckless no matter how obviously correct they are, or how much their fans really truly love them.

This is preposterous. The GOP never gave up trying to stick the knife in Trump's back, along with his policies. They starved MAGA candidates of support in the midterms, and hung that failure around Trump's neck. During his administration his own Republican appointees passive aggressively hamstrung much of his MAGA agenda, often to the jeers of the liberal media who greatly enjoyed writing headlines like "Even the Republican appointed judge/bureaucrat/cabinet member agrees that Trump shouldn't secure the border/pull out of Afghanistan/etc". And even up to this convention, major Republican donors and top party members were hoping to hang some albatross like Nikki Halley around his neck as VP.

The GOP is treating MAGA like an insurgency they must defeat just the same as they treated the Tea Party during the Bush and Obama years. If Trump were killed they'd make public mouth sounds about how terrible it is, and they will embrace Trump's winning agenda moving forward, and then they will quietly return to losing on every major issues their base cares about like it was 1996 again.

They starved MAGA candidates of support in the midterms

One of the big reasons Vance won his Senate seat at all was because McConnell drowned Ohio in NRSC money.

You're stuck in the same oppressor-oppressed mental dynamic the Left has. Trump is the GOP right now. All of the party establishment positions are filled with his people. Pretty much everyone who ever opposed him speaks glowingly of him at the Convention (or they've left the party).

Stop playing the victim.

but let’s be honest here that Trump the Character is uniquely toxic for American politics

Don't assume this is a consensus feeling. It is absolutely not.

What does "toxic" mean? I hear it all over the place. "Toxic masculinity," "Toxic work environment," "Toxic relationship." But what does it mean besides "bad ++" ?

What makes something toxic in my mind is the idea that it spreads. One person being a dick at work can lead to people being more likely to act that way and everything gets dragged down.

I don't think so. That would be 'virulent'. 'Toxic' is immediately poisonous at point of contact. It damages others directly. Probably it's closer to 'dysfunctional' with overtones of 'makes it difficult for others to function well'.

But mostly, like 'fascist', it's just 'things the left doesn't like', so yeah, doubleplusbad.

I understand that’s not the literal meaning of the word toxic. I’m merely observed it seems to be used when the behavior drags other people down. I’ve definitely found myself behaving in ways I don’t like in what most would call a “toxic” workplace for instance. If it were up to me that wouldn’t be the word used.

People use the word in a political context to mean both things. I've heard phrases like "David Duke is toxic to the republican party", which is more or less your framing (and the traditional one), but I think Tacherus is using it in the more colloquial and current way. It's what I thought of first, and I believe what most millenials and younger mean most of the time. With this connotation, a "toxic" friend is not bad because they are a bad person, in fact they might have a few really good qualities that you love, but the worry is that overall they rub off on you or interact with your life in a way that is harmful and spreads and you think you're better off without them. In other words, it's possibly a two-way street, but most of the time it's more the notion of entanglement and prompting negative reinforcement loops/patterns.

I take toxic to mean "bad in a way that encourages people to relate to each other in increasingly unpleasant ways".

If someone shouts "Fuck you!" and walks away, that's rude. But it's not "toxic" in the sense that it's not a part of an ongoing relationship that's being degraded into ever higher levels of spite and resentment.

Seems like it takes two (or more) to tango in the land of "toxic." Is this correct?

I’m surprised at the strength of the backlash tbh. I expected biden‘s condemnation of political violence to be less categorical than it was. As a centrist with a strong interest in maintaining the democratic peace & order , who doesn’t think Trump is that bad, it’s easy for me to say that the old geezer should live. But I confess I don’t understand the anti-assassination case for opponents of the status quo who have spent years denouncing him as an authoritarian threat.

We all agree Hitler should have been killed, right? That’s the most popular hypothetical ever. Although some (e.g., Lothar Fritze) have objected to dead waitresses and complained of insufficient self-sacrifice in the few attempts on his life.

Therefore, I must conclude that they don’t believe Trump is Hitler after all, and instances of anti-trump and anti-red tribe hysteria only came from extremes or were meant to energize the base, while the leadership remains sane and committed to the american project. Reports of the death of democracy have been greatly exaggerated.

It exposes the culture war these last years as a giant attack ad, clickbait, crude emotional manipulation for dull partisans, irrelevant and rightly ignored by people who matter.

I don't think Trump is Hitler, but I'd echo JD Vance's initial sentiment: he has some signs of being an early-stage Hitler. Or at least an early-stage Caesar figure. January 6 and the fake electors plot highly updated that probability in my mind. Would the senators have wanted to assassinate Caesar before he crossed the Rubicon? Probably not many.

I agree the people calling him "literally Hitler" are hyperbolizing and most don't really believe it, but the hyperbole is backed by the genuine belief (which I agree with) that he may pose a major threat to American democracy. The ascension of Vance, backed by the anti-democratic Thiel and who respects the anti-democratic Yarvin, also does not bode well.

So, just because I see him as an authoritarian threat doesn't mean I think he should be assassinated. A threat is just a potential until it's realized. There is some threshold after which I think assassination could be morally justifiable, and I don't think he's met it. Many people I know do think he has, which leads to some awkward conversations.

We all agree Hitler should have been killed, right? That’s the most popular hypothetical ever.

I don't know. Based on the info we have today? Sure. Based on what was knowable then? I really don't know. I could imagine myself in 1930s Germany going "Pfft, even if Hitler becomes Chancellor he'll still have to govern in coalition. There's no way the other parties will sign off on handing full unfettered power to him".

I’m an optimist myself, but he had written a book where he announced the war and the massacres to come, he had tried to putsch, his goons were murdering politicians, etc. It was hard to miss that he was literally hitler. A rule where we kill all politicians who do all that would have an acceptably low false positive rate imo.

And later, after 1933, surely assassination is permissible and recommended in all cases. A free man has the right to murder even a benign dictator. Without the vote, it’s really the only way left to express disappointment and provide valuable feedback.

A free man has the right to murder even a benign dictator.

What about Tito, if you thought there was good reasons to believe that the result would be civil war and genocide? (As ultimately there was within about 12 years of his death.) Is the right to "feedback" enough to justify instigating bloody chaos?

People are very quick with historical counterfactuals, I think. The Red Alert series was smarter. We know what happened with Hitler as Germany's leader in the 1930s; we don't know what would happen with Goering or Himmler as leader. Maybe they would have been smarter, more successful, and the Nazis would have won. Or if Hitler was killed in 1918, maybe German communist or ultra-conservatives unleash even more bloodshed. Germany was a highly industrialised and highly dysfunctional country - some degree of tragedy was likely. I also think that the USSR was likely to lead to horrors, even if Stalin died in 1923. Sometimes, a happy end requires a very big counterfactual.

That's not to say that "I would kill Hitler, in hindsight" is a bad judgement. There's a plausible case to be made that he was an exceptionally dangerous figure - that probably a Goering or Himmler or communist or non-Nazi far right Germany would have been less awful. However, it's overstating the case to think that e.g. Hitler's assassination would be utility-maximising, as opposed to expected utility maximising.

The same applies all the more strongly for those on the left who regret Trump's survival. Be careful what you wish for, because what you ask for is not always what you want.

Stephen Fry wrote a novel with a scenario where a time traveler basically cancels Hitler from history and it just means a smarter Hitler alternative takes over and actually manages to wipe the Jews out.

Wasn't this also the premise of the original C&C Red Alert?

Congrats Einstein, you erased the national socialists from history and created uber-socialists in thier stead.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3HUWUtTZvK4

On a personal level, a dictator taking power is like a guy challenging you to the most significant bar fight of your life, a duel to the death really. You don’t have to fight him, but then you become his bitch for the foreseeable future. If a dictator should claim to rule over me without my consent he will have to do without my peaceful cooperation.

Ultimately our power as citizens is backed by the threat of this ehm… counter-revolutionary violence. It’s what keeps the fringes in line and our countries relatively coup-free.

When Tito uses force against me, coerces me, puts me in prison, kills me, that’s just him being a dictator, all according to plan. But when I use force, I’m supposed to have perfect foresight of any resulting chaos before I lift a finger… I’m sorry, but that’s too passive, copenhagen ethics. On self-defense grounds alone I have a right to assassinate him (before any utilitarian arguments about discouraging coups or genocides).

By "before", do you mean taking precedence over the utilitarian arguments? Because in that case, as always with deontology, you face this position being taken to absurdity, e.g. claiming you have assassinating the dictator at the cost of a nuclear war that kills everyone but you.

Do you not think that you can ever be morally obliged to suffer indignity or coercion?

Practically speaking, you can’t adequately calculate the consequences of the assassination, so it defaults to “him or you” and you’re morally justified to kill him (he is the aggressor because a dictator issues implicit death threats). Perhaps Tito not being assassinated and keeping yugoslavia going longer than it should have, precipitated the genocidal killings of the breakup .

On principle, on hypotheticals, I agree that you shouldn’t kill him (and even die by his hand if necessary) if you have divine knowledge of incoming nuclear war or genocide. But that’s a huge if.

"Practically speaking, you can’t adequately calculate the consequences of the assassination"

But you can study history. How many cases in history are there where successful hit at high value target worked as hitman intended (few) and made the world, from objective standpoint, a better place (much fewer) ?

More comments

Based on the info we have today? Sure.

Are we sure? The person who did the most damage to Hitler's ideals was arguably Hitler, though the mechanism is a tossup between "Let's fight on two fronts; doesn't getting involved in a land war in Asia sound fun?" versus "Let's get rid of all the Jews; what good are their wacky nuclear physics ideas ever going to be anyway?" The latter dumb idea was probably baked into the Nazi ideology, but the former dumb idea might have been a Hitler-specific mistake. If Hitler dies, do we end up with something like the Germany of today where anti-immigration polling above 20% sends the country into an introspective panic, or do we get a Germany (plus half of Poland, plus France, plus...) where hatred of The Other hasn't been so massively discredited, because its banner got taken up by somebody more competent?

Yeah that's true. I was thinking about the period between eg the Beer Hall Putsch and him actually taking power but once he's already started WW2 it's far from clear that taking him out improves things. Decisions like choosing to stop focusing on RAF bases to instead bomb London were pivotal and the war could have gone very differently.

Check out the Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze. It's by no means obvious that Operation Barbarossa was a dumb idea. Opinions to the contrary often seem to assume that militaries and societies can run on orders, rather than oil and bread.

