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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36912 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Scott has an excellent new article that'll likely enrage at least a few people here: Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance

Last week, the Libs of Tiktok successfully cancelled a random lady from Home Depot who called for the assassination of Trump. This prompted a lot of triumphalism from the right: "the time is finally here, now WE get to be the cancellers" they seemed to cheer.

There was a discussion on the Motte, and while there were some voices calling for restraint, many commenters demanded blood from the left. The real question was how much blood should be taken, with most responses landing somewhere between "massive" and "infinity". Some quotes include

Scott's article gives 9 reasons why cheering for blood like this might not be the best strategy. They include:

  1. Nobody Learns Anything Useful From Being Persecuted
  2. This Isn’t Tit For Tat, It’s The Nth Round Of A Historical Dialectic
  3. You’re Not Debating Whether To Become Like Woke People, You’re Already Like Woke People
  4. Nobody Is Ever Both-Sides-ist Enough
  5. Most Cancellations Are Friendly Fire
  6. Cancellation Is The Enemy Of Competence
  7. No, Seriously, This Is A Terrible Decision
  8. Don’t Go Mad With Power Until You Actually Get The Power
  9. There’s Probably Other Options

"If you do to us what we did to you, that would hurt Democracy, so be responsible and let us continue discriminating against you, because we're morally superior"

Yeah, that's a tough sell, bro.

I appreciate the link and the implicit "are you sure you want to go down this road?" it contains. A couple of years ago, it felt like unbreakable blue-tribe consensus forever, which I found horrifying. Now that things have cracked, and it only took a failed assassination attempt to do it, what is team red supposed to do otherwise? The rhetoric is still that Trump is the most dangerous Threat to Democracy who must be stopped, from the side that usually makes arguments about stochastic terrorism. I see two broad types of strategic response, both awful:

  1. Claim "principles". This feels like trying to co-operate with defectbot, and seems to bring things further away from balanced, healthy discussion.
  2. Seek vengeance. This feels really good but escalates the culture war, and seems to bring things further away from balanced, healthy discussion.

I really don't know what culture war disarmament looks like. There needs to be some cross-tribe elite consensus that we stop doing these sort of things, and I don't know how you get there without first putting the shoe on the other foot for a while. The pendulum needs to swing back a little bit, then it needs to be caught.

Now that things have cracked, and it only took a failed assassination attempt to do it, what is team red supposed to do otherwise?

Has it really cracked? Will this moment of right-wing cancel power last more than a few weeks?

Well, if Cthulhu swims left, then it's natural that the tools that the left uses will inevitably be employed unconsciously as they are by the blue tribes.

There needs to be some cross-tribe elite consensus that we stop doing these sort of things, and I don't know how you get there without first putting the shoe on the other foot for a while.

The shoe was on the other foot 60 years ago. Didn't really teach them much; academia promptly generated reasons that it was totally different when they did it.

This feels like trying to co-operate with defectbot

Scott's proposal is along the lines of "co-operate, and also hire a thug to hold a gun to defectbot's head and blow its brains out if it continues defecting". I don't think this is an especially-exploitable strategy.

The shoe was on the other foot 60 years ago.

Was it? I seem to remember the Weathermen becoming college professors at prestigious universities.

One of my favorite culture war book reviews is of Days of Rage, covering how left wing terrorists in the US were supported by groups like the National Lawyers’ Guild.

Having not lived through the Weather Underground and McCarthyism, I'm hesitant to say which side the shoe was on or how much it should inform our strategy for the current state of the culture war. I do remember 9/11 (I was standing deck watch at the Naval Academy) and the culture for the decade after that. Criticism of the war effort was treated pretty harshly, and that was a time and topic of right wing (RW) dominance. But I also recall gay marriage ballot initiatives failing across the country (an example of RW dominance) until the 14th amendment got stretched around it (LW victory). And we still had Superman embarrassed to be an American enough to change his "Truth, Justice, and the American Way" into "Truth, Justice, and all that stuff" in the 2006 movie Superman Returns (LW dominance). Christianity was never protected or sacred (LW dominance). I recall more collaboration and respect between Republicans and Democrats in Congress (less hostility in the culture war). I'm surely biased, but it seems to me that "elections have consequences" defectbot has been exceptionally effective over the past decade or two at pushing the pendulum to a far left position with much higher amplitude/height than the right swing it was returning from. All of which adds up to limited utility in looking to history while swapping "right" for "left".

Is there anyone here with book recommendations about the culture swings of history, in ways that would inform right wing decisions today?

Weatherman was less than 60 years ago.

While I like Scott's article and agree with his position in principle as someone who is pro-civilization, I also like confuciouscorndog's position. Both of them have a good point, but at the end of the day it's a tempest in a teacup by people who are arguing about something that's existed (as Scott admits) for a very, very long time.

This problem will be with us forever. Campaigning for fairness, even though fairness doesn't exist in the real world, always comes across as sour grapes by those currently suffering the business end of the jackboot.

There is no solution. As long as society exists in any meaningful form, and consists of people that we can reasonably consider human, these societies will always self-curate to throw out undesirables, no matter who they are, what they do, or what they provide. "Canceling" has taken many forms through history - if losing your job, home and having your livelihood destroyed is the worst of it I'd consider those bullets mere grazes, even if they weren't sufficiently dodged. The same impulse could go straight to old-school Americana lynchings or ME fundamentalist Islam beheadings.

America gets around this a lot of the time by self-segregation of societies. Red and blue states, yadda yadda. Blue gets more blue red gets more red as people self-select into the societies they fit into.

Solution is the same as it always is; don't be an undesirable in the eyes of those with power. Frequent software updates to stay on top of who's it's okay to despise in your particular society are recommended for personal security reasons. Last I heard the progressive stack are still squabbling over TERFs, they'll consider Trump ascendant a boon because it'll get them to stop bitching at each other for five minutes for the daily orange man bad prayer.

I'm staunchly on the left, virulently anti-Trump, and am completely okay with people being cancelled for these comments. I would be a hypocrite if I weren't. I think there's a lot of crocodile tears from the left on this: if Obama were almost killed and people were saying the same things, how many would protest those people being fired?

Do note that there is a difference between "I wish somebody would assassinate Trump [in the future] [rather than not make an attempt at all]" and "I wish the guy who tried to assassinate Trump [in the past] had succeeded [rather than attempted and failed]". I've little sympathy for the first - that's direct incitement to terrorism - but significantly more for the second.

I agree with Scott that persecuting people won't teach them anything useful. I recommend a leaf from Ozy's book: separate them from their children, raise the kids in your own culture, use violence only when necessary to eliminate expressions of their culture that might contaminate the succeeding generations.

It's a long-term project, but historical precedent says it can be effective if you're organized and consistent about it.

Is Ozy really that bad? Can you link me to the blog post?

In many ways it's worse: the meaning of that document rather changes connotations when you find out Ozy's significant other 'contributed' a bunch of e-mails with Scott just after the NYTimes article, all of which Scott had asked him to keep in confidence, and one of Ozy's first examples of compassionate, integrated feminism argued that all that open-minded tolerance from Excluded only applied to "perspectives/experiences of marginalized groups", ie her side specifically to bash Scott.

Maybe Ozy has all the strength of principles about not prosecuting people, but without the ability to present anyone who won't on their side, it's little more than standing on laurels and calling on an army to do the dirty work.

I don’t exactly remember the timeline, but was this after their relationship ended? Can we separate this cleanly from Ozy’s partner simply being a jerk to a flame’s ex-boyfriend?

Come to think of it, this is a good reason to avoid polyamory. Limit your exposure. Works for the clap, too.

They've not made the timeline too clear, but yeah. You could even use the same excuse for Frantz themself.

But I think that's an exception that swallows the rule. A lot of cancel culture involves people with petty disagreements getting blown out into public spaces; dismissing a cancellation because it's driven by a flame's drama turns quickly into throwing out major cases.

I wasn't excusing it or disagreeing with you. In fact my point was to emphasize how petty and personal these incidents end up being, and how little they often have to do with the serious issues theoretically presented rather than interpersonal drama.

It's very old drama, and one of the several things that moved me from "grew up in fandom and thinks freedom of expression is very important" to "many progressives successfully dedicated themselves to changing my mind."

I'll have to go look for the link.

Edit: here it is.

I do not understand what you wrote.

"one of the several things that moved me from "grew up in fandom and thinks freedom of expression is very important" to "many progressives successfully dedicated themselves to changing my mind.""

