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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.
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Don't respond to provocations with low-effort responses like this that communicate nothing but sarcasm.
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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?
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
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Calling for the death of the president was considered unacceptable even before the last 8 years.
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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.
Unilaterally surrendering also won't stop the madness.
Ok, fine. But refraining from reprisals is still a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for peace.
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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?
He doesn't think peace is realistic. He just wants a détente, and that requires a show of strength.
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It almost has worked. There are vanishingly few people actually willing to fight back, and it took incredibly good luck to keep them (literally bullet-dodging levels of luck!).
And even they are only willing to go against the most radical 10% of the left's agenda: the other 90% has already been adopted in the Republican party platform.
So the leftist strategy worked, even if people manage to claw back 5% of what they won with it.
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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.
Winning and crushing your enemies makes peace. I am not sure if a country can have two roughly equally matched cultures. It’s probably clear at this point it’s the only solution.
A key to winning will be getting the Jews on board. They dominate media and the influencer space. Democrats mistake with Hamas helps a lot on this front.
I don’t support going after Home Depot lady. She would have fallen inline once a dominate culture emerges.
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Oh, yeah, I should have clarified that peace is definitely not my goal.
The shortest path to peace is the suicide of anyone who would fight back against the powerful, so that's what I'd expect anyone who prioritized peace to advocate for.
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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.
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.
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There has been no shortage of actual blood either.
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There's dozens of us!
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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.
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