However, I think that Hitler's earlier decision to go to war in 1939 was the beginning of the end of fascism. The promise of fascism was military power. By fighting a war against two of the main powers of the day (France and Britain) with backing from an economic juggernaut of unprecedented proportions (the USA) Hitler was taking a huge gamble with the risk of defeat. And the defeat of fascism militarily was its defeat ideologically. Soon, even the Spanish and Portugese regimes were moving in a conventionally conservative direction.

Similarly with communism: once the hydrogen bomb ended the prospect of a Soviet military victory in the Cold War, it was stuck in an economic competition with an economic juggernaut of unprecedented proportions (the USA again) and in comparisons with countries that had fundamentally better economic systems. The promise of communism was prosperity, which became a joke once Soviet citizens had a standard of living that trailed increasingly behind such erstwhile primitive backwaters as Finland, Spain, and even Taiwan.

There is no good evidence for intelligent design, but the closest is that God apparently directed history so that fascism was defeated militarily and communism defeated economically, i.e. on the grounds of their main promises. It's as if e.g. communism was able to deliver a more free society than classical liberalism or fascism a more stable society than classical conservativism.

Some might argue that the mandate of heaven is its own evidence 😉

Not that Hitler getting rid of jews had any practical effect on Germany hypothetically getting nuclear weapons. That was never on the table for plain old economic and resource reasons.

That's true, but if hypothetically all of the notable Jewish scientists stayed in Germany, it's possible other powers would have gotten nuclear weapons much later. Einstein's letter to Roosevelt in 1939 may have been instrumental for the start of the Manhattan Project.

In which case they still would've lost, all else being equal, but overall it definitely benefitted their allies. The ideology spawning things like Aryan Physics (which sought to deny relativity and all other "Jewish physics") shows how untenable it was for scientific superiority.

Huh. You might be right? I remembered Namibia having significant uranium ore, but I misremembered Germany losing control there after WWII when it was really in+after WWI.

Yeah it was never happening, read about it in The Making of the Atomic Bomb (good read, if a bit scientifically technical, though I liked that). I mean even if we say that D-Day failed or something, Germany had taken almost no actual steps because they recognized it was near impossible right away. Even the US who had pretty close to an ideal scenario - with tons of money, willing scientists from multiple countries, scouring the globe for resources with Atlantic maritime control, years of work, and who never had any of the facilities in the States bombed (a big deal, if you recall Germany got bombed quite a lot, as an understatement) only got a few bombs going by mid 1945. Even the Soviets took four years after the end of the war (so again, no bombing!) to make their own bomb, and they had espionage help too.

What follows is a somewhat harsh statement that I don't fully endorse:

Gass is on Simulacrum Level 3, Jack Black is on Level 2.

I don't know. Realistically I feel like most hardcore progressives are just concerned about optics on this, not that they actually understand the deeper underlying morality in any real way. By the deeper underlying morality I mean stuff like "how you behave in a conflict is just as important as what side of the conflict you're on".

Realistically I feel like most hardcore progressives are just concerned about optics on this, not that they actually understand the deeper underlying morality in any real way. By the deeper underlying morality I mean stuff like "how you behave in a conflict is just as important as what side of the conflict you're on".

As someone who is concerned with the degradation of civics, worrying about optics is super-fucking-important and more people should do it. We teach our kids that having bad feelings is normal, but we need to regulate how and where and when we express these feelings. Jack Black can have wet dreams every night about Trump dying, but as long as he knows that for some reason it's important to not say it out loud is crucial to our ability to function as a society.

That, to jump into another discussion upthread, is the toxicity of Trump: he doesn't care about maintaining civility. It may be refreshing to hear someone say all the dirty things we sometimes think in our worst moments but would never dare say -- but it's important not to take that as a license to just say whatever and not worry about its repercussions. (IMO, Trump and a lot of the media/Democrats who hate him are mirror images of each other on this, he's just a sharper, brighter reflection, so it's not a complaint isolated at him.)

It may be refreshing to hear someone say all the dirty things we sometimes think in our worst moments but would never dare say

Build the wall, ten feet higher, is not a dirty thing we sometimes think in our worst moments, it's a declaration that the line will be drawn here, this far and no further. It is an incredibly popular position that in anathema to the uniparty, and so seldom spoken.

The shithole countries line was more like what you're referring to, and even then, it's not that it's dark, it's that it's both rude AND true. Keep those shithole people from their shithole countries out of America, please, because assimilation works both ways.

If we could say those things without the vulgarity, we would. However, that's not the world we live in. If you want to think, and say, true things, you can't be concerned with civility, because civility has come to mean ignoring impolite reality.

Trump grew in my esteem a lot.

Same here. After the Vance VP pick which I'm highly supportive of I'm now at the point where I don't know who I'd vote for if I had a vote in the US election.

Trump hasn't grown in my esteem at all (there are many virtues I think he lacks, but the abilities to take risks and project self-righteous strength are not among them), but Biden has been falling fast recently. Confusing "5%" for "$55", repeating inflammatory lies after the dangers of that were demonstrated, maybe that could be excused as a mentally slipping figurehead who nevertheless has a solid team behind him ... but is the team out to lunch too? Even "5%" is some mix of shameless pandering with economic illiteracy. More obviously, the "we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof" lie should have been treated as probable cause for criminal investigation; every hour where it isn't even considered to be cause for firing is another hour of shame.

I also don't effectively have a vote in the Presidential election (in a very non-swing state, I get to vote for the Libertarian and plurality counting be damned), but every year I get more sympathetic to people who do. Whichever way you all vote, at least have the decency to regret ending up in this situation, and maybe get drunk afterward?

...but the counter sniper team was on a sloped roof, what the hell? https://i.redd.it/3dc6t8vjbxcd1.jpeg

Is she just that stupid or does she think that will actually mislead a significant percentage of the public? How did the interviewer not call her out? That's straight journalistic malpractice

From what I could tell in the video posted here a day or two ago that merged a bunch of different videos that have become public from random people's phone cameras or whatever, the sloped roof that the counter sniper team was on looked like it turned out to be a problem for them. They were likely already alert to a possible threat in that direction and were already oriented that way. It looked like a metal roof, and when the first shot cracked, both of the guys in the shot visibly flinched and started slipping down the slope. They ended up off balance and struggled for a second to get back up into position, reacquire the target, aim, and take the shot. The delay from slipping may have enabled the final rounds from the would-be assassin to happen.

I don't have any grand pronouncements as to blaming anyone or anything, but I imagine that AAR and future training/procedures will make such folks at least a little more likely to include things like a grippy, non-slip mat in their kit in the future in case they need to establish a better base from which to fire. I'm binning this just under, "The real world happens like that sometimes, and people hopefully learn."

That's all well and good, but the head of the secret service's claim was that no one was posted on the shooter's roof because of safety issues due to the slope, even though people were posted on other sloped roofs (and roofs that appear to have a steeper slope than the shooter's roof)

Somewhat of a coincidence, but I thought it was funny enough to make me want to share it. I happen to be reading through a book on home inspection, because I just want to know more about maintaining the house, and it's talking about roof inspections. It gives some factors for/against getting up on the roof in different conditions. ...then we get to the section on metal roofs. It says, "Never get up on a metal roof to inspect it: it’s too slippery, even in dry weather." The emphasis was in the original.

If I were forced to steelman, perhaps it could be done. I've been reading some of the articles about what their plan was and what went down (NYT just had a pretty detailed one that didn't seem atrocious). The biggest aspect would be the SS/local divide. Folks in this thread have already made jokes about the local folks probably being incompetent, screwing stuff up and not doing what they're supposed to do. The SS could have thought, "Yeah, we're not going to have some obese local hanging out on that roof all day, just hoping that that they don't hurt themselves," while still thinking that their own counter sniper team was obligated to take such a position, for lack of any better positioning options... plus a little overconfidence that their guys would totally be capable of handling it, even though the dumb locals couldn't (as I mentioned, I think this belief turned out to be wrong, considering that both their guys immediately started slipping down the roof).

I still totally agree that things were immensely screwed up, because that roof is the single most obvious place to attack from in the area.

EDIT: I also think that if their reasoning was something like this, they really can't vocalize, "The reason why we thought it was a safety issue is because we have no confidence in obese, incompetent locals." Too much social desirability bias.

Maybe because advocating for the assassination of your political opponents is not really bad and completely unacceptable?

Some groups of people think killing political enemies offhand is bad. Other groups think it's good. Nobody is clearly in the majority at the moment. (I probably meet more of the latter than the former.) So either (any) set of socially acceptable behavior is acceptable, so to speak...

It's all just a matter of the mob.

It is, however, still outside the Overton window and not supposed to be publicly stated.

Indeed. My line has been that I don't mind (too much) the private expression of dark thoughts. I may not be interested in maintaining a relationship past a certain threshold, but if you wanna hang out over a few beers/joints and have a completely unrestrained conversation about this stuff, I'm game for it! The human mind is full of evil as well as good, and I am self-aware enough to know some of my beliefs are completely unproductive in the public sphere unless stated very carefully. I'm not intetested in scouring people's brains for wrongthink as long as their outward behavior is okey-dokey; because that's what actually matters.

If you literally can't stop yourself from gloating over this shit in public, then you have signed yourself up for the fucking war AFAIC.

Don't get me wrong, the political instability you're pointing at is serious. But it doesn't disgust me nearly as much as the trend I've seen of people trying to posthumously cancel the rally-goer who was killed protecting his family during the shooting. The worst of the left are digging through his internet history laughing it up at right-wing posts he made, trying to make an example out of him the same way they would if he was a random civilian who'd wound up in the news for any other reason. It seems to be a very popular stance to take, in certain corners of Twitter. Microcelebrities are getting in on it. In their social circles, it's gauche to defend him. He was a Trump supporter; of course he deserves to be dragged through the mud online. Hundreds of Tweets saying things to the effect of "obviously he didn't deserve to die, but", perfectly conveying that they're lying their asses off, are quite glad that he's dead, and think it's a good start.

I don't personally agree with it, but I'd say the majority of the right has no problems doing the exact same. Each side dehumanizes the other.

They have made it crystal clear that their ire is not constrained to Trump. It regularly spills over to his base, Republicans in general, and even people that just are just not faithfully aligned with Blue Tribe values.

It is astounding reading and watching people act like this is some hot topic of the week that will blow over in a month. Maybe? What I don't see enough chatter about is how Trump voters received a loud and clear message that their deaths and misfortune (not just Trump's!) will be minimized at best and actively celebrated at worst (see also Babbit). As if it matters one bit to me if Crooks was a registered Republican when I subsequently saw how sizable chunks of the Left reacted to it.