This is confusingly written to me

I think what Tinted meant is that, like me and others, they grew up with online fandom (think forums and early social media), steeped in the tits-n'-beer-liberalism milieu, and then watched with horror as GamerGate transpired and revealed just how many people operated on Conflict Theory.

More books, less online. Some anime fandom around the edges. And I was never much of a gamer, unless you count Myst. But none of that mattered. You have the principle.

It's one of the foundational texts of the culture-war canon, in my view.

Back when this was written, Ozy was well-known as a reasonable, thoughtful pro-SJ blogger, someone who could put some real weight behind "okay, maybe some of these people are crazy, but there's a point here worth considering". I don't read it as proof that they're an especially terrible person. All they do in that essay is play out the necessary implications of liberal Progressivism. The values conflict is in fact real, and there is not in fact anything that can really stop it within a population.

I don't think that Ozy is making a good point in this essay. I don't think that "progressives" and "conservatives" are moral mutants to each other. Mostly my counter-argument would follow similar lines to Scott's essay:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/18/fundamental-value-differences-are-not-that-fundamental/

Also I think that "progressive" and "conservative" are silly, mostly illusory categories. It's more complicated than that, but I do basically think it's a mistake to treat them like elves and dwarves or whatever.

I'd say that we're witnessing in real time how effective this strategy can be if those before/after college videos are any indication.

got a link? I have no idea which videos you're referring to.

https://tiktok.com/@truth24hr/video/7215886406835572010

This is just an example, and there's absolutely no indication that these captions are real. Also, the poster is obviously a warrior, so make of it what you will.

I was reading through the comments, found myself saying "This one guy sounds a lot like darwin", looked up at the name and lo-and-behold.

Points for consistency.

I don't understand what you mean by this.

It was in fact darwin

What short memories people have. This event has made me think I am doomed to live in a world of never-ending reprisals. How silly of me to once think that only the middle east was locked in the hell hole that is endlessly escalating conflict and revenge.

The language used by the right is very much exactly the same damn language the left was using a decade ago.

Scott wrote some impassioned pleas back then for the left to not go down this path. I give him lots of kudos for being consistent. I give everyone here who has called for lots of revenge zero kudos.

The right already had its fun being the purgers. Was no one else alive and remembering what the 2000-2010 decade was like? The slightest lack of extreme patriotism was enough for "cancellation". It was not hard to find stories of small towns and chruches treating gay people terribly. And about a decade of that treatment led the left to feeling quite a bit of bloodlust. So when power dynamics had shifted enough by the early 2010s there were a bunch of bloodthirsty leftists that were happy to live by the sword.

I made my position clear last week:

https://www.themotte.org/post/1077/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/230501?context=8#context

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.

To all those about to say something like "its not fair that they got to be mean! I want to be mean back to them!" Don't worry. In a decade when the right has once again gone too far and the power dynamics switch back I will once again say that we shouldn't be "cancelling" people. But it will be the Left that is not listening. All will become fair over time, and meanwhile I won't be pouring gasoline on the house fire.

Was no one else alive and remembering what the 2000-2010 decade was like?

If you go by my comments on the topic you'll see I'm pro-truce, but this is insane. I was very much alive back then, and on the side that was supposedly getting cancelled, and it was not in any way comparable. "Muh Dixie Chicks" is the best people can come up with from that era. Show me someone who got fired for cracking their knuckles, then we'll talk.

Ward Churchill comes to mind. He was fired for research misconduct in the same way Al Capone was arrested for tax fraud.

There was widespread low level harassment of gays, arabs, and anti-war people. If the dixie chiks is all you remember then I don't think you really remember. Even as late as 2007 people were freaking out that Ron Paul could say something like "they don't hate us for our freedom, they hate us for our interventions in the middle east", the failure to cancel him was a turning point as well as the general 2008 financial and housing crisis. Bill Mahr got kicked off a TV show for saying that people who committed suicidal terror attacks probably weren't "cowards". Comedians were mostly immune to being cancelled back then, but they loved to be "edgy" by picking at the fanaticism of the right.

Social media wasn't a thing so cancellations weren't as visible and weren't as easily documented. But anyone who grew up in a small town and paid enough attention probably has stories.

If the dixie chiks is all you remember then I don't think you really remember.

It's not all I remember, it's the most egregious example of what I remember, and you haven't brought up anything worse, while I can bring up several worse instances for any one you mention.

Social media wasn't a thing so cancellations weren't as visible and weren't as easily documented. But anyone who grew up in a small town and paid enough attention probably has stories.

Yeah, and on top of the things that are public, people now also have stories that never make it to the media.

Only other egregious example I can think of is Rage Against the Machine essentially being blacklisted by any radio stations owned by Clear Channel. But yeah that's nothing compared to a lot of the crap the left has done in the last 14 years or so.

My experience in both cancellation waves was only to be booted off a few forums that I didn't like much anyways. I'm not gonna claim I know which one was worse. I find it plausible that one cancellation waves could have been ten times worse than the other one and we wouldn't really be able to notice.

I am only certain that there was a cancellation wave, not how bad it was.

If there has been massive escalation by one side that is only an additional reason for me to worry.

Yeah, fair enough. I do agree with your broader point, I was just unreasonably outraged at the idea it's all the same, and to be fair I'm not exactly an impartial observer.

This is not the first time this year that the right has cancelled it’s enemies- earlier on they managed to cancel some left wingers over Palestine. We also took bud lights scalp last year. I think it probably too late to put the genie back in the bottle; the cold civil war is going to escalate from here.

Now, as far as how it ends, either one side wins, or it goes hot, or we pillarize(hopefully Netherlands-style and not Lebanon-style). Calling a truce in this kind of environment requires strong, central leaders on both sides wanting one, and Trump doesn’t want a truce and the democrats don’t have a strong leader. Cest la vie.

The fact that your enemies are just as sure as you are should make you less sure.

The more the enemy hates you, the more you should ... doubt yourself???

I think this is an appeal to take the outside view. If your reference class is "partisans who feel strongly that their current enemy is the most evil thing ever" then you see that other members of that class are mistaken about their attributions of evil.

Ban or not, I stand by everything I said. (As the great rhetorician Adolf Hitler proves (regardless of what you think about his politics), sometimes you must breathe fire and brimstone to communicate the righteous fury necessary to get your point across, and I'll take the upvotes as a sign that I made that point in a rhetorically effective way that induced the intended response in most readers. With that said and my prior point made, I will take a different approach in this post.)

Now I think it's also clearly worth pointing out that, even if you advocate for (as I'm seeing all over this subthread) the "This weaponization of someone's expressions/speech/beliefs to deprive him of employment/civil status of basic respect/social media accounts/etc. is a terrible thing and should be off the table for all sides." position (which I actually happen to agree in large part would be the rule of an ideal society, at least in regards to working as a cashier at Home Depot and not as a teacher or in a high-profile government position, which is also why I take the practical position on the necessity of retaliating now that I do, as I'll explain), then you are still simply being rather naive if you think the present right-wing retaliation is a bad outcome/choice in regards to achieving your long-term goal.

Do you know what the best way is to get a child to stop pinching you, thus ensuring no pinching for everybody? Pinch him back just as hard (if not slightly harder), so he understands how it feels (and the precarious dynamics of getting into a pinching fight). No pinchy child has ever thought, "Well I've been pinching this adult all day and he's kindly not retaliated every time even when he could have, so I guess I should just stop pinching him forever. Peace has been achieved for our time."

That is, even if what you really want is the end of both tits and tats forever and entirely, you can rest assured that you are not going to get that through insisting that tits ("tit" being the part of the phrase "tit for tat" that I am interpreting as the retaliatory action, based on the phrase "eye for an eye") be banned. All you're going to get from that is even more confident tats all the time, increasing in frequency (which is exactly what we've experienced with politically-motivated firings/retaliation/"cancellations"/"deplatformings" etc. for the past 10 years proportional to the right's inability (and it's mostly been unable) to respond in kind), which is the absolute worst outcome. Going based off of the old formulation about "rules applied fairly" etc.:

No tits or tats (peace) > Tits and tats applied evenly (war, affecting both sides in an even/fair fashion, so not a massacre) > Only tats (massacre for one side only without any possibility of retribution for them)

Point is, magnanimous inaction is rarely if ever a winning strategy. Your serial killer may appreciate you generously not resisting, but that's neither going to do anything for you nor make society any safer from murder.

