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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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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

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