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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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Forgiveness is a method of strength and leveraging the good traits of humanity.

I agree! But the concept is a lot more complicated than that and requires that the other person stop doing whatever it is you need to forgive them for. If I go to a concert and there's an active shooter murdering people in the crowd, preventing them from committing more murders is actually the moral course of action when compared to just forgiving them and letting them continue to shoot people.

That said in this specific case, while I think no cancelling would be ideal, I am not going to blame the people on the right for taking advantage of the new rules the left has set up until the left makes a serious effort to go back and dial down the temperature.

I mean, how would you even measure this? What would it take to say "okay the temperature is going in the right direction, thanks left", do you think you would be able to recognize it or is it purely a vibes check? Because crazies gonna crazy so there's always gonna be something out there. Is it like, LoTT losing tons of likes/subscribers/attention? Is it more about MSM cover for twitterati? Or would it be public disavowal by leading figures? This is an actual question that I'm curious your perspective on, what you feel would be most impactful/genuine step back and what that looks like.

I mean, how would you even measure this? What would it take to say "okay the temperature is going in the right direction, thanks left", do you think you would be able to recognize it or is it purely a vibes check?

I legitimately haven't thought about this because I didn't actually think there was any way to stop it - I assumed it would just continue to get worse over time until there's an irreversible reduction in societal complexity (good luck cancelling someone whose job is stealing copper wiring from abandoned buildings). Any kind of positive steps in this direction would be extremely negative steps, personally, for anyone on the left who actually wanted to make them. Furthermore, it isn't actually like there's a central authority figure who could speak for the entire left and announce that the days of cancelling people are over - and even if there was, making that kind of announcement would doubtless cause them to lose all that influence and authority. Second, the trust required for such an announcement to be taken seriously or in good faith just isn't there, either. You'd have to come up with meaningful consequences for this kind of behaviour, along with a reliable and trustworthy enforcement body, because a system like this would absolutely get gamed the second it was implemented.

The only workable alternative that I can see would be legislation that mandates incredibly harsh penalties for the employers who actually fire people like this, but that has consequences and a lot of complications as well - a left-wing political group should absolutely be able to fire someone because they found out that he was actually a secret nazi doing his best to sabotage them from within.

Of course, my dream goal would be for the world to adopt my preferred political system (non-catholic environmentalist distributism), which would mean that cancellation can't really happen due to the altered structure of the economy. But that isn't going to happen anytime soon so it isn't really a realistic proposal.

Is it like, LoTT losing tons of likes/subscribers/attention? Is it more about MSM cover for twitterati? Or would it be public disavowal by leading figures?

It's weird, because you've answered your own question as far as I can tell. Each of these things is an indication of the temperature going down, though we could probably come up with more examples if we thought about it.