So if you think (or pretend) you're trying to achieve the end of both tits and tats evenly, but your practical suggestion to achieve that is just to let the tatters run wild without response because goodness deary it would be so undignified and hypocritical for the titters to tit after complaining so much about the tatters and their tats, then I can only see you as either a disingenuous undercover tatter trying to sabotage the titters for your own personal ends, someone who smugly (and wrongly) believes himself to be above all conflict in all cases (until it comes to their doorstep, as it often does), or again simply very naive and suffering from sloppy, short-term thinking (as opposed to being "principled").

Going based on the above, I absolutely resent and reject the notion of @FiveHourMarathon below that those advocating for retaliation in this case are therefore not "principled libertarians". If "principled libertarians" had managed to overthrow the Soviet Union, that would not mean that they would have immediately had to apply the NAP to Joseph Stalin the moment they had him on the ropes for a bit or supposedly suddenly lose their principles. It does not mean that after you get punched in the face you must out of principle strictly avoid punching back because "After all, my right to swing my fist stops where their nose begins."

Principled libertarianism is not (or at least doesn't have to be) absolute "Turn the other cheek." Tibetan-monks-praying-for-the-souls-of-their-killers-while-CCP-soldiers-gun-them-down absolute non-violence. (Though I personally am not super attached dogmatically to libertarian(ism) as a philosophy/identifier, even if I do identify with it somewhat, the notion that reasonable retaliation is incompatible with it is at a minimum essentially a de facto rejection of the existence of contracts with penalties (as any contract must have, explicitly or implicitly, if its performance is to be enforced and its violation sanctioned) for one, which is basically the whole foundation of the ideology. So that's why I chose to highlight specifically that attacking people over supporting retaliation here on alleged libertarian grounds is utterly absurd.)

I'll echo the post below of @FarmReadyElephants (which I suggest everybody also read) too and quote the most important line from it:

So it's just wrong to model this as tit-for-tat violence. It's 10,000 tits for one tat. And the one tat is a nonpartisan tat that absolutely must hold.

[Note that he writes, contrarily to me, interpreting the initial action as the "tit" and the retaliatory action as the "tat", whereas again, after considering the phrase "eye for an eye", I decided that the initial action should actually be the "tat" and the retaliatory action the "tit". I tried asking an AI about this, and it could not tell me whether there was a consensus about whether or not the tit or the tat is universally intended to come first, nor could I find anything about the query on basically useless modern search engines. But I prefer to ally with the tits (which is not to say women necessarily), so that's how I wrote it.]

And he's entirely correct. Even going based on what I said above, you must remember as he points out that this is still mostly a massacre of tats (or tits in his formulation) with only the briefest respite of tits (or tats in his formulation) thus far.

So I just don't get the anti-retaliation side at all. I just don't. Do you apply this logic to other aspects of your lives?

If you see Little Timmy, who is near his lowest because he has cancer (that he is recovering from... maybe), get his ass beat by Brad on the playground every day, and then one day some unique circumstance happens, say Brad breaks his arm playing football and it's in a sling, and Little Timmy briefly gets the upper hand and gives the bully a small taste of his own medicine, you'd really start indignantly lecturing him about how hypocritical and unprincipled it is that he went after Brad in his time of weakness after all of the complaining he's done about his own present weakness being exploited? That it proves that Little Timmy was always just as in favor of violent confrontation as Brad is? Even when there's a very good chance that the moment Brad recovers the (attempted, likely successful) ass-beatings for Little Timmy are only going to intensify, that it's not any sort of a permanent victory?

He doesn't deserve to celebrate or luxuriate in his one respite/triumph in a long time at all? He should have just ran out the clock on his brief moment of strength by peacefully meditating on how evil and inconsistent with his prior expressed non-violent principles it would be to take advantage of the circumstances by having poor ol' Brad be the injured party this time instead? (I'm not just slinging around rhetorical questions, but genuinely asking what the general principles on retaliation should be here.)

"But he didn't just go after Brad directly! He also attacked Sarah, who never directly touched him to my knowledge. As far as we know, all she ever did was subscribe to the mutual ideologies of Bradism and anti-Timmyism, cheer on Brad beating up Timmy every day in the background, and post on social media about how disappointed she was that Timmy's mom [who is seen by Little Timmy as his primary defender, as she's been advocating for the obviously unfairly biased teachers/administration to stop being so clearly prejudiced against him and punish Brad for his own bad behavior] didn't die in the car accident she had the day before. She's totally irrelevant, a minuscule fish in the larger pond of the overall affair. Even if you think retaliating against Brad or some more prominent members of his bully posse like Brock is understandable, going after innocent little Sarah is nothing more than pure sadism!" This meanwhile, IMO, is basically the equivalent of defending that cashier at Home Depot and others like her specifically. (No I'm not saying that any of the people defending her formulated their arguments exactly as I did or trying to put words directly into their mouths; the quote is just how I characterize their position myself, simply rephrased.)

Even Scotty engages in what I can only see as absolutely facile logic here. Observe this (what I would characterize as) nonsense:

The right-wingers admit that they have suffered terribly at the hands of cancellation mobs. Okay, check. They admit it’s made them so mad that they want a bloodbath of cancelling liberals harder than anyone has ever been cancelled before. Okay, check.

And now they say . . . that lefties must suffer terribly at the hands of cancellation mobs, because it will teach them that cancellation is wrong?

If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught you that. It obviously hasn’t, so try a different strategy.

"You admit that being pinched by this annoying child has made you think it might be a good idea to pinch him back; so you admit that being pinched hasn't even taught you as an adult that pinching a child is wrong; so what makes you think that a child being on the receiving end of a pinch is going to teach him anything!?"

Zero acknowledgment of the difference between unprovoked aggression and responding to unprovoked aggression already in progress. This is supposed to be one of our top rationalist game theory gurus? Give me a break. (I'm not even going to bother dissecting the rest of the article, because it is similarly flawed from top to bottom, as most modern barely-worthy-of-engagement Scotty (ever since he let himself be fully chastity caged by Ozy and co., with Alexandros Marinos showing him to be a fraud being the final nail in the coffin) writings are.

If there is a world where tatters (absolutely convinced of the righteousness of their tats in this case as we must be reminded) generally choose to put their tats away without the effective exhibition of tits creating a credible threat of more tits in return, then I'd like to see it, but I haven't yet. And it is precisely those like the Home Depot cashier who cheer on the tatters and their tats that gave them their perception of absolute imprimatur in the first place. How can you address a behavior without addressing such a deeply-rooted cause of it? If you deal in tats, whether by dishing them out or cheering them on, then you must expect an imminent tit to the face (or to the job in these cases). That's the only way to incentivize fair behavior.

tl;dr: By my reckoning, whether you simply like tits or even if you seek an eventual future without them (and tats), the only productive path for either side at the moment that I can see is to free the tits. Get your tits out boys. Otherwise you're committing a mistake much like someone with a cockroach infestation focusing their energy instead on killing the house centipedes chowing down on them.

"You admit that being pinched by this annoying child has made you think it might be a good idea to pinch him back; so you admit that being pinched hasn't even taught you as an adult that pinching a child is wrong; so what makes you think that a child being on the receiving end of a pinch is going to teach him anything!?"

Here's perhaps a better analogy: somebody keeps screaming at the top of his lungs and disrupting things. Which is more useful: screaming back at him, or handcuffing and gagging him so he can't scream anymore?

Scott is suggesting doing the latter, breaking the teeth of the cancellation monster by throwing HR ladies and others in jail until they stop executing the will of the mob. This is not rolling over and playing dead; it's in some ways an escalation. But it's an escalation that accomplishes something and which doesn't burn the commons.

Okay, but the problem is that throwing the HR ladies in jail is presently impossible.

If you can handcuff and gag a person who is screaming at you, then yes, that's the superior option. (Of course it's worth noting that handcuffing and gagging people is in most cases illegal, even if they're screaming at you.)

But if you can't, then screaming back at them is at least superior to doing nothing. I'm pretty sure that, probabilistically speaking, someone who is screaming at somebody else is more likely to stop or at least be interrupted if they're screaming back as opposed to just sitting there and taking it. That's my entire point.

doesn't burn the commons.

The commons being depleted for the exclusive gain of one side < The commons being depleted evenly for the gain of both sides < The commons not being depleted at all

So that argument is irrelevant too. If someone else is destroying the commons, you're not going to stop them by just appealing to the commons (which they're perfectly happy with the state of, because you're giving them a monopoly on abusing it) and refusing to demonstrate to them how it feels to have the commons depleted for somebody else's exclusive gain. That's just more for them.