This memory will not be going away any time soon.

"The basket of deplorables."

I'll second this with roystgnr's caveat about it being a lot worse where people like Comperatore are victims, and also point to people who've made similar arguments in other contexts. FCFromSSC has pointed to the celebrations around the murder of Aaron Danielson (and conspiracy theories about the police shooting of his killer), but there were also significant efforts to explain how Lee Keltner or Jessica Doty-Whitaker 'deserved' it, and state prosecutors gleeful that their campaign lead to Jake Gardner's suicide.

(see also Babbit)

This is much worse than Babbitt.

"It's okay to shoot at a mob engaged in violent breaking-and-entering" would have been a classic conservative talking point if not for the valence of that particular mob. It might have even been considered an especially-conservative talking point; centrists might agree with Niven's "1a) Never throw shit at an armed man." but the "why didn't you aim for the leg" crowd would hesitate at enforcing "1b) Never stand next to someone who is throwing shit at an armed man."

However, "It's okay to shoot at a political rally for the wrong politician" is only defensible if the politician is Actually Literally Hitler, not Hyperbolically Literally Hitler. The election may now be Trump's to lose, now that every anti-Trump campaign message has to thread the needle between "doesn't invoke Godwin's Law at all" (in which case it might not be persuasive, given the alternative and the implicit backpedaling) versus "kinda invokes Godwin's Law" (in which case it looks like irresponsible stochastic terrorism to anybody who isn't already pro-assassination).

When some random schizo tried to kill nancy pelosi and ended up severely injuring her husband, plenty of people on the right spread some bizarre spurned gay lover conspiracy and made fun of the victim for it. There were people on this forum taking it somewhat seriously. I don't think any side gets a high ground on this.

Trump himself has mocked the incident.

The gay lover thing was in retrospect dumb, but wasn’t he quite literally a gay prostitute with moonbattish far left politics?

At least at the time of his attack against Paul Pelosi, he had far-right views. He had a blog with a lot of pro-QAnon, antivax, and election denial stuff.

i don't see anything about him being a prostitute. he did bounce from being a nudist activist to an antivax election denier though

That is not the same thing for a variety of reasons. No one was applauding the attempt; Pelosi is not equivalent to a leading presidential candidate; the gay lover conspiracy was based on the men apparently knowing knowing each other and standing side by side when police arrived

The left also immediately tried to make the right wear the Pelosi beating. Controlling narratives does matter. The left lives off this.

If a trans women is killed by his lover we get articles about the rise in maga fueled transviolence. If black men start beating up Asians it’s because of white supremacists maga fueled Asian hate. If some rope is found in a nascar garage near a black man it’s maga fueled KKK racism.

There is a real need to control the narrative quickly while it’s in the news cycle. If Pelosi’s attacker was his gay lover and you didn’t fight for the narrative then half the country 4 years later would believe it was maga because that is the story that ran while it was in the news cycle.

Hold on a second. The attacker in that case had spent years and years living in a Berkeley polyamory cult doing drugs in a shitted out bus in somebody’s yard.

If he ended up schizophrenic and convinced he was helping Donald Trump somehow, it was basically a direct result of democratic politics, and is exactly the type of thing that “MAGA” is fighting against.

The reason people were critical of/making fun of the Pelosis was that this was their own schizophrenic chickens coming home to roost. I also didn’t see any sort of wishing that he had succeeded, just a lot of sort of “you eat what you grow” sort of things.

If he ended up schizophrenic and convinced he was helping Donald Trump somehow, it was basically a direct result of democratic politics, and is exactly the type of thing that “MAGA” is fighting against.

Replace 'democratic politics' with 'Republicans' and 'Berkeley polyamory cult' with 'AR-15s and gun control' and you've got yourself the bog-standard (brought to you by Stephen King!) leftist argument that Trump's own pro-gun policies led to his assassination. It's stupid when they do it, and it's stupid when you do it too.

Policies at the federal/state level have such broad impacts that nearly any event can be linked back to something one of the parties did.

If somebody said “well this is why we want stronger gun restrictions!” I’d sympathize with them (but disagree). I’ve even seen people wondering out loud if this would cause Trump to change his stance on gun control at all.

That’s all different than “I wish my political enemy had been assassinated…to protect democracy.”

I mean, except for the fact that gun ownership is a constitutionally protected right, and gun ownership has many legitimate uses. Hard to say the same about open air drug markets that permanently break people's brains and fester like a boil on society.

My righteous policy of AR-15s for self-defense versus your policy of open air drug markets that permanently break people's brains is a Straussian conjugation if I've ever heard one.

Your description of both 'policies' or platforms is massively lacking in nuance and accuracy, and in both cases ignores the tradeoffs involved. Pretending that gun ownership is an unalloyed good while being soft-on-crime is an unalloyed ill is just silly.

One is a god given right that is enumerated in the constitution, also heavily policed and regulated. The other is a criminal enterprise lacking legal basis at any level, ignored by the police and authorities.

Oh, you can't tell which I'm talking about because they're equivalent?

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Did you mean Russel conjugation?

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Is it? Then please enlighten me as to the benefits of permissiveness towards illicit open air drug markets.

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It turns out you can't freely substitute things in an argument that are not at all similar and expect the truth value to remain the same. Perhaps you can substitute "republican" for "democratic", but "Berkely polyamory cults" is not similar to "AR-15s and gun control".

Centrists get high ground on this.

I've been consistently anti-violence, anti-terrorism, anti-riot, anti-extremism, etc, my entire life. Every gives centrists crap for not getting things done, but some things are better undone, and some better things would actually get done if it were possible to get more sane centrist candidates elected.

I have the high ground Anakin. Don't try it.

"I have the moral high ground" says man who lives in decaying society.

Refusing to participate is also a choice. Passivity is not centrism. If you're not actively trying to enforce norms against political violence (of either the remove employment or remove earlobe kinds) you're not a centrist, you're just politically irrelevant.

No more or less than the man who yells "Trump deserves to die" and then doesn't shoot at him is politically irrelevant rather than an extremist. I'm not a political activist, but neither are the vast majority of people, and yet all the voices do add up. An awful lot of activists and politicians and media are emboldened by the prevalence of people supporting them and saying the same thing. Rather than being one more of the millions of voices shouting "you're scum, you deserve to be killed" to their political opponents, I am one of the thousands shouting "No you. You are scum, you deserve to be shamed and mocked but not killed, not because of which side you're on but because you are an uncivilized thug who resorts to violence over words." If it were reversed, if there were millions of us and thousands of them, a lot less violence would happen because they would find less comfort and confidence and public support.

Activism is useless, and in many cases actively harmful, unless you're actually supporting the right cause. Even if my words turn out to be entirely useless because nobody listens to me, literal 0 is still higher than a negative number. And if I'm lucky then maybe my words and my sane representation of ideas that are usually misrepresented by insane extremists will help people realize that their political opponents aren't all nutjobs, even if some of them are, and be less violent and more forgiving as a result.

I feel like this is a little too convenient.

Centrists get crap because they are perceived as supporting the status quo. Therefore, any sins that are part of the tapestry of the status quo get imputed to centrists, because whether they say they support them or not, they are perceived as being useful idiots for whoever has the power to make the status quo a certain way, and keep it that way.

If a libertarian ardently believes that taxes are theft, then centrists support government theft. If a dominionist theocrat believes that anything but a Christian government is a subversion of God's will, then centrists subvert God's will. If a woke progressive believes that any policy that is not aiming to end racism is itself racist, then centrists are racist.

I certainly think a kind of institutionalist centrism can have the high ground compared to partisan electoral politics in many cases, but I think telling people who believe in change of some kind that you have the high ground is going to fall on deaf ears.

That is one of the satisfactions of being a centrist or moderate, yes. We may not get to enjoy the extremes of partisan frenzy, but the enthusiasm of the moment burns out, and the radical ends of the spectrum overextend and end up looking like fools, we're the ones left to nod knowingly and pick up the pieces.

I realise this comes off as rather smug, and maybe isn't that constructive, but I think there is some value in occasionally reminding ourselves of the merits of even the 'boring', conventional positions. "Actually Political Violence Bad" is not a position that's going to excite anyone, but it has repeatedly proven itself, and those who stuck to it even when it would have been easy to come off as edgy or cool by doing otherwise may deserve some praise for their restraint.

Not from me, probably, because I shouldn't praise my own group, but I'd argue that knowing when not to speak, when not to act, is a kind of virtue in itself.

To that I'd add the ability to condemn two things at once. There's always a strong temptation for partisans of one side or the other to say "but it's different when we do it". BLM riots bad, January 6 good. Cancelling the left bad, cancelling the right good. Extrajudicial violence bad for them, but good for us. But if you're in the centre and you're devoted to having principles... just say that it's all bad. Make no excuses. What they must not do, we must not do either. What we may do, they may do as well.

But if you're in the centre and you're devoted to having principles... just say that it's all bad. Make no excuses. What they must not do, we must not do either. What we may do, they may do as well.

I wouldn't say this is smug, but a bit high on your own supply. I do want a world where each tribe can sleep easy, and build their own thing in peace, but tell me how we're going to get thee by freaking out over people getting the smallest possible dose of their own medicine. It's an offer about as compelling as not returning fire in the Ukraine war.

That's fair - I admit I'm indulging in a bit of backslapping here. I suppose it's a bit foolish of me. Still, every now and then taking a moment to feel positive about one's self and perspective isn't that much of a sin, I hope.

Centrism is only good if the center is good. A centrist was pro-Hitler, pro-Stalin, pro-Mao, pro-FDR, pro-Reagan, pro-war on drugs, pro-mass incarceration, pro-Iraq War, pro-KKK, extremely racists, extremely reverse racism. They were likely pro a lot of things I would consider good too.

It’s an intellectually lazy philosophy of not taking the time to think thru an issue and form an opinion. A lot of the time you are not able to form a wise opinion so it gets tough. Being pro-Iraq war seems reasonable then because Cheney did some so CIA games and laundered false intel to the American people that you couldn’t verify.

Centrism is just assuming the current Overton window is correct. But the Overton window moves and thus makes a centrists opinion incompatible with views a centrist would have had just a few short years ago.

