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I said I wasn't getting people fired. I can still report hateful snots and find I'm getting a lot more traction than I did a few years ago. I am checking back in with people who peacocked the fact that they made whole wretched subreddits dedicated to 45 being dead just several weeks ago now squirm and go bipolar since they've gone under the microscope. And I am finding that a few of my Dem friends may have been caging their frustrations in the same way I used to, while the rest have conspicuously piped down their vitriol to their benefit and mine.
You say 'petty'. I say 'doesnt require that much effort'. Because the beauty of this is that you don't need to go hard when your opponent has so utterly beclowned themselves in this manner. When I say I am not looking for symmetry, that means I am not looking to cancel people for being pro-trans, pro-immigration, or holding any other stereotypical lefty belief. I am fine with profiling solely for people who publicly wish death on Trump and his supporters - who have decided this is leftist territory worth defending - and collaring every single one of them within arm's reach where possible, big and small. Just because I don't have the stomach or patience for this work doesn't mean I don't recognize the utility.
And if this can be accomplished by spooking them into doing this to themselves, all the better. That's decent power projection IMO. I think it's actually great that Kyle Gass is getting sanctioned by his own people instead of his opponents. That's some self-awareness starting to show. If they start to doubt the existence of an actual threat - well, Billionaire Tyrant Elon Musk has shown he's happy to make your life harder if he can half-cleverly justify it even if it breaks his touted his 'maximum free speech' line. The future cultural terrain is looking more and more up for grabs to me than it did in January. If nobody wants to wise up, we could very well make support for increasingly-discredited 'gender-affirming care' worthy of bans and demonetization by some time next year if trends continue.
You want me to talk about 'changing the law'? Okay, sure. "Social media posts cannot be considered as grounds for termination, and companies found doing this will be prosecuted to the full extent possible". While simple and broad, that seems like a good enough starting point for me, is actually close to my heart, and one I can be pragmatic about in regards to exceptions. And I'm just positive this is so widely uncontroversial and easy enough to coordinate consensus on that all I need to do is send an email to Mark Zuckerburg and ask him to lobby on behalf of this beautiful, pure ideal! Now that this wonderfully useful exercise has taken place, what's next, Hoss?
You want a change in law, make at least some people want it. This implied demand that I need to set forth a charter or a ten-point plan on 'How I Would Fix Free Speech On The Internet' is pointless when that opportunity is neither here nor there at this time. Especially when I am actually already telling you this a minimum Step One for such a process.
Well, this sounds way better to me but doesn't really make a lot of sense. So you want liberals to lose their jobs but also for that to be illegal? I thought that the point was to attack and not relent or "roll over"?
In addition this is a Step One that has already occurred in many cases. This might be news to you but people on the left get cancelled all the time. At some points more often because there are more of them in spaces controlled by leftists. This hasn't really led to a change of heart. I think it's plausible that the left might allow changes like the one suggested, but not because of this specific event - but because they're losing their grip over social media. But that's an ongoing change, something that's been happening slowly now for a few years.
Force should be applied along a continuum until compliance (or 'persuasion' if you prefer!) is achieved. We can start with explicit Dead 45 comments made after July 13th. If nobody's feeling interested in setting down bipartisan protections after that, then the ratcheting should continue until it is desirable. And if that day never comes, then seeking complete dominance gets put on the table. Everybody here is familiar with the "your rules/my rules/fairly" orders of preference, and I'm trying to be clear about mine. Concerns regarding how successful this can be are valid, but don't dissuade me from thinking its worth attempting. "You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs" is also a villain line in movies, but it has been more true through history than not if we're honest.
Previous intra-left cancelations have had more to do with failing to meet purity standards or not being up to speed with the most current lingo of the day. I think what's different after the Trump shooting is that they are now being visited by something outside of their wheelhouse, and it is making some of them crap themselves. Nobody in Dem-ville had to worry about lazily wishing for Trump to be assassinated (couched in cutesy Harry Potter metaphors, or trans-themed guillotine memes from the 'Love is Love' Facebook group) up until last week. My read isn't that Gass and HD lady are being punished because their peers or employers are truly offended by them, but because they are are afraid of what may be coming if they don't start heading this off now - especially since it looks like we will be getting an energized Trump admin with a popular mandate pretty soon. That fear should be exploited to get concessions or at least a table-meet.
You're right that some of this has already been churning in social media, but I think it's really only been on Twitter, and that is a direct result of one man being in the right place at the right time. Reddit got worse with each passing year, and only now may be internally wondering what their path beyond 2024 should be. It's incumbent upon conservatives to start flooding this space with their own heuristics and impacting the Overton window now, and that unfortunately is going to involve street scraps and some old ladies getting knocked over. I guess we could hold fire and wait on some high-minded technocratic solutions from Musk and his peers to shake out from top-down. Or he could be bankrupted or assasinated by next week, get replaced by somebody who's happy to revert to status quo circa 2020, and the opportunity to build some momentum on a grass-roots level will have been completely whiffed on.
I have to wonder...
My stereotype of a cancelled person is a heterodox liberal in a blue state or sphere. Your James Damores, JK Rowlings or whatever. But your average policy maker is usually someone who has spent their whole life being surrounded by people who think just like them. In that sense, DJT is very unusual, he's right wing but spent much of his life surrounded by New York Democrats. That's why he comes off as so defensive, instead of the complacency (a common defect among conservative politicians) of Utah raised Romney.
That's why I suspect that we might get the opposite - law that for example, makes it easier to fire public sector employees for their comments on social media. Your average red state legislator is going to be less interested in the travails of SF programmers or Chicago academics, and more interested in putting the fear of God in the public school teachers in his state.
But, for the object level discussion, I think it's natural that it's going to be tough for conservatives to embrace cancel culture. Knowledge producing conservatives, meaning journalists, academics, whatever, still exist and operate in blue controlled regions and spheres. They are highly motivated to try and lower the temperature, not raise it. And liberals still have the share of institutional power in the US, even if the right has clawed a little bit back. I agree with the other post here that the historical reason that conservatives have gotten the brunt of cancellation is not because of how principled they were (a joke, to be sure), but because they lost institutional power.
I also don't know if this even works as a sell. Can you sell "end cancel culture" to America even as you freely engage in it? Probably not.
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