Quite frankly, I just feel like some people here (not necessarily you @magic9mushroom, but just the anti-retaliation case in general) are almost game theory denialists, like some Flat Earth stuff. Tit for tat is a well established as a ridiculously effective strategy there. That's why it's used productively even in entirely non-political contexts like bandwidth allocation algorithms for decentralized networks. You can come up with as many hypotheticals as you want, as many different ways of phrasing things, but you're not going to make tit for tat bad anymore than you will prove that 2 + 2 = 5.

Okay, but the problem is that throwing the HR ladies in jail is presently impossible.

Indeed, you do not have real power. Your goal should therefore be to get real power, and it mostly looks like the easiest way there* is a coalition with liberals. Liberals don't like cancel mobs, though.

If someone else is destroying the commons, you're not going to stop them by just appealing to the commons (which they're perfectly happy with the state of, because you're giving them a monopoly on abusing it) and refusing to demonstrate to them how it feels to have the commons depleted for somebody else's exclusive gain. That's just more for them.

Indeed, this does not suffice. But that's not what Scott or I are suggesting. We're merely suggesting that you retaliate in an asymmetric way that does not burn the commons - not all retaliation does!

*Well, the easiest reliable way there. The easiest way there is to wait for WWIII to incinerate your enemies for you, but that's not guaranteed to happen.

A "coalition" with people who don't want you to actually fight back (other than in some future magic fairy tale "right moment" where every star has perfectly aligned, which they will almost certainly keep finding a reason to declare hasn't come yet, but just you wait!) because "Nooo be civil, don't be so grossly hypocritical as to attack the people who attacked you first, because remember, if you kill your enemies, they win, and muh commons, so just wait until you're magically in charge of all corporations and can fire all your enemies directly instead (because that's somehow ethically superior)!" (even though if that ever comes to fruition it would have to mean that the right's already won and tactical considerations of seizing power would be irrelevant then anyway, basically making such advice "Don't even try to make any gains until your victory is already fully assured anyway. Surely that'll work right?") is a classic "With 'friends' like these, who needs enemies?" situation, not a path to "real power".

If "liberals" want to interpret liberalism to mean game theory denialism that pretends that tit for tat is not just and effective, then as far as I'm concerned they can keep their "coalition" to themselves and try their luck with the lefties. Surely you'll be able to convince them to shut down their attack mobs, right? Don't think so. (That is, liberals need us more than we need them. Almost no true liberal has ever been attacked in the modern era by right-wingers over it, whereas they tend to share institutions with lefties who love taking their scalps constantly for supporting insufficiently many Stalins. The right has been the only modern refuge for true liberals. If you want to reject the only shred of protection you've got, the only people who have ever gone to bat for you, because they're actually choosing to fight back against their and your mutual enemy now during an obvious opportune moment that's actually presented itself in the real world (instead of waiting for a hypothetical Death Note keikaku from a Substack post to play out), so you can jump out of "principle" on grenades for lefties who already think you're the same "fascists" as us too anyway (and still will after they reward your generosity by gulaging you themselves later), then be our guests. Just don't expect us to jump with you though.)

Going based on the above, I absolutely resent and reject the notion of @FiveHourMarathon below that those advocating for retaliation in this case are therefore not "principled libertarians"

...

Though I personally am not super attached dogmatically to libertarianism...

So you're not a libertarian, but you feel resentful that you've been labeled as less than a principled libertarian. No doubt you'll also resent not being called an observant Muslim, or an implication that you had a less-than-stellar academic record at the University of Padua.

So let's address one of your examples. I honestly lost a track of who deserved how much tat so I'm just gonna stick with the first one.

Do you know what the best way is to get a child to stop pinching you, thus ensuring no pinching for everybody? Pinch him back just as hard (if not slightly harder), so he understands how it feels (and the precarious dynamics of getting into a pinching fight). No pinchy child has ever thought, "Well I've been pinching this adult all day and he's kindly not retaliated every time even when he could have, so I guess I should just stop pinching him forever. Peace has been achieved for our time."

This assumes that your opponents are the children, while you picture yourself as the adult. This strikes me as wishful thinking. At best, these are two co-equal parties, neither of which has strict escalation dominance. At worst, this scenario is the reverse: a child, tired of being spanked, sees that just this once, his father has bent over to pick something up, and now he has the chance to spank his father and see how he feels getting spanked for a change! Do you think that any father, spanking a child he found to be acting out, has been hit back by the child and thought "Now I understand how it feels, I guess I should stop spanking him, peace has been achieved in our time."

Because this isn't a permanent turning of the tables, it is a momentary advantage to the right. For completely random reasons, for this moment, the right has a limited power to hit back. What scalps have they taken in the process? Not nearly enough to deter their enemies, but enough to lose the moral high ground in the eyes of people who think it is acceptable to make any kind of joke you please. I'm cancellable either way for a party with sufficient surveillance of my life: I've made nigger jokes and I've made jokes about politicians deserving death. Hell, I've made serious philosophical arguments about trans people and justifying the assassination of politicians, call the thought police! I may not be the perfect Libertarian, but I am going to note how people behave.

When the child hits his father, he won't cause his father to change his mind about spankings. He won't inflict enough pain on his father that his father will be deterred from hitting him in the future. What he will do is convince onlookers that his father was probably correct to hit him, even retroactively, because clearly a kid that would hit his parent is acting out and needs to be put in line.

So you're not a libertarian, but you feel resentful that you've been labeled as less than a principled libertarian. No doubt you'll also resent not being called an observant Muslim, or an implication that you had a less-than-stellar academic record at the University of Padua.

Well, sure, if you intentionally cut out the part where I say I do somewhat identify with libertarianism regardless (in that I by no means discount the abundant importance of liberty as a crucial value), even if I don't consider myself an absolute dogmatist (though realistically I'm probably still more libertarian than much if not most of the US population), then I guess my words do sound somewhat stupid, don't they? I'm not a dogmatic "animal rights" supporter either, but yeah I'd probably chafe as well if you suggested that my viewpoints mean that I'm not generally a principled opponent of random dog slayings too. (But yes, if left-wingers came specifically at right-wingers' dogs, part of the solution would be...)

And in fact, though I'm certainly not a communist to any degree, I would still object if you suggested that "principled communists" should oppose something for spurious reasons that have nothing to do with communism. That's just called defending reason.

In any case I will note for the record that other than trying to snark at me with a "gotcha" about me not wanting to box myself in as whatever your definition of "principled libertarian" is (which you probably aren't either for many definitions I could come up with, as I'll demonstrate below), you did nothing to challenge my claim that retaliation is perfectly compatible with and in fact necessary in libertarianism.

At worst, this scenario is the reverse: a child, tired of being spanked, sees that just this once, his father has bent over to pick something up, and now he has the chance to spank his father and see how he feels getting spanked for a change! Do you think that any father, spanking a child he found to be acting out, has been hit back by the child and thought "Now I understand how it feels, I guess I should stop spanking him, peace has been achieved in our time."

It's rather humorous that you ask this as if it's inconceivable, because in a more accurate (as an analogy) and only very slightly tweaked formulation of your scenario, the answer is absolutely... yes! Many physically abusive parents have definitely been chastened by their children showing them that they are grown enough to now beat the parent's ass instead. It's as common of an anecdote as it is a media trope, the 13-17 year old boy who gives his rough stepdad his first black eye to fiercely let him know that he's never going to hurt him or mom again.

Now you may protest that you were talking about presumably justified spankings (assuming spanking can be justified, as much research on childhood discipline says it can't) here, not physical abuse, but since the referent in the analogy is leftist "cancellation" (which I believe even your own argument admits is unwarranted), my change for it to be physical abuse instead of mere spanking (which would be more akin to some neutral, order-keeping activity of an official authority like a cop or judge) is more accurate to the real case the analogy references. (It's worth nothing that in the real scenario there is also nothing analogous to the right coming after the left merely because it happened to come across themm innocently bent over (unlike the innocent gamers who really were doing not much other than enjoying their preferred medium when leftists attacked them in one of the earliest shots of the culture war, Gamergate) as opposed to, you know, openly cheering on the assassination of their current political leader...)

So yes, if you're a child who is unfairly physically abused a parent, whether it's in the ostensible form of spankings or not, you should absolutely, definitely beat that abusive parent's ass in return as soon as reasonable to try to deter them into stopping. And I certainly question the morality of anyone who is against that statement on a moral level (as opposed to saying on a tactical level that it's not a wise time for it yet).