I'm not defining 'centrism' here as 'the axiomatic assumption that the correct position is always in the centre of the Overton window'. I don't think that's unfairly redefining it on the fly? We probably wouldn't define leftism or rightism as the axiomatic belief that the correct position is always the furthest left or furthest right idea. Rather, we understand these words to refer to general tendencies or ideological leans. We also tend to associate them with specific embodied tribes (e.g. Democrats, Republicans), or with specific ideologies, which are often more complex than can be expressed with a binary spectrum (e.g. socialism, liberalism, conservatism).

So let me say what I mean when I say that I consider myself a centrist or moderate. (I don't feel it's particularly worth hair-splitting between those two terms. I think they both successfully communicate the idea of someone who is skeptical of both the left and the right, but willing to listen to and adopt ideas from either.)

Firstly, and this is what I think I alluded to most clearly in the above, I mean a dispositional skepticism towards enthusiasm or radicalism. I adopt a posture that is skeptical of passion in politics, or people who are deeply invested in an organised political vision. It is a posture that favours pragmatic, incremental reforms, and tends to regard big intellectual theories or visions as inherently suspect. There is a sense in which this is just small-c conservatism, and I'll wear that, but I think that as in practice the word 'conservative' in politics means something different, it's reasonable to avoid it.

Secondly, I mean in terms of practical allegiance and identification, sitting somewhere in between the two dominant tribes. American politics are radically polarised, and for most people adopting positions has more to do with team loyalty than anything else. Feelings of affection for one team and hostility to the other are therefore the dominant force in American politics. By identifying as centrist or moderate, what I want to communicate is that that's not what I want to do. Rather, I am trying to signal openness to a range of perspectives, and an attitude of noncommittal friendliness to people in either tribe.

Thirdly, to the extent that there is an ideology of moderation, I think it's the conscious knowledge that passion tends to outrun reason; that human judgement is fallible and that my internal sense of my own correctness is probably flawed; that good decision-making often requires input from different perspectives, even adversaries, and collaboration; that personal restraint and humility are virtues; and that no idea or proposal should be allowed to pass without a proper attempt to criticise it.

This piece makes a lot of the same case. Irrespective of any particular issue (some of which I do skew more conservative on than that guy), there is a case for moderation as political practice as well as moderation is ideological or attitudinal stance.

“ I adopt a posture that is skeptical of passion in politics, or people who are deeply invested in an organised political vision.”

This just feels like how I described centrism. Apolitical. Lack of vision. Just taking center of Overton window.

I know Trump is described as a radical rightist. His political views though are largely to the left of Bill Clinton. He favors less mass incarceration. He’s pro-choice (though aligned with Pro-Life judges), he’s pro gay marriage. He’s largely anti-market - trade protectionism. The current right largely backs ‘90s style race relations.

Politics is a real thing. It effects people’s lives. It’s very important to national and personal success. I just played basketball with a few Venezuelans. It matters. They are living in a foreign land because politics were bad at home.

The thing about centrists is they actually encourage Overton window pushing. If 60% of voters are just going to vote for the middle of the Overton window then the correct strategy is to push the Overton window wide. And then the median view comes closer to where you want it.

Take abortion as an issue. Right now the Overton window has one it’s right ban abortion. On its left abortion till 9 months. The centrist position is basically 16 weeks and then banned. If my goal is to ban abortion I need to get discussing the negatives of birth control into the public conscience as a respectable position. Then the centrist position becomes ban abortion.

The left did this with gay marriage. They made pronouns and gender surgery for kids into the Overton window. Now nobody questions gay marriage when in 2005 it was not passable as legislation.

If you had a hard view of abortion after 16 months is bad then if my side pushed to ban birth control then the right would lose elections. Instead centrism makes polarization beneficial because moving the Overton window moves the centrist position.

I... at no point said that I default to the centre of the Overton Window on any issue, or that centrists should do that? Dynomight actually made a case for moderation as the best way to achieve change - he makes the argument, I think correctly, that gay marriage won via moderation, not via radicalism.

As it happens, I oppose gay marriage, which the last I checked puts me way outside the Overton Window. Moderation or centrism in the sense in which I am identifying with it is not a list of policy positions, or a reflexive determination to always adopt the position exactly halfway between the Republican and Democratic platforms. It is a dispositional skepticism of passion politics and radicalism, a deliberate openness to the possibility of being persuaded by people on either team, and an attitude of caution and intellectual humility.

What does it mean to be a moderate and oppose gay marriage? It means that I think it's bad policy, but also that I think that, say, the postliberal Caesarist types are dangerous rogues. Or to pick something coded the other side of politics, it's the same way I can support, say, universal health care, but think that the democratic socialists are a bunch of ineffective muppets high on their own supply. It means a distinction between the policies I envision happening in an ideal world, and the practical ways in which I approach doing politics.

I will be honest I then have no idea what you mean by moderate.

The post liberal caeser types by your definition of moderate I believe they are moderate. Vance has said he wouldn’t have counted the 2020 vote and wants to dismantle the beaucracy. You know from his background that he’s well thought out both camps. It is in his lived experience from where he grew up to having had very leftist friends at Yale. Which is far different that some who grew up on the UES and went to Yale law. He has clearly been a card carrying member of both tribes.

The fact you used the Caeserist types those are probably the most moderate because those tend to be some of the most well read people on the political map. Who have read and thought about everything.

I don’t think the conventional definition of radical versus moderate is unrelated to political positions.

I feel like most people would consider Peter Thiel, Yarvin, Hanania as radical right, but they all feel like moderates to me by the way you define moderate. I use the word grey tribe for these types.

Without more knowledge on your beliefs you sound like a radical right grey triber based on being anti-gay marriage.

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What would you consider a moderate vs a centrist? A moderate being someone temporarily in the political middle, while a centrist is someone who chooses to be there? Vocabulary might matter here more than usual. I'm not sure I quite agree with your characterization of the philosophy, such that it is, as intellectually lazy, and think it describes some sort of mythical centrist that does not actually exist.

Like, isn't he just describing a regular person who calls balls as he sees them without bandwagoning too much? Someone cautious of getting too over-engaged in partisan passion? Additionally, merely being in the center of two extremes does not imply inaction, though some degree of approval of the status quo might be implied. Both extremes want action, so at least in some cases if you average the two, don't you still get action of some kind? Of course some political positions are a simple tug-of-war, but I feel like most are more like you're traveling on the freeway, and trying to decide which exit to take, or maybe that you're deciding where to eat and someone says Chinese and someone else says Burgers and you end up at a Japanese fusion place that isn't quite what either pictured but still tastes good. IDK, I'm bad with analogies but you get the picture. The idea is, a centrist option can still be an actual blended action, not just inaction due to indecision.

I think one can distinguish between centrist (ie someone who believes the truth is between two alleged poles as a truism) and Burkean conservatism (change slowly as you might break things). One can be a progressive Burkean, liberal Burkean, libertarian Burkean, nationalist Burkean, etc.

That is, the first is about identifying the two poles and plopping yourself in the middle. The second has a vision about the world they want but argues going very slowly towards that goal.

Both tend to favor status quo but have different failure modes.

I'm happy to grant that Burkean conservatism is one of the things I'm describing when I praise centrism or moderation, yes.

I think moderate and centrists are roughly the same and synonyms.

I have nothing against a centrists. You can live a happy life in country with bad government. You show up to work everyday, marry the cute girl, impregnate your wife a few times, and raise a few good kids. It’s a fine noble life.

But it does not give them some moral high ground on politics or an enlightened view. It’s hoping politics works out in a way that doesn’t ruin their life.

Not everyone needs to be airplane engineers. And know every intricate detail. You can still ride the airplane, but you are hoping the dude at Boeing is a good engineer.

Part of that was fueled by the assumption that the Speaker of the House's home would be secure, and thus this attacker inside the home must have been an invited guest.

Maybe we're just generally bad at protecting high profile people.

Maybe we're just generally bad at protecting high profile people.

I'm open to the argument that the secret service is like the TSA - security theatre that's there to reassure people rather than a meaningful protection.

And part was fueled by this having taken place after Smollett and Whitmer and Covington and Fine People and whatever other media hoaxes I'm forgetting. The right had been in too exhausted a wolf-has-been-cried-way-too-many-times state for "this is actually real and bad" to even be in their top 5 possibilities of what's going on

My social media is full of leftists who are openly saying that they wish Trump was killed, and they're not going to pretend otherwise. I haven't personally witnessed any level of cancellation or even any light scolding for them from saying this, but of course, these people are not celebrities, just people on social media, and they probably are posting to an almost exclusively blue echo chamber.

I'm also really surprised that we still have no real clues about motive of the assassination attempt released yet (as far as I've seen). This has led to the aforementioned leftists in my circle to chip in their own wishful speculation as fact. I've seen a few saying things like "Wow, it's been confirmed that the shooter tried to kill Trump because he wasn't far right enough. That's hilarious" in response to the info coming out that Crooks was a registered Republican.

My social media is full of leftists who are openly saying that they wish Trump was killed, and they're not going to pretend otherwise

Time for some reportmaxxing? Please post the receipts and trophies if you do go for it, I'm sure we can all do with a laugh here.

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I tried that on reddit a bit. Turns out it isn't against reddit's rules when anti-Trumpers do it.

Yeah, I believe that. Furthermore, "If you disagree with our political positions, you're dead" isn't merely acceptable on reddit, it's so obviously acceptable that reporting it is abusive and I caught a tempban from the admins.

At least the admins didn't ban me in retaliation.

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That's a nice auto-nope response. I won't bother any more. The classic "the US Marines call in a US Air Force strike on the Taliban. Why doesn't the Taliban ask the US Air Force to bomb the Marines in retaliation?"

Weapons are lobbed in one direction.

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This is not rdrama, this would not be acceptable to post here, and it would be clearly waging the culture war.

Watching people post these sentiments publicly online as if they are completely unaware that advocating for the assassination of your political opponents is really bad and completely unacceptable has left me amazed. How can people not realize that it's a bridge too far?

Have any of them ever seen anything be a bridge too far (to the left)? That's an honest question, because I can't think of any popular news stories where someone had their reputation damaged by too-far-left comments. Sure, a few people have been fired or harassed, but that's always painted as inappropriate backlash.

I'm not surprised at their sense of invulnerability, given the stories I've heard about.

Today, Jack Black cancelled their tour and appears to have killed the band.

As an aside, I may have found the funniest way to bypass their paywall.

It blocks half of your screen with the pester message and prevents scrolling, so simply get a bigger screen (and/or one set in portrait mode) and zoom out. Voila, you can see the entire (short) article in the unblocked half.

Have any of them ever seen anything be a bridge too far (to the left)?