Along the lines of my parentheses, you might further object to this that the right cannot be sure that it has truly become a big enough child to hold off its parent for good. A little temporary retribution now, no matter how satisfying, might just lead to a bigger, angrier ass whoopin' from daddy later, right? But that is merely a question of tactics, not ethics. Who is the parent, who is the child, and if the child has become large enough to challenge the parent-- that is all still to be decided. Yet it's a well-known fact of martial strategy that you can lose a war by being too passive and not taking advantage of a situation just as much as you can lose it by being too eager to take advantage of one. Evaluating the risk/reward, I think the opportunity here is worthwhile. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but again that's not a moral judgment.

What he will do is convince onlookers that his father was probably correct to hit him, even retroactively, because clearly a kid that would hit his parent is acting out and needs to be put in line.

Again, I completely question not only the morality but in fact the "principled libertarian" bona fides (given the inherently hierarchical and coercive nature of parental authority over children, though I won't be as much of a shit (yet) as to question you if you're allowed to consider yourself a "principled libertarian" if you're not against it) of anyone who sees a child driven to physical violence against their own parent and automatically assumes the child is 100% in the wrong without appropriate additional context.

Not nearly enough to deter their enemies, but enough to lose the moral high ground in the eyes of people who think it is acceptable to make any kind of joke you please.

Yes, we've apparently lost the "moral high ground" in the eyes of "principled libertarians" who, in my reckoning, seem to think something at least like the equivalent of that you should be allowed to physically assault your kids with impunity and them fighting back at all is merely automatic proof that they deserved it in the first place (which I think is a reasonably fair interpretation of your words in the quote above the most recent). Somehow I think we'll live.

Well, I guess we'll see what happens then. One set of facts about the world will turn out to be correct, but not for years.

Okay, great, as long as you're not sticking to your story that retaliation is incompatible with any notion of libertarianism. Also don't automatically assume the child is wrong in conflicts between child and parent; some parents are legitimately abusive.

It's as common of an anecdote as it is a media trope, the 13-17 year old boy who gives his rough stepdad his first black eye to fiercely let him know that he's never going to hurt him or mom again.

It is probably also worth pointing out that, for males, the ability and willingness to do this (to parental figures or to authority more generally) is the ultimate dividing line between child (who can't and aren't) and adult (who can and will).

For females, this dividing line comes when they can successfully convince an adult male to exercise that capacity for violence on their behalf.

If your opponent has more capacity for violence than you it will result in your subhumanization/demotion to child (relative to the more powerful) 100% of the time given infinite time, though whether anyone happens to care is another question entirely.

I'll take the upvotes as a sign that I made that point in a rhetorically effective way that induced the intended response in most readers.

Upvotes for wall-of-text polemics about how much you hate your enemies are usually just a sign that you got a lot of seals to clap for you. There are quite a few people who regularly nominate the most toxic rants for AAQCs, and people who write very calm and well-reasoned arguments for a very unpopular (usually leftist) viewpoint often get heavily downvoted.

This place isn't as bad as reddit, and sometimes upvotes and downvotes do reflect the quality of a post. But no one should delude themselves that the average Motter isn't prone to using upvotes/downvotes as "Fuck yeah!"" or "Fuck you!" buttons.

If they are intelligent enough to recognize the obvious correctness and virtue of what I wrote (in my view), then I'm happy to have them as clapping seals.

Seals are hardly uncivilized anyway. The delightful tricks they can do often greatly supersede those of my adversaries, such as the many Reddit (since you brought it up) mods who yet possess comparable if not superior amounts of blubber.

So I just don't get the anti-retaliation side at all. I just don't. Do you apply this logic to other aspects of your lives?

I'm on the left and I find the "retaliation" angle here somewhat odd. If done solely or primarily out of retaliation or spite - like Cernovich with Sam Seder - where you do not think someone did something bad for real but you just want to give them a taste of their own medicine, then it feels like stupid, emotional, warmongering bullshit to me and I agree with all of the criticisms of the "right wing cancel squads" that I've seen in the past few days.

If you genuinely think it's really bad to support the attempted assassination of any major political figure, then while there can certainly be a retaliation motive, you're still broadly acting in good faith by trying to get people cancelled. If there's some sort of "I have a principle of supporting freedom of speech and opposing cancel culture but the desire for just deserts is temporarily overriding that at the moment" going on as well - sure, whatever. But if you actually are disgusted and outraged by people endorsing assassination attempts, I really see zero issue with any of these cancellations, because 1) that part of the motive seems "pure", and 2) I personally agree that it's bad to endorse assassinating politicians (including Trump, who I detest) so I feel fine with it.

I'm assuming most of these pro-cancellers on the right aren't just looking for some excuse to cancel annoying leftoids and gleefully jumping on the opportunity. As Scott points out, such behavior is bad and dumb for many reasons, including that one has no evidence any of these assassination-supporters endorse the sorts of cancellations the canceller despises, even if it could be likely. I figure most of the pro-cancellers in this situation just share the logic of most pro-cancellers on the left: they see something they find sickening and corrosive to society and antithetical to morality, and they're doing something about it.

(There's some wiggle room here: a liberal making a joke about the shooting does not necessarily genuinely think the shooting is good or desirable. For the sake of argument I'm speaking about the people who clearly sincerely are saying and believing "I wish the shooter hadn't missed".)

I'm on the left and I find the "retaliation" angle here somewhat odd. If done solely or primarily out of retaliation or spite - like Cernovich with Sam Seder - where you do not think someone did something bad for real but you just want to give them a taste of their own medicine, then it feels like stupid, emotional, warmongering bullshit to me and I agree with all of the criticisms of the "right wing cancel squads" that I've seen in the past few days.

It's not necessarily pure spite, for some pro-retaliation people it's about making it stop. In my opinion it's a valid approach, but requires better targets then random Home Depot workers.

stupid, emotional, warmongering bullshit to me

Is it warmongering to wage war against those who have already started a war with you? Or if it is, is warmongering still a vice in that case?

Wow, an angry rant talking about how the libs really do deserve hatred. Enjoy your trip to the QCs.

This is not a ban message or even a warning, because what you’re saying here is within the rules. At least, I’m fairly confident that’s the case; my eyes glazed over somewhere around the third agonizing metaphor. But compared to your previous screed, it’s positively restrained, so you’re getting credit for improvement.

You’re still missing the point.

Contrary to what certain critics believe, the point of this forum is not to emulate Hitler. It should be abundantly clear that all Hitler’s self-righteous fire did not keep him from being a fuckwit. No, he wallpapered over his incoherent philosophy by speaking to the anger and desperation in his audience. That is not conducive to truth-seeking. If you care about that at all, that feeling of righteousness should be a warning, not a point of pride.

Wow, an angry rant talking about how the libs really do deserve hatred.

Hey look, more proof of a point from my subsequent post:

And this is why the strictest literal letter of the rules here is rarely/only selectively enforced, though who gets the privilege of bending them the most can differ based on mod fiat.

Completely uncharitable and overly simplistic, putting words in my mouth summary of what is essentially a post about game theory and the broader implications/necessity of retaliation to prevent defection? Check. Coming from a mod, so totally kosher and okay? Check. (Would a user have ever been guaranteed to be modded for such a thing? No (as again it depends on who they are anyway). Could they readily have been modded, especially at least with a warning, for such a thing over the course of this forum's existence? The exact probability depends on the time period and who was mod at the moment, but absolutely. As always though the mods here fire confidently and freely on the posters, safe in their nests, while the rest of us fight it out in no man's land waiting to see if a machine gun will suddenly take us out.)

It should be abundantly clear that all Hitler’s self-righteous fire did not keep him from being a fuckwit.

Agreed, in many, if not some of the most important ways, unfortunately. :(

Contrary to what certain critics believe, the point of this forum is not to emulate Hitler.

It shouldn't be to emulate anyone, but that doesn't mean you can't learn from them.

Your mistake is apparently assuming that history, even the "good" history, isn't mostly littered with "fuckwits" or that even the best figures in history weren't "fuckwits" in their own way. I mean, though Hitler made many bad decisions, luck is also a factor. Some of the least "fuckwitty" figures in history were actually still just "fuckwits" with better dice rolls.

If you can't learn from the best aspects of "fuckwits", then you're not really trying to learn IMO. Arrogance is the cousin of ignorance.

No, he wallpapered over his incoherent philosophy by speaking to the anger and desperation in his audience.

Well, that's fine. His philosophy was somewhat incoherent at times (which is often basically inevitable when you have to be an actual leader in the real world who has to unite disparate factions like German Protestants, German/Austrian Catholics, Aryan mystics, vehemently atheist racial science enthusiasts, etc. into unsteady coalitions instead of just posting the Internet). Mine is (mostly) not, I believe. Must it be only the incoherent who wield anger and desperation? Should only criminals have guns?