Kathy Griffin faced consequences: https://people.com/tv/kathy-griffin-says-she-was-erased-not-canceled-after-trump-photo-scandal/

Fired from hosting a New Year's Eve show, theaters canceled her stand-up shows, and she claims to have been "erased."

I think it should have been taken in the spirit of a dark joke. Which sort of matches their aesthetic. But Jack Black is a big star and can't afford to have that kind of baggage.

It is interesting to see cancel culture changing valences once again.

But Jack Black is a big star and can't afford to have that kind of baggage.

The guy peaked at the VMA when Sarah Michelle Gellar ripped the one ring from his dick. I don't think he was ever A lister.

I don't think he was ever A lister.

Jack Black is the 37th highest-grossing leading actor of all time. He's top 100 by just about any objective metric. His biggest stuff is voice acting in kids' movies (lead villain in a $1B+ movie last year) so he doesn't have as much face recognition as most of his peers, though.

His biggest stuff is voice acting in kids' movies (lead villain in a $1B+ movie last year) so he doesn't have as much face recognition as most of his peers, though.

I don’t think that’s accurate. I would say he’s every bit as well-known for films like School Of Rock, Nacho Libre, The Holiday, Saving Silverman, and Peter Jackson’s King Kong as he is for his family-film voice acting, even if the latter has certainly made him the most money.

I loved School of Rock more than any animated movie he's ever done, so I want to agree, I just don't see how to justify that with data.

I don't know who Sarah Michelle Gellar is. Jack Black played alongside Kevin Hart and Dwayne Johnson in Jumanji. And honestly his was the best comedy performance in that movie. Add to that being the star voice actor in a major animated movie (kung-fu-panda) that has grossed over 2$ billion dollars internationally in ticket sales. If those things don't make you an A lister, then I have no clue what does. (by your standards who even is an A-lister other than maybe Tom Cruise?)

f those things don't make you an A lister, then I have no clue what does.

Well someone with a name that could pull audience on the name alone. No one watched Kung fu panda because of jack black. The same way no one watched puss in boots because of antonio banderas. Jack black hasn't been lead man since the mid 2000s. He is solid B lister - always reliable, doesn't attach himself to shitty projects, works very good in ensemble cast, but doesn't have the gravitas to carry a project on his own the same way Jim Carrey did in days of old, or the Rock, Tom Cruise and (maybe)Chris Hemsworth can do now.

I like him a lot and I still can't forgive Tim Shaffer for fucking up Brutal Legend so tremendously with the absurdly idiotic strategy game instead of giving us straight up action adventure, but this wound will never heal.

but doesn't have the gravitas to carry a project on his own the same way Jim Carrey did in days of old

I agree that he’s not a Jim Carrey level comedy star, but he clearly carried films such as School Of Rock and Nacho Libre, as well as the supremely underrated black comedy docudrama Bernie. (And if he’d stayed relatively thin, he could have had more everyman-style leading roles like Shallow Hal.)

Bernie is super underrated. By far Jack Black's best role, IMO.

What's the joke? What's the setup? What's the punchline? Explain the humor behind it.

It's a "joke" in the same way someone might be "joking" about your body odor, and then backing off when you take offense. It's plausible deniability for a thing they really believe.

I suppose when it comes down to it I just want a maximum punishment for the spoken word. And cancellations often go way beyond my nebulous line for what a maximum punishment should be. People should suffer social embarrassment for a day, maybe a week for really bad things. And then it should be let go. The written word can maybe receive twice as harsh of punishments. If they are some form of sociopath that isn't really punished by social embarrassment then we can work something else out as a punishment that is about equally as harsh.

Humans aren't perfect, and sometimes they slip up and say dumb things without realizing they have crossed a line. I don't know if you think you've lived a perfect life and never said anything wrong before, but I know I've certainly said things I shouldn't have. I would like to not lose my livelihood over saying those things. I specifically remember one of the earliest instances of me saying a wrong thing, I was bullied by a kid in Elementary school, in middle school that kid committed suicide, in Highschool I made an edgy joke to a friend about being glad he wasn't around to torment me anymore, the friend winced and didn't laugh. I felt mild social embarrassment, and learned not to joke about that. That is an easy one to describe that I feel safe sharing because I can say I was an idiot in highschool, but I've made dumber and worse speech decisions in my adult life that I'd absolutely not feel safe sharing.

Humans also sometimes hold views that are not socially acceptable or within the Overton window. We are specifically on a forum that has been chased out of a larger social media site, because we want to allow people to say things outside of the Overton window. I am very uncomfortable with social rules that make it impossible to state anything outside of the Overton window. My own Dad often says things that are not acceptable on wider social media. He has been temp-banned on Facebook a few times for things he has said. He isn't really willing to not say some of his thoughts. Banning him from social media doesn't really remove him as a person, he is still out there thinking those forbidden thoughts. "Jokes" are one way to tease out the limits of the Overton window. The attempt to use humor, even if the attempt fails, shows that the person in question cares about social conventions. This is a sign that you don't need to punish them as harshly.

It seems like the simple and obvious solution would be for social media companies to set user post visibility to friends only by default, though with something like Twitter its basic premise is that you are posting for everyone to see.

I suppose when it comes down to it I just want a maximum punishment for the spoken word.

"Nice business you have there, friend, it would be shame if it caught fire. Fortunately, you can easy prevent it for a reasonable price"

"I found some not so nice pictures of you, friend, it would be shame if your wife saw them. Fortunately, you can easy prevent it..."

Nothing than spoken word out here, no big deal, people talking like might be socially embarrassed, but no more than for whole week.

edit: bad typing

The first is a threat, and the second is blackmail.

But also you just said those things and I don't think you expected to be persecuted (nor should you be). So as words they are fine to say. Its when they are paired with a context that the underlying meaning is the problem.

I don't know if you think you've lived a perfect life and never said anything wrong before, but I know I've certainly said things I shouldn't have. I would like to not lose my livelihood over saying those things.

I haven't, and I also would like to keep providing for my family. But the only way out is through, and after living in fear in a particularly vulnerable industry as a witch, and already nearly losing my job over COVID mandates, I believe the only way this stop is if the left gets a taste of their own medicine. Rules only exist and are respected among peers with the same capabilities.

Having your band partner get pissed off at something you say (especially on stage) and break up isn't centrally cancellation, though.

His agent dropping him does though. But that might just be because the only thing Kyle has going for him is that he is adjacent to Jack Black, and once that is gone there is nothing for an agent to gain.

The setup was Jack Black singing Kyle Happy Birthday, and asking him to make a wish. "Don't miss Trump next time" was the punchline.

It's an example of shock humour. Similar to the average Jimmy Carr quip. "People always talk about how Hitler murdered 6 million Jews. They never mention how he also killed 2 million Gypsies. No one likes to focus on the positives."

A) Jimmy Carr has a brand. He's up there with Anthony Jeselnik for dark humor. Dark humor is not even remotely in Tenacious D's wheelhouse.

B) It's nakedly obvious Jimmy Carr doesn't believe 3 million gypsies being killed was a positive. The punchline is the shock value sure, but also playing a character that appears to possess almost every terrible belief you can imagine, void of all morality or social shame.

Tenacious D saying they wish the president had been assassinated as a birthday wish possesses neither of these points in their favor. It's not their brand, and it's not immediately obvious they don't actually believe it. Because lots of people believe it. Especially in their business. They haven't been shy about it for the last 8 years, and no part of it has been joking. All that's changed is that now people aren't tolerating it now that an attempt has actually been made.

It's like being a nazi, being flippant and jovial about the holocaust in 1942, and claiming it was just a joke. Or a KKK member in the 50's being really encouraging about lynching the local black kid who was seen with a white girl, and then backing off and claiming it was just a joke.

I don't buy it.

Dark humor is not even remotely in Tenacious D's wheelhouse.

"I can't wait to take Kage back to Hell

I'm gonna fill him with my hot demon gel"

Their second most popular song jokes about a protagonist potentially being raped for eternity by Satan.

But your point (B) is much more persuasive.

is that dark humor? does that mean that every heavy/death metal band is dark humor?

Most heavy/death metal bands aren't comedy-focused, so obviously no.

listening to the snippet of the song in the link above just proves to me that this isn't for me as I don't find it funny

"I can't wait to take Kage back to Hell

I'm gonna fill him with my hot demon gel"

Their second most popular song jokes about a protagonist potentially being raped for eternity by Satan.

This isn’t a “dark joke” in the mold of Jimmy Carr or Anthony Jeselnik, because approximately zero of Tenacious D’s listeners actually believe in Satan or hell, and therefore this joke isn’t rubbing up against any of their actual moral sensibilities. Yeah, it’s puerile, homoerotic, and makes light of Satan, so it would certainly be a “dark joke” if said by, for example, a Catholic priest in the course of a church service, but in the context of a Tenacious D song it’s a very “light joke”.

What made the Trump joke different is that political humor, especially of the violent nature, is absolutely not part of their act (even if, as others have pointed out, the members have made political comments outside of their capacity as Tenacious D) and therefore it actually is shocking to the political sensibilities of some listeners.

The rape element is as shocking in a modern polite society context as the Satan element is in a Christian one.

I don’t think that’s true. I hear people make prison rape “don’t drop the soap” jokes all the time. Men raping women is something it’s taboo to joke about. A man (or, in this case, a male deity) raping another man - especially when the context is this over-the-top and obviously tongue-in-cheek - is far, far less taboo to joke about, especially to this particular audience.

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It does have basic comedic timing, with a big setup to say something unexpected and then blowing out candles: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-hPUM01nuis

I wouldn't know to what extent they're playing characters, but it seems pretty exaggerated. And they're americans in another country so it may have seemed less inflammatory to go for a darker joke there. But yeah it doesn't preclude that he did mean what he said, even if as a punchline.

Gass could have said 'Boobies' and probably gotten the same effect. Instead he did the stupid thing.

I'm still carrying a charge over this after watching various leftist figures not only joke about the attempt on Trump's life, but also the other victims (1 dead, 2 critical). Last week I listened to Glenn Loury and John McWhorter on the former's podcast, and even straight-laced smarty linguistics expert John was saying he was only 'half-kidding' when he said he wanted Trump killed. Mind you, this was before the shooting, and I am intensely interested in their next episode together.

I had low tolerance for this kind of public talk before. It's nuked now.