That is not conducive to truth-seeking.

Truth-seeking, maybe not. Truth-sharing, yes. What's the point of the first without the second? I thought I had a truth, so I coated it in the medicine that I also thought would best make it go down others' mental throats smoothly.

If somebody, like maybe for example you, had posted some amazing logical rhetoric that soundly refuted my central point, then I would have read it with rapt attention, admitted they were right if so, and that would be truth-seeking. (Or perhaps truth-baiting, its cousin. That's what you do when you post something on a forum like this that you think is true. You bait a possible counter-truth, the realer, better truth. I think that's a perfectly valid form of truth seeking.)

Instead I was entirely prevented from speaking for a little bit for communicating the truth a bit too spicily. And now from the same police force I'm receiving similar spice back for pointing that out. Oh well. A lost opportunity for truth-seeking, perhaps?

Pray, where shall I seek the truth you believe I need if none shall put it out there to find? Is your anger at me the real truth, as opposed to my anger at left-wingers? Are you truth-seeking/baiting and/or truth-sharing with your post? Enlighten me.

Or feel free to respond to my original post again, without the mod hat (which seems highly superfluous in this case given that you say you're not even warning me (though it sure seems to me like using a mod hat at all is inherently at least a "quasi-warning", which itself elaborates upon the weird political/power dynamics of this place) and my post is entirely within the boundaries of the rules), and actually engage with my real argument this time. I mean, sorry for the "agonizing metaphors". Feel free to skip them if they don't add anything to your understanding. But the whole post is still only about 12K characters, hardly a novel, and I promise you I didn't waste my time writing it with the intention that it be entirely without substance.

So if you think it doesn't represent the truth that should be sought, perhaps you could present the truth, for the benefit of all of us, that we should be seeking instead of just apparently raging that I invoked the Great Satan? Again, enlighten me.

Ban or not, I stand by everything I said. (As the great rhetorician Adolf Hitler proves (regardless of what you think about his politics), sometimes you must breathe fire and brimstone to communicate the righteous fury necessary to get your point across, and I'll take the upvotes as a sign that I made that point in a rhetorically effective way that induced the intended response in most readers. With that said and my prior point made, I will take a different approach in this post.)

IMO, this represents everything wrong with what the Motte has become.

Maximizing your "rhetorical effectiveness" is literally just a fancy way of saying "I'm waging the culture war". You're not in traffic - you are traffic. You are intentionally optimizing for heat rather than light and you're proud of it.

The fact you got "upvotes" merely proves that other people on this site are also angry - that you are in an echo chamber. What an achievement.

I remember when expressing anger and hatred wasn't considered a virtue back in the good ol' reddit days. Alas.

Well said. I don't upvote very often, but I feel this deserved one. The purpose of the Motte was always supposed to be light rather than heat, but it is often... not the best at shedding that, and sometimes attracts posters more interested in raising the temperature. Let's bring it back down.

Thank you for putting this to words.

This community is unusually good at resisting the urge. On the other hand, it’s a really strong urge, and it benefits from feedback loops we can’t really control. The site would be boring with zero fire, which is part of the reason Deiseach and Hlynka were so well-known. Can’t keep them while trying to enforce civility. Can’t keep their critics if we bend the rules for charisma. Lose-lose.

Many people here over the course of years or even decades were probably incubated in the idea that anger or hatred were not virtues, and should be avoided despite our occasional, personal lapses. Your parents, teachers, and media all probably echoed the same sentiments, and this was sold as non-negotiable bedrock. Over time, you realize this isn't actually how things work, and that many of your moral instructors have a hard time even bothering to keep up the act. And so you go from having a sincere belief, to an abstract ideal, to lip service, and it has now bottomed out entirely. A fairy tale has lost its spell, and we are all Spider-Man now.

I don't think this should be license for infinite rudeness or malice. But if we're going to talk about modern cancel culture dynamics and explore the idea of 'revenge' being compatible with 'justice' (for real, not snapping up the drawbridge at "eye for an eye" platitudes), then this ire is a very legitimate data point, and it is ignored at everybody's peril.

I see where Scott is coming from, and it is not even close to overcoming the war memorial I can visualize of victims shitcanned for transgressing progressive values in the most milquetoast ways. And I don't know why I should have to reflect in the mirror and assume I'm the one getting warped because I feel a bit cross.

(Hear, hear! I think this is the first comment I've upvoted on this site.)

There's a lesson to be learned in the idea that justice and hate aren't so clearly delineated. It just needs to be contemplated by more people from more walks of life first.

My point is that this space and its precursors (Less Wrong, slatestarcodex.com, /r/slatestarcodex, /r/themotte) all believed that charity and knowledge-seeking were virtues - and that venting your anger was not. The expectation was that, when participating in those spaces, you made a good faith effort to pursue those virtues - however imperfect. The person I was responding to was, to my reading, effectively saying "I didn't fail to achieve those values by mistake - I intentionally pursued opposing values and see that as the correct course of action" - the literal opposite of the original founding values.

I'm not expressing an opinion on what "The Right" or "The Left" should do or should value. I'm expressing an opinion on what this website should value.

I disagree with this - the entire reason LessWrong got as big as it got was that Eliezer very much "brought the fire" in the name of advocating for his vision of correct thought. I don't think you can read, say, the Zombies sequence and argue it's cold and passionless.

"What does the god-damned collapse postulate have to do for physicists to reject it? Kill a god-damned puppy?"

I upvoted the parent because I think it's entirely in keeping with that rhetorical lineage.

I’m not saying you should never be angry - I’m saying being proud of your anger is the antithesis of rational thought and shows you aren’t operating in good faith. It turns this website into “let’s all vent about the outgroup”.

The idea that there is some state of pure discourse free of even the hint of antagonism where humans merely discuss, unmolested by concepts like personal interest or context, the culture war without waging it to any degree is a fantasy, unless they're Spock (in which case they aren't human) or some secret time traveler posting from 3050 who finds the whole thing irrelevant. Maybe it's an important or necessary fantasy to prevent a discussion forum from entirely turning into /pol/, so maybe me getting banned for stretching kayfabe a little too much with my prior post was necessary (not that I really think so, but I have no idea where the Culture War Roundup community went or how I can participate in it), but it's still a fantasy.

But no, I wasn't optimizing for heat instead of light in that post. (That's more like a genre of post not uncommonly made on /pol/ that says something like "All women like to be dominated, therefore all Israeli women secretly want BHC (Big Hamas Cock). Only JIDF shills disagree. Prove me wrong, if you work for Mossad. Also, God doesn't exist, and Nick Fuentes is confirmed gay. But don't post in this thread if you have an American flag, because I don't want to talk to mutts who can't stop getting themselves shot." (Pls don't ban me mods for accurately imitating a /pol/ poster like you previously banned me for accurately imitating a black person. It's genuinely just an example to illustrate the difference between what I posted and what actually optimizing for heat is.)) I simply acknowledge that there's no light that doesn't also produce heat, and sometimes the best way to get the kind of light you need effectively is to turn up the heat a bit (whereas with my current post I instead tried a more logic-based rhetorical approach). Again, only in a fantasy world is this never the case.

The only thing strict adherence to the absolute most literal letter most rules here gets you is the culture war still being clearly waged, just in an infuriatingly indirect, passive aggressive fashion, like when Andrew Yang fans would pretend they were entirely non-partisan even though they obviously leaned heavily to the left. (And this is why the strictest literal letter of the rules here is rarely/only selectively enforced, though who gets the privilege of bending them the most can differ based on mod fiat.) I prefer my direct approach, though it's of course necessarily limited by the venue.

And I am traffic as opposed to merely in it? Good. I appreciate the compliment. The only thing that gives me pause about the current state of this world is that I'm not getting in its way enough, not that I'm getting in its way too much. You know who also acted as really infuriating traffic for the drivers on the road once? This guy. Traffic can be a noble thing.

So am I just waging the culture war? No more than basically anybody else here, even if I acknowledge it a bit more than some. Maybe I'll get popped extra/again for rejecting the polite fiction that this is a venue inherently opposed to that, but again if that happens given the pretty anodyne tone of my current posts then that's just a matter of selective enforcement, not reality.

In any case, if you think my prior post was wrong, then you should be happy with the mods here, who banned me and incentivized me to use a different rhetorical strategy this time. Your Motte lives, or at least its naked emperor has not yet ended his alleged fashion show.

The fact you got "upvotes" merely proves that other people on this site are also angry

That's good for me. They should be in my view.

that you are in an echo chamber. What an achievement.

Yes, I'm happy to confirm that some reasonably intelligent people agree with me. (Though according to the OP's count, almost a quarter of voters still disagreed with me, so hardly an echo chamber. Perhaps I just made a good point, even if it wasn't dressed up all fancy in pretending that I have no dog in the fight?)

I remember when expressing anger and hatred wasn't considered a virtue

I remember those days too. They were called the '90s when I lived them. Alas, they've changed some things since then that have affected people's propensity for anger and hatred.

I'm not saying your original post represents "everything wrong with what the Motte has become" - I'm saying that particular paragraph I quoted does.

I don't expect unbiased discourse.

I don't expect an unadulterated pursuit of perfect knowledge.

I don't expect every single post to be an epitome of kindness.

I used to expect that the above was the desire. I used to expect that we had a shared desire to be unbiased, knowledge-seeking, and kind. That, when we fell short in this space, it was considered a mistake rather than something to be lionized. This is why the most important part (which I italicized) is you're proud of it.

That is what has been lost in my opinion. It used to be that the consensus was that we had ideals rooted in charity, curiosity, etc - however imperfectly rendered in practice. IMO, those ideals are no longer the consensus on this website.

"Kind", no. But I do desire to be relatively unbiased (other than by what I see as the truth) and knowledge-seeking (and it's worth noting that it's the pursuit of "kindness" that often inhibits those two more important values), and I think that I'm at a reasonable level of both and that the quoted paragraph in controversy by no means contradicts that. If effective rhetoric invalidates truth and knowledge-seeking, then there is not a truthful or knowledgeable person on this planet (or if there is, he has zero tools to communicate any of it to the rest of us or at least is apparently not supposed to use them, which seems a bit unproductive to me).

IMO, those ideals are no longer the consensus on this website.

That's the rub, isn't it? Any time you make a venue to attract intelligent people founded on a certain set of principles, if you succeed, those principles will inevitably be challenged, because intelligent people (who you wanted to attract) always challenge principles and ideas. Perhaps by its original standards this place would have stayed better if it had stayed dumber, because dumb people listen and obey.

But yeah, I'm fine with being proud of not being lockstep in agreement with communicative norms inspired by weird Berkeley polysex people who have for the most part collectively accomplished nothing, even easy layups like all getting rich on Bitcoin so they could influence everything with money, other than mostly ruining their reputation in the mainstream. They don't have a monopoly on truth or knowledge-seeking any more than I do, and their blog posts from 2014 or whenever about Edwardian Salafi Confucius Lite etiquette or whatever are not the gospel for all time.

As mentioned too, the people who most adhere to the commandments of "niceness" on this site and other places like it overwhelmingly aren't actually that nice deep down either (including its alleged enforcers, if you'll look at the angry response left on my post by a mod here who chose to don their hat for it despite declaring it not even a warning) I often find. At their best, they're better at keeping the knife hidden behind their back. At their worst, they're merely sneakier about pulling it out and plunging it into your throat before you've even noticed.

That's why I'd rather hear it straight and say it straight, even if pesky human feelings and shocking realities like "conflict" and "People often associate negative emotionality with sociopolitical and cultural issues, especially when those who oppose their preferred beliefs and have hurt them over it appear." end up involved. That to me is helping the pursuit of truth and knowledge. Revealing that I'm biased by what I see as the truth in a particular evidentiary or even emotional (yes, we are not Vulcans, not even the rats) direction is helping the conversation stay overall less biased (or at least transparent about it, which realistically with humans involved is the best you can hope for). Everything else is a smokescreen of little imperial court mandarins just desperately trying not to rock the boat. Boring and pointless.

That's the rub, isn't it? Any time you make a venue to attract intelligent people founded on a certain set of principles, if you succeed, those principles will inevitably be challenged, because intelligent people (who you wanted to attract) always challenge principles and ideas. Perhaps by its original standards this place would have stayed better if it had stayed dumber, because dumb people listen and obey.

There may be a correlation between intelligence and contrarianness, but I think you're going a step beyond that and asserting a correlation between intelligence and aggression, or between intelligence and lack of charity.

I find that much more doubtful.

I will repeat my recent reply to a very similar objection for efficiency's sake in response to you:

Maybe not, but I'm not sure that the agreeable are generally more intelligent than the "disagreeable" (assuming in this case that a mere propensity for dissent and adversarial analysis is equivalent to the psychological trait of disagreeableness, but I won't get into the weeds of dissecting that now) either. That means that at a minimum, if you try to draw intelligent people to your platform, you will attract both kinds. In fact, if even just 5% of intelligent people are somewhat "disagreeable" (or actually disagreeable), that's still enough people in raw terms to force every janny online into a jumble daily.

So while I was perhaps asserting such a correlation (not sure if I want to commit to that or explain more nuance, but it's not super important), and I am perhaps wrong if I was, it's still worth nothing that no such correlation is required for "aggressive", "charity-lacking" (by your standards, as by my standards the mods here often lack the most charity when modding others' posts) people to be all up in your intellectual discussion venue (based on subjective frequency of appearance).

I haven't asserted that agreeability correlates with intelligence either. In fact, I just said that I think plausibly intelligence correlates with being contrarian.

But being contrarian, or even just disagreeableness simpliciter, is not the same thing as being a passionate culture warrior who seeks heat rather than light. I don't particularly care to discuss moderation here, particularly since, in my experience, culture and implicit norms are vastly more important than explicit rule enforcement.

Where I object to what you're saying is that I think you're defending a pugilistic, uncharitable approach to discussion, which I think is opposed to a goal like actually learning. I think a measure of charity, of good-faith curiosity and desire to understand different perspectives, is necessary for intellectual growth, and that's what I think is lacking in what you advocate.

That doesn't mean I think people should be dishonest, passive, or should feign agreement. Forthrightness is an intellectual virtue. But that is still a long way away from a Hitler-like "fire and brimstone" approach.

It may be that fire and brimstone are more persuasive - indeed, if your goal is to sway the public, they almost certainly are. In your top comment, you described Hitler as a 'great rhetorician', and indeed he was. But rhetoricians optimise for persuasiveness, rather than truth-seeking. 'Winning' in the sense of swaying more of an audience is something you may sometimes want to aim for. But here is supposed to be a place about 'winning' in the sense of learning and increasing your understanding.

That's why I think the aggressive, militant approach is wrong here. Soldier mindset, to use Galef's term, may be great for soldiers - but we're not soldiers. This is not a barracks.

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Sounds like we agree there has been a shift - just not on whether the shift is desirable. C'est la vie.

That's the rub, isn't it? Any time you make a venue to attract intelligent people founded on a certain set of principles, if you succeed, those principles will inevitably be challenged, because intelligent people (who you wanted to attract) always challenge principles and ideas. Perhaps by its original standards this place would have stayed better if it had stayed dumber, because dumb people listen and obey.

Personally, I don't think disagreeableness is all that tightly correlated with intelligence, and I certainly don't think that people who feel a need to vent on social media are more intelligent than those who don't.

Personally, I don't think disagreeableness is all that tightly correlated with intelligence, and I certainly don't think that people who feel a need to vent on social media are more intelligent than those who don't.

Maybe not, but I'm not sure that the agreeable are generally more intelligent than the "disagreeable" (assuming in this case that a mere propensity for dissent and adversarial analysis is equivalent to the psychological trait of disagreeableness, but I won't get into the weeds of dissecting that now) either. That means that at a minimum, if you try to draw intelligent people to your platform, you will attract both kinds. In fact, if even just 5% of intelligent people are somewhat "disagreeable" (or actually disagreeable), that's still enough people in raw terms to force every janny online into a jumble daily.

If there is no correlation, then intelligence doesn't have anything to do with it, and your claim reduces to "as new people come to a platform, values drift unless they're all super agreeable, because some of the new people disagree with the original values". This is (I think?) obviously true, but doesn't pad our egos in the same way.

Re the 5%, my opinion is that the most confrontational 5% of users are net-negatives in terms of overall discourse quality and discourse quantity (i.e. they drive other users away). It seems like you don't agree?

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The anti-retaliation side assumes that there are more groups than the two monoliths, of which one is actively doing the titting upon all tatters and the other has only now gained a reprieve to briefly tat upon all titters.

If I'm someone who dislikes the left at their current level of cancel-happiness, yet would dislike the right more if they were in power and would be just as cancel-happy, then blind, cathartic retaliation from the right as soon as they can teaches me that I actually don't want to give them a chance to prove they'll stop canceling as soon as they get the catharsis out of their system.