EDIT: I have just now actually watched the video of Gass on stage making that joke. The most disturbing thing isn't the joke itself, but watching and hearing the crowd go fucking wild at it. And I'm reminded that we have a much larger problem than whatever stupid shit falls out of Gass' mouth. If the Right needs to claim scalps wherever they can get them and make examples of people (even down to lowly Home Depot workers), then so be it. Time to reach out and oh-so-gently touch them.

The most disturbing thing isn't the joke itself, but watching and hearing the crowd go fucking wild at it.

That's what makes me think that in context of the whole show (without having heard Tenacious D in 20 years), it must be practically like an in-character comedy set, where the audience is willing to go along with near full charity, not with arms crossed and deciding how they really feel about anything said.

Mind you, this was before the shooting, and I am intensely interested in their next episode together.

Definitely, this has to be one of their most anticipated episodes. John's TDS does seem embarrassing, but I at least gave him credit before if he was trying to say out loud how he really felt, even knowing that it didn't sound good. I think now that things actually ramped up to another level, it's sobering, and people are feeling a bit sheepish to have been involved in childish gay ops or fantasies. But to the extent anyone keeps at it or doubles down, that's important to learn. I'm still not interested in going after a Home Depot worker for it, but I'd hold John to a higher bar (although it's a bit unlucky to not have been this past monday for a less filtered take).

Oh how quickly the concept of politically correct humor has gone back to being a justification for right wing censorship. I'm sure we'll see such consistent logic from everyone involved.

The logic of "this is your petard, right?" is perfectly consistent. I don't see what hypocrisy you could possibly be pointing at.

in my opinion The right wing gets free speech and all it entails, and the left wing freeze peach and all it entails. That means I'm judging them based on their own standards without any hypocrisy involved and I get to keep my moral high ground, thank you very much.

Wanting to kill the president is disgusting. It's morally reprehensible. There's not some "both sides" hypocrisy consistency "true free speech" liberal norm where I'm forced to concede that, hey, live and let live man. "I want to kill the president." "That's disgusting." "I'm only joking." "Oh, ok, sounds like free speech."

It's free speech even if he's not joking. The whole point of free speech is to protect reprehensible speech. Inoffensive speech needs no protections.

That's missing the point. No one is denying that you have the free speech right to say you want to kill the president. It's also morally reprehensible. Cowering behind the defense that, it's just a joke man, that's my free speech, man, is retreating. It's pretending that they didn't say what they said.

"I want to kill the president."

RIP Trevor Moore.

It really can be a joke, though.

Sure, it's possible to make a joke about killing the president, and it's even possible for it to be funny, but this is obviously a bad faith justification people are applying after they get criticized for bad taste. There's a big difference between a dark joke comedy sketch and actually admitting out loud that you want the president to be killed.

The sketch was in reference to Bush, and what made the joke funny was the fact that everyone could tell Moore was not actually joking.

Morally reprehensible is definitely an objective line for determining the boundaries of free speech. Not at all something with competing definitions.

I'm not saying it's not free speech, I'm saying it's bad stupid and morally reprehensible speech. Falling back on, "it's just a joke," "it's free speech" is the lowest possible justification. Being sarcastic about it doesn't make your defense any stronger.

One day I'm going to stand for election on a platform of legalising comedy.

Australia is going to have to add a right to freedom of speech in their constitution first then. And an actual one, not a "subject to reasonable restrictions" one

Playing it off as a joke requires both Gass to have been joking and the audience to believe that he was joking.

Not only only is Black a (relatively) big star, his fanbase is predominantly middle-aged cis-hetero folk who grew up waching 90s stoner comedies who's kids have grown up watching Kung-Fu Panda.

Point being that there's a lot of overlap between Trump's core constituents and Black's, and i suspect that Black is savvy enough to recognize that, and to recognize that this is not something said constituents were likely to take as "a joke".

Minor celebrity Kyle Gass, who isn't particularly politically important, might have gotten away with it being a dark joke, but megastar Jack Black, who has frequently stumped for political causes, being involved means that it's on another level.

Good point. Let's remember he was the prominent keynote of a major Biden fundraiser and made a prominent public endorsement. He's too close to the campaign itself to even joke about that kind of thing.

Right wing cancel culture is a thing- remember when homosexuality could get you canceled?

Nobody wanted to see Trump get assassinated. Well, nobody wanted to see what happened afterwards. That makes this easy to start canceling people.

The guy who just tried to assassinate him presumably did want to see Trump get assassinated

Nobody wanted to see Trump get assassinated.

Except for the people expressing regret that the shooter missed.

Right wing cancel culture is a thing-

Not much of one. If you added up the top 10 people cancelled by the Right, do you think they would reach the prominence of James Damore? Google Trends could quantify it if you want to check.

remember when homosexuality could get you canceled?

No, I literally don't. Jack Black probably does given his age, but homosexuality has been (at least) tolerable for as long as I've been politically aware (though that could be a Canadian vs. American difference).

Not much of one. If you added up the top 10 people cancelled by the Right, do you think they would reach the prominence of James Damore?

Does Bud Light count?

I think you can explain a large part of the higher visibility of LW cancel culture because progressive thought dominates so many public-facing institutions. It's hard to cancel someone if you don't have a high profile patrons like major media outlets on your side.

Bud Light is a brand, not a person. Dylan Mulvaney (of Bud Light fame) had the potential to be cancelled, but as far as I can tell it didn't happen. Was there even an attempt against her?

There was a pretty serious boycott targeting Bud Light specifically highlighting Mulvaney's ad. It's not clear she could be cancelled in the fired sense -- from my understanding, this sort of influencer stuff is usually done as one-off contract work, if that -- but afaict the beer company has studiously avoided committing for or against any further ads with her, the ad company cut a lot of staff after, and a couple execs 'went on involuntary leave'.

Dylan Mulvaney is uncancelable by the right, and was not canceled. Alissa Heinerscheid, VP of marketing for Bud Light, might be said to have been canceled... but to be fired (her linkedin suggests she left AB Inbev in November last year) for angering your customer base by screwing up your job is another very non-central version of canceling.

American rules varied a lot by state and context.

14 states still prohibited 'sodomy' at the time of the 2003 Lawrence v Texas lawsuit, including a few that might surprise you like Massachusetts. While most of these were not enforced or only enforced with 'aggravating circumstances' (prostitution, exhibitionism, or assault) in modern times, firings of people, especially around 'sensitive positions', quite often highlighted ties to the 'illegal' behavior. While a few jurisdictions had employment protections against discrimination on the basis of sexuality as early as the 1970s, only fifteen states had such laws by Lawrence's release, and some states bounced back and forth (Ohio has switches policies six times since 1983, and I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up drawing back some of the gender identity stuff again).

Even where firing (or prosecuting!) someone for being gay was legal, not all jurisdictions had such firings be common or even present. And while there aren't good records about the typical firing -- both parties had as much cause to not publicize the matter as possible -- but cancel-culture like stuff was documented even at that early era. On the other hand, even where such bans on firings were present and enforced the cases aren't necessarily the most sympathetic.

((This is further impacted by the HIV crisis: no small part of paranoia in the 1980s and even early 90s genuinely did reflect concerns about transmission of a pretty deadly disease!))

Most of the overt cases reflect federal policies (both in military and in civilians) in the 1950s and 1960s, with the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era getting increasingly inconsistent over enforcement, but the military specifically officially considered homosexual behavior or identification cause for an other-than-honorable discharge until DADT under Clinton (which generally involved honorable discharges barring physical abuse, albeit with some post-separation pay ramifications). DADT was a thing in the military until 2010, and while some units would put significant efforts into willful blindness, others were willing to act on a cuckold's tip. Some civilian federal offices allegedly retained similar unofficial policies, though it's controversial how much that's supported by evidence.

I've pointed to [JD Vance's grandmother being tolerant in 1993] as one of the parts of the story that seems the least plausible to me, and that's not without cause. A variant less focused on God could well be true, even for an Appalachian Borderer (arguably especially: borderers take blood and friends seriously and religion less-than-literally). But at the risk of extrapolating from tiny samples, I know of coastals getting fired over it in that very year; it was a couple years before my own far-more-urbane father had a Talk with me and my brother, informing us that he didn't care what race of a girl we brought home, so long as we brought home a girl. It took a while for Tolerance to really take off, and if you're younger it can be hard to grip how quickly it came through.

The right has been claiming a lot of scalps lately, generally using the same playbook the left used in 2020-21.

@Libsoftiktok has been particularly egregious, going after minor government employees and restaurant workers for things they said on social media. It's disappointing and hypocritical, but it's a good thing that cancellation is no longer a leftist superweapon. Now that both sides have the bomb, perhaps we can have a Cold War instead of a hot one. One can hope.

Perhaps along these lines, my Twitter feed is full of viral posts from conservatives who have accepted Kyle Gass's apology and urge people NOT to cancel Tenacious D.

But I do agree that the most hilarious thing about this whole episode is "Trump is literally Hitler and we are praying for his speedy recovery".

LoTT has been going absolutely scorched earth, and in the heat of the moment it pleased me in the spirit of "the left is getting a taste of their cancel culture medicine". Then had a moment of shame that I've been cheering collective punishment: I have zero evidence that any given person who locker-room-talks "too bad he missed" has had any involvement whatsoever in destroying people's lives over the past 8 years.

So it's back to being liberal about speech. Back to Voltaire/Hall for me.

good, good. Now you can feel righteous and pure the next time you roll over and show the belly to the lefty with a new pair of boots and the next superweapon.

Less sneering and less culture warring. This is just being antagonistic.

👍

Don't respond to provocations with low-effort responses like this that communicate nothing but sarcasm.

I have zero evidence that any given person who locker-room-talks "too bad he missed" has had any involvement whatsoever in destroying people's lives over the past 8 years.

I'm sure most of them didn't, and I'm nearly sure all of them didn't. The number of people whose direct involvement it takes to get someone "cancelled" is frighteningly low.

But I'm also pretty sure that they didn't because of lack of opportunity rather than lack of desire, in the case of the ones who aren't joking. If you're happy about deterring your political opponents through murder then you're hardly going to draw the line at firing, are you?

So it's back to being liberal about speech. Back to Voltaire/Hall for me.

Sounds great, so long as we codify it. Put "Acts of speech shall never be considered evidence of a hostile workplace environment in a legal context" or some such into a bill, and I will vote for whoever supports it and against whoever opposes it. I'll still support the right of Home Depot to independently decide that they don't want any employees who are pro-assassination or anti-homosexuality or in whatever categories they want to use to draw the line, but I suspect that without massive lawsuit risk they'll be a lot more chill about firing employees who can keep their personal beliefs out of their work. Apply the same principle to independent contractors and businesses, and to really make it clear, add damages against anyone who files nuisance suits anyway.

But if we don't codify it? I'm not going to join in on cancel culture, but neither can I bring myself to condemn its equal application, not until the people nominally on the side of the current victims are also opposing it in a way at least as meaningful as my off-the-cuff suggestion, something that will definitely still apply after the next pendulum swing, once the jackboot is back on the other foot. I don't want to join in the (metaphorical!) bloodshed, but I can still recognize that, while shooting opposing forces as they surrender is a war crime, shooting them as they retreat is just good tactics.

Yeah I'm down with this. There should be consequences, consistently applied, for mob participation, that's the only way this stuff doesn't keep escalating.

Of course first there needs to be some kind of cultural truce (like that of the wars of religion on which the First Amendment is based) that brings back actual rule of law and gets rid of all the exceptions and strategic redefinitions of words ("violence" and "racism" come to mind) etc etc

I have zero evidence that any given person who locker-room-talks "too bad he missed" has had any involvement whatsoever in destroying people's lives over the past 8 years.

Calling for the death of the president was considered unacceptable even before the last 8 years.

I just went back and reread a lot of old discussions about "the ok hand gesture", "all lives matter", "it's ok to be white", and damore.
It reminded me why I ran out of any sympathy or mercy in 2020.

I understand the frustration. I share it. But unfortunately if one responds in kind then we are doomed to a cycle of hatred and retaliation. Peace is only possible when one side is willing to stick to it even at the risk of being stabbed in the back.

It's been decades of backstabbing.
They can give Gina Carano her job back. They can release the guys in prison for "hate crimes" because they left tire marks on a gay crosswalk. They can say "sorry" to that kid they lynched for smiling. They can stop letting DEI departments throw away people's resumes for not being leftist. They can stop using lawfare to "reduce the comfort & regularity with which those who do not accept climate change science speak". They can stop the deplatforming campaigns against anyone who tries to publish books critical of them...
If they want peace they can ask for it.

At the very least I have a list of names who still post here who could apologize for what they said about those earlier cases and admit they were wrong.
None of them are stepping up, because they don't think they were wrong to hurt those people.

They can stop this at any time, but because they won't it's not going to stop until their power is absolutely broken.
And that's going to take a lot of pain.

Yeah unfortunately that's not how it works. Repaying hate with hate just makes them double down. They will say "we were right to hate these people, let's put the screws to them even more". If your goal is to get the madness to stop, making the perpetrators feel pain is not going to advance it.

  • -11

Unilaterally surrendering also won't stop the madness.

Ok, fine. But refraining from reprisals is still a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for peace.

The left have shown that is how it works. Their punishment regime has made absurdities intro absolute dogma in every professional environment, simply by inflicting enough fear and pain on anyone who dared to speak out. Nobody in the year 2000 could have even imagined the insanity that would be enforced by the next 20 years of HR witch-hunting, mobbing, lawfare, and violence. Inflicting pain is how that was accomplished.

The post-modernists had important lessons about social discipline and punishment, and the left learned them first.
It's probably too late for the right to learn the same lesson, now that the left dominates the social control infrastructure, but they can at least try.

The very existence of your argument refutes it. If putting the screws to people got them to relent and peacefully live according to one's preferred ideology, then you wouldn't be mad because you would have relented. But in actuality, you're upset (rightfully so) and you want to hit them back as hard as you can the instant you get a chance to. Why on earth do you imagine the result would be any different when it's your (side's) hands welding the knife?

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Not making them feel pain hasn’t muted their desire to punish. That’s been the status quo since atleast the 1980’s and things have only gotten worse.

Things that have seemed to limit them some is Musks taking over twitter which let the right organize these attacks too. Desantis punishing Disney.

I am against going after the peasantry like Home Depot girl. I see my aunt or mother in her. We 100% should be punishing the leaders and taking scalps when we can. Disney and the executive class is fair game.

I agree that refraining from reprisals, by itself, does not lead to peace. In truth I don't know what will lead to peace, it's a hard problem! I just know that reprisals are going to lead to further war. So if one's goal is peace, then reprisals need to be taken off the table.

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Peace is only possible when one side is willing to stick to it even at the risk of being stabbed in the back.

Peace is only possible when both sides realize if they break it they're going to get stabbed.

This is only true between absolute belligerents who are otherwise at each other's throats.

Not every disagreement has to be ratcheted up to murderous rage on both sides. Although I'm much further right than I was only a few years ago, when I talk to my historically right wing friends they're all "There will be blood." Whereas those I know on the left (often more effete by disposition, admittedly) use the weapons of condescension and matter-of-fact dismissal. Only leftist extremists, or those oddly allied to them eg BLM-types (at least in my experience) say anything about violence.

Normal (for lack of a better word) people who aren't always blowing a gasket from reading the latest outrage online do not seem to me ready to knife their interlocutor, regardless of how indisposed he or she might be politically to share beliefs.

This is only true between absolute belligerents who are otherwise at each other's throats.

We're not talking about literal stabbings here, but cancellation. There may be little actual blood, but there's been a lot of scalps in terms of getting people fired from the left (they had a tumblr dedicated to it, for instance). The right "risking" getting stabbed in the back by not retaliating isn't going to help at all; it's co-operating with a defector.

Well if you're talking in metaphors sure, I don't disagree. I suppose I'm becoming more literal-minded myself despite my best intentions.

There has been no shortage of actual blood either.

There's dozens of us!

It's disappointing and hypocritical, but it's a good thing that cancellation is no longer a leftist superweapon.

All is proceeding according to the prophecy.

What's the prophecy? Genuinely curious.

Disaffected liberals were warning the left that at some point their opponents will get their shit together enough to use cancel culture against them, so they should stop giving ammo to the other side. If this is what we're seeing, it took at least a decade, and is rather underwhelming, if you ask me, but I suppose technically it did happen.

Disaffected leftists were warning other leftists that cancel culture was destroying the left from within by allowing leftists to use cancellation campaigns to settle intra-left personal beefs as early as 2013.

McCarthy was cancelled (by the Army-McCarthy hearings) when he started using anti-Communist cancellation campaigns to settle intra-right personal beefs. The left needs to do this for its own sake as well as for the rest of us.

Cancel culture is BACK baby.

Just today we had a perfectly normal Walmart-American harassed and fired after exercising her constitutionally-protected right to post a shitty hot take on her own Facebook page. Of course, it's not enough for human resources to quietly take her out back. She had to be publicly defenestrated.

Cancel culture is BACK baby.

I can only imagine this face while reading that

/images/17211959832546847.webp

There's a lot of right-wingers talking about how this is the crows coming home to roost, and reasons that they don't have a lot of sympathy. I don't think it's a particularly useful approach to go down, but I don't exactly have a ton of great arguments against it.

Well, the best argument is that this will be over soon. Left-liberals will go back to using their disproportionate control over institutions and offices to push their politics. So there is a limit to what left-liberals can get away with, but then, it's pretty generous. So this is totally pointless. Maybe you get a few idiots cancelled, but that's it.

Cancel culture from the left is a manifestation of power, not it's source. Even sixty years ago, employers can, and did, fire people for being pinkos, for being homos, for getting divorced, for having interracial relationships. This didn't maintain those societal taboos, or prevent them from being eroded. And cancel culture from the left hasn't snuffed out conservative beliefs either.

When they go after Home Depot lady they are going after essentially their own people. Those not smart enough to have perfect grace on knowing what memes are appropriate at a given time.

I am all for canceling Bud Light and over educated Bud Light marketing VP but attacking the working class is just wrong. It’s not in the best interest of the right.

When they go after Home Depot lady they are going after essentially their own people.

Someone isn't on my side because they work at a Wal-mart.

No, but it's a pretty good sign they aren't actually your enemy either.

I've looked into Portland antifa bios, and a lot of them work shitty retail jobs if they work at all, although usually at smaller companies or schools that won't fire them for getting arrested.
Going after foot soldiers doesn't really matter, but the real target is the companies that feel safe hiring such people. The left has an entire punishment apparatus for firing "the kind of people who might think things that could conceivably someday create a hostile work environment", and companies are enslaved to it (see gattsuru's latest damore post for the quote).
Time to take over that system and turn it against them.

the real target is the companies that feel safe hiring such people

Please, no. We don't want it normalized for employers to scrutinize their employees' politics, regardless of ideology.

Not only is it already normalized, it's mandated by the Federal Bureaucracy, enforced routinely, and has been for decades.

Those not smart enough to have perfect grace on knowing what memes are appropriate at a given time.

Not to be all "both sides" but both sides have footsoldiers of varying levels of tact. The dumbest of the enemy soldiers does not make a friend.

"He's is edgy and politically incorrect like me, so he must be on my side. The fact that he wants me and my kind dead must be a misunderstanding"

if you couldn't stop the bully when you pleaded with him, what makes you think that finger wagging at the the victim will stop her from retaliating?

I don't have a lot of sympathy, but it's still not cool. Mobs getting angry and demanding [bad stuff] happens to [petty target] when no real harm has befallen anyone is a human behavior championed by geeks. Not cool, man. Dweebs and dorks chase the dopamine rush from owning the libs and bashing the fash for saying dumb stuff. A political party should adopt a platform that includes the creation of state trained swirly enforcers that replace the democratic moral outrage mob. It will require a constitutional amendment, but after that it's smooth sailing.

More seriously, there's no a path to a détente. People really don't like people that say bad stuff that makes them angry. A good old fashioned lynching is probably one of those God given human rights that the American founders thought were so obvious they didn't write down. Perhaps this pathetic incarnation of the lynching and moral enforcement is the last trace of true humanity we have. There's not much else anyone can do to enforce speech norms in a liberal democracy short of physical harm.

For this reason I'll suggest, in addition to dunking nerds in toilets, the SS (Super Swirlies) could make their way around to the people shit posting after they dunk the pointdexters for being mad at them. Dunk'em all.

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.

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.

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.

Would you happen to be newaltright on Substack? You have a very similar style.

Nope.

"Trust arrives walking and departs riding."

The political value of maintaining moral high ground here does not pay the cost of letting your opponents keep a chilling effect superweapon for their exclusive use. Do I want rando home depot employees fired for venting political frustrations on Facebook? No. But given conservatives are laboring under a system where they often can't be caught misgendering someone online, letting democrats do a "haha just kidding... unless?" routine for political assassinations is insane.

edit: I see the first one goes to a comment that makes sense, but the second one doesn't seem to be a right wing person that got shaken down.

Are those links correct? They go to the same article that has to do with comments about the Gifford shooting over a decade ago.

Travis Corcoran is better known as MorlockP; at the time he was just a small time righty gunblogger and rando (technically, I think at the time identified as libertarian?), but he's since become a moderately well-known figure in both literary conservative circles, which MonsterHunter45 also swims in, and in New Hampshire state politics. A lot of that was downstream of the Massachusetts JTTF investigations, where state police confiscated Corcoran's guns, 'temporarily' took his gun license, and which Corcoran points at partially causing the failure of his business at the time, since in addition to the costs of lawfare, multiple comic writers told their fans to boycott him.

I only see one comic writer advocating a boycott in that link, Gail Simone just said "You have my pity. May you grow a soul someday, because you desperately are in need of one."

Fair. For another author that did make the statement explicitly, Warren Ellis said:

Obviously, I’d rather Heavy Ink didn’t sell my work, but I don’t have a choice about which stores order my books. However, if you do buy my work from Heavy Ink, would you please consider buying it from someone else instead?

Ah.

Edit: I do remember Simone saying something at one point about how people should separate the art from the artist or something like that. Not about this. But it does give a little bit of perspective on her perspective.

How have I been following this guy for years without ever knowing his backstory. I even remember his original avatar but never made the connection!

How can people not realize that it's a bridge too far? They're literally saying that to preserve democracy, they need to assassinate the leading candidate, a level of cognitive dissonance beyond anything I've seen.

That said, I also find the current cancelations hilarious. The very people who are calling Trump "literally hitler" are now pearl clutching that it's not okay to try kill Hitler.

Which is the correct position to take for someone who is pro-democracy and thinks Trump is a threat to democracy? Should they be pro or anti assassination? You seem to be simultaneously mocking both stances.

The correct position is to realize that “Trump is trying to end democracy by getting more votes than his opponent by appealing to more voters by suggesting policies that provide material improvements to their lives and the lives of their children” is an absurd one.

Trump is not a “threat to democracy”. This is why there is no coherence to be found among the supporting or downstream arguments around that.

It's not incoherent to think that Trump is a danger to democracy. It might be wrong but it's not incoherent.

You'd obviously be familiar with the Hitler example. He won a legitimate election, and then after he was in power made himself dictator. Or you could look at Hugo Chavez, or Robert Mugabe. There's plenty of precedent for people seizing power fairly and then retaining it illegitimately.

Now, you would obviously counter "Trump is not Hitler", and I would agree with you. But different people can have different opinions, even if those opinions are wrong. There are absolutely people - lots of them - who believe that Trump is a danger to democracy, and it is a coherent belief to hold.

And so I ask again: should those people support murdering him?

You'd obviously be familiar with the Hitler example. He won a legitimate election, and then after he was in power made himself dictator. Or you could look at Hugo Chavez, or Robert Mugabe. There's plenty of precedent for people seizing power fairly and then retaining it illegitimately.

These are all poor comparisons to make. When people say "Trump is a danger to democracy" it reveals a lot of ignorance about the structure of the American government. Three-branched Federal government with a bicameral legislature, the tradition of judicial review, and codependent powers distributed across the different branches (the most important being that Congress has to pay for everything) means that it would be close to impossible to make oneself a dictator in the American system from a structural perspective. You can't flip it all on its head with 51% of the vote and some clever executive orders. You'd need what amounts to multiple constitutional amendments on top of a court not only packed but FULL of sycophantic non-lawyers. This just isn't anywhere near the realm of truth or possibility - especially for Trump who is easily distracted on his policy priorities and only has four years to get all of that done.

For some good precedent, remember the 9-0 ruling against Obama for attempting to make some pretty ho-hum appointments during a Senatorial recess.

"Trump is a danger to democracy" is a very emotionally dressed up version of "orange man bad."

Coherent? Sure i guess. Supported by facts? Not really. That is, it is ridiculous

Ok. But should they support his assassination, given their opinions of the man?

You need to be extremely beyond sure sure. So no I don’t think anyone can truly say that. And even then I’m not sure it makes sense. Assassination frequently is bad for the politics of the people who engage in it.

No, because then you support extra-judicial violence in a democratic system predicated on state monopoly of violence. By that logic, anyone who really thinks that X-group or Y-person is really, really, really not good has permission to kill their enemies.

At what point (if any) of his political career do you think the assassination of Hitler would be justified by his opponents?

I'll reframe your question thusly;

At what point did Hitler's authority become illegitimate and unable to be corrected by the functions of the German state?

I think the Enabling Acts of 1933 were pretty much that point. Explicitly extra-legislative and supra-constitutional.

Is any assassination attempt on Hitler at that point therefore valid? Eh, I'm and end-to-end pro-lifer (don't like abortion, don't like death penalty) so I'd've preferred to see some sort of pseudo-state-vigilante-police action. You know, arrest Hitler on behalf of "Free Germany" or something.

But we're playing with counterfactuals within counterfactuals wrapped in hypotheticals. So it's all Dungeons and Dragons. Furthermore, intentionally or not, I've been misled into a "tRumP iS HitLER" online discussion. So, really, I guess I'm the asshole.

Sure. I guess. In the same way that a schizo may 'support' stabbing his roommate because they're trying to steal his precious bodily fluids or put chips in his brain. Makes sense from his individual perspective. Of course, this perspective has consequences meted out by other parties (disconnection, imprisonment, execution).

They should support his murder based on their premises. I have my own premises as well, and some disorganized thoughts on what should be done to them in turn.

And so I ask again: should those people support murdering him?

If they have only minimal foresight, they should not.

In situation where half of voters hate freedom and want strong man who will rule with iron fist, the democrats already screwed things as much as they could.

Redacting aspiring leader might be historically justifiable if the leader is truly great man with exceptional and irreplaceable skills. Otherwise, nothing will change, new strong man (there are always more candidates for this job) will rise up and step in the boots of his martyred precedessor.

Trump might not have irreplaceable skills, but is the meme magic replaceable?

Assassination seems sort of anti-democratic too though. Maybe even moreso than peacefully relinquishing power on losing an election even if you think it wasn't fair.

whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it

But if you squint, doesn't it kind of follow the same logic as "the second amendment protects the first amendment"?

In the sense that neither is protected when it would protect an opponent?

In the sense that both are proposing extralegal violence in defense of enlightenment principles.

My attempt at steelmanning the "assassinations are actually good" position: democracy is good, and an assassination attempt is a sign that a democracy is on the brink. Being successful or not does nothing to the health of the democracy: the fact that it occured at all is the symptom of the underlying malady. Given that, if someone is actively harming democracy, then it's better that an assassination attempt on them succeeds than fails.

(I'd disagree basically on every stated assumption in that, but I think it's how the logic goes.)

Assassination seems more like an extreme form of hecklers veto. Someone could have unanimous -1 support and get assassinated.

Riots and mobs are maybe justified under this logic, which tells you how crappy democracy is as a justification of power.

Which is the correct position to take for someone who is pro-democracy and thinks Trump is a threat to democracy? Should they be pro or anti assassination? You seem to be simultaneously mocking both stances.

I think there are a bunch of mockable positions here.

There's the people who actually think Trump is Hitler reincarnated. For one, that's really dumb and worthy of ridicule. Two, it's idiotic to publicly state this since if it turns out you're correct, you get a free trip to a concentration camp.

The people who say Trump is Hitler for their two minutes hate, but then weathervane into pearl clutching when someone almost kills him are huge hypocrites and absolutely should be mocked.

As for cancellation, I don't support or participate in it, I'm a staunch free speech advocate. I think in most cases (especially in cases like the home depot cashier above) nothing you say on a social media platform should cost you your job. That said, the left has been wielding cancellation like a war hammer for the last decade, so it's a lot of fun to watch the leopards eat their faces.

This isn't an answer to my question.

Which is the correct position to take for someone who is pro-democracy and thinks Trump is a threat to democracy? Should they be pro or anti assassination?

Anti.

Trump being a potential or likely future threat to democracy is wrong but it isn’t schizo. If you undertake a policy of just assassinating everyone that codes as a potential Erdogan or Mugabe then you don’t have a democracy, because the false positive rate is too high. Instead it becomes justifiable to assassinate positive current threats to democracy- eg Hitler right after the reichstag fire, not during coalition negotiations.

Yeah this is where I land as well. Which is why it irks me to see people going "haha they says he's literally Hitler but also saying the assassination attempt was bad, they're clearly full of shit." No, it's that crossing the line of embracing political violence and murder is a serious thing and most people won't do that lightly.

What is the correct position for somebody who is pro democracy but doesn’t think that people who disagree with him should be allowed to vote?

It’s just an incoherent question along the lines of “can god microwave a burrito so hot that even he cannot lift it?”

It’s just an incoherent question

It is coherent question with coherent answer.

"What is democracy?"

"Democracy is when we win!"

Two, it's idiotic to publicly state this since if it turns out you're correct, you get a free trip to a concentration camp.

Eh. There are things worth dying for. I don't happen to agree with this particular statement, never mind think it's worth dying to state, but the worldview where this adds up even on a utilitarian level, never mind a deontological or virtue level, is not hard to construct.

Even if you don’t like Trump, his assassination would be the quick path to civil war. At the very least, we’d see a whole bunch of reprisal attempts and ensuing escalation. The response to the attempt is having me consider voting for Trump.

It's already made his wikipedia page.

No other controversies with this guy, apparently. Poor Jack Black. Being a weird friendly wholesome druggie is his whole deal. In the solid five seconds he spent being stunned, he came up with, "Thank you...we love your cakes," (to the cake-bearing robot).

Like others have mentioned, this may have been a turning point. I know the RNC has turned the temperature down on its planned speeches during the convention. I think there are lots of people who haven't actually watched a video of someone being shot in the head before, and, when watching the video where it could have happened to Trump, they may have realized how gruesome the whole business is.

Edit: Never mind. It appears Tenacious D has taken plenty of political stances in the past. Idk, I'm kinda getting the sense that cancelling everything is an overreaction. It's definitely too soon, and it has real Kathy Griffin vibes. But, like Kathy, his mistake was that it was just...not funny at all.

The audience actually found it very funny, they laughed and cheered.

I think it just that showbusiness is very fickle. It can give sudden fame and glory and then can throw down to the earth.

While I agree that cancel culture is bad, I have no sympathy in this case. Who is to say that the fame and income of those performers was really deserved?

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