So again, per my post, do you apply this logic universally? Do you recoil at Little Timmy punching Brad, because you imagine that in all of his resentful little fury he'd probably be just as bad of a schoolyard bully or worse if he had Brad's status?

If "I believe you would behave badly if you were in a position of strength, therefore I can't support your retaliation from a position of weakness in the present moment." is a solid argument against retaliation, then retaliation is basically off the table entirely, because, as the old saying goes, power corrupts. If anybody who might take inappropriate advantage of a position of strength is banned from defending themselves from a position of a weakness, then almost everybody would be banned from defending themselves from a position of weakness.

Among the victims of mass shooters, for example, haven't there almost certainly been some who themselves fantasized about going Columbine occasionally? The types of young men who perpetrate these massacres have also not infrequently been their victims. So if one of these potential victims who likes to indulge in a little GTA and might even do so IRL if they had the power to do it without consequences (as unlike an actual mass shooter they're not willing to give up their life over it) manages to wrest control of a gun from an actual current mass shooter and end him, we should object?

The anti-retaliation side assumes that there are more groups than the two monoliths, of which one is actively doing the titting upon all tatters and the other has only now gained a reprieve to briefly tat upon all titters.

I think this is just a bad assumption. Yes, left vs. right is somewhat reductive, but in regards to the issue of Donald Trump's assassination, splitting people into those two camps is hardly inaccurate.

Your mistake is assuming that "their unprovoked assault, our retaliation" is a correct take on the situation in the first place, because you once again reduce the two coalitions to monoliths. A better analogy would be Little Timmy "retaliating" by punching Kyle, who actually didn't touch him other than standing next to Brad and looking complicit. What is Kyle going to think now? Likely that if he's going to be assaulted anyway (perhaps for some verbal insult against Timmy), he might as well join in on the beatdown.

"I believe you would behave badly if you were in a position of strength, therefore I can't support your retaliation from a position of weakness in the present moment." is a solid argument against retaliation

My argument is "if you don't like the side I'm closer to, how about you start your retaliation with the people who have wronged you most, not the people who are the easiest targets, such as myself. Otherwise, you'll find me closing ranks". If you don't care and see yourself as a perpetual Little Timmy, then be my guest and flail around. I'll keep the enforced pronouns.

A better analogy would be Little Timmy "retaliating" by punching Kyle, who actually didn't touch him other than standing next to Brad and looking complicit.

Which Kyle has been attacked? Because if we consider who has been highlighted as the most innocent victim (the Home Depot cashier), she wasn't targeted for merely "standing next" to anyone or "looking complicit". Nobody is going after people who just happen to merely identify as left-wingers or Democrats, simply automatically assuming they support Trump's assassination (even though of probably many if not most of them do based on their "stopping Hitler" rhetoric), and proceeding from there (as left-wingers meanwhile have often done in the past with anybody who identifies as right-wing in relation to their most hated right-wing beliefs, as anyone who has ever tried to post on Reddit can testify to). She made a direct comment supporting Trump's murder. She is, as I characterized her, Sarah. She cheered Brad on openly and wished for the death of Little Timmy's mom.

My argument is "if you don't like the side I'm closer to, how about you start your retaliation with the people who have wronged you most, not the people who are the easiest targets, such as myself. Otherwise, you'll find me closing ranks".

This just gets into my broader point about tit for tat though. If left-wingers had taken your own prescribed medicine and focused their efforts exclusively on the Trumps and Musks of the world instead of the random people using the "OK" hand sign, then we wouldn't be here. But if you go after our cashiers, as you have for years, why shouldn't we go after yours? Are you just going to stop without any retaliation looming over you? Again, I doubt that.

I'll keep the enforced pronouns.

And we'll keep up the aggressive "misgendering" then. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If not, then the gander has no reason to ever let up on the goose.

So I don't even really see where you're contradicting me.

I actually don't want to give them a chance to prove they'll stop canceling as soon as they get the catharsis out of their system.

You already thought that, though, since you said you would dislike the right more given the same actions.

The right currently claims their principles are against the same actions, though. I'm explaining how being flippant about the Home Depot lady makes me disbelieve that they will act according to those stated principles if given the opportunity.

Can your principles not be against certain actions then if you would ever make use of them as demonstrative retaliation to prove their malice (or just to actively quell a threat/as a deterrent to further harmful actions against you)? If somebody punches me in the face and I punch them back, do I lose any credible claim to being basically more or less against punching people forever then? (Or, to specifically address the Home Depot lady, if I've been punched in the face repeatedly for years, and I punch somebody in the face for being a punchist who posted on social media that they're upset I didn't get punched so hard I died.)

The real question was how much blood should be taken, with most responses landing somewhere between "massive" and "infinity".

To play Devil's Advocate for a bit, I'm not sure the answer should be zero either. The historical parallel that comes to mind is the difference in long-term outcome between WWI and WWII. Germany lost both, but at the end of the first hadn't really suffered any major damage to its infrastructure or civilian population, since the front lines were mostly beyond their borders. Belgium and parts of France certainly got hit hard, but I can't help but look at how the second war weaved its narrative around the aftermath of the first: Versailles was unfair, but wasn't even fully enforced, and a generation later Germans were thinking not that the lesson to take away was that simultaneously fighting Russia, France, and the UK was doomed to failure, but that "this time, it'll be different." But the lesson from the second, even before the country was split among occupying forces for several generations, was (loosely) "nothing we could have won would have been worth it."

I can't help but think that to at least some extent, history teaches the costs of the war need to be at least plausibly fairly distributed to discourage revanchism. And I think that could easily be applied to the Culture War: yes, that absolutely sucks for the victims, but ensuring a long-term stable peace is plausibly cheaper than the short term concerns here. Giving one's opponent, after they've inflicted a serious beating, a chance to tap out before getting hit back seems like a recipe for convincing enough people that it might be worth it to try again later.

On the other hand, I don't wholly endorse this view: I generally side with Asimov that "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." But I don't think the idea is completely meritless either.

I'd burn your ChatGPT summary; there are some dubious parts to it:

  • "who they believe have used it against them for years" - the "they believe" fnord is ChatGPT's addition
  • "stating that it would be [...] morally questionable" - he mostly shied away from making that point
  • Scott's mention that it's good strategy to actually get power before beginning the abuses is totally omitted

Given all of those it's likely -EV given the read-everything nature of theMotte.

Also, checking your quotes section:

"So this lady losing her job, if she goes into despair, if she becomes homeless, if she kills herself... So what?" "I don't give one flying fuck that these people are now getting served their own dog food."

These are taken from the same post, but are quoted separately with other stuff in-between.

"We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged."

You took this one out of context; Lizzardspawn is basically in agreement with Scott, with only maybe a bit of ex post facto added to the stuff Scott literally suggested should be illegalised.

You're right, both the chatGPT summary and that one particular quote have been replaced, while the two quotes from the same post are now together and marked.

This is just a reverse application of “When I am Weaker Than You, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom Because that is according to my principles.

First there was cancel culture, with people of all walks of life getting canceled for going against the party narrative (remember the scientist who got canceled for his shirt). Then (interestingly seems to have starred around the time Elon took over twitter) a denial that there is such a thing as cancel culture, and it is just a right wing boogeyman (eg how can cancel culture exist if Shane Gillis is more popular now than when he was canceled from snl) . Now, we’re at the stage when the right is using cancel culture and the left is angry it exists.

The left is very good at progressing by disavowing it’s failures (eg eugenics) and only remembering its successes.

Hopefully cancel culture will be one of those failures, but I think it is too much a part of human nature to ever go away.

Then (interestingly seems to have starred around the time Elon took over twitter) a denial that there is such a thing as cancel culture

I think you have your timeline wrong, I vividly remember having an argument with a girl in 2021 in which she insisted that cancel culture didn't exist and it was just a right-wing phantom.

Then (interestingly seems to have starred around the time Elon took over twitter) a denial that there is such a thing as cancel culture

Huh? I am not very good at recalling exact dates, but I seem to remember "Cancel culture does not exist" being a thing at the tail end of the BLM2 riots, but before Biden got elected. I know time is going fast nowadays, but that's at least few years before Elon started talking about buying Twitter, isn't it?

I seem to remember "Cancel culture does not exist" being a thing at the tail end of the BLM2 riots, but before Biden got elected.

There have been plenty of writers advocating that position, but I'm not sure it's really distinct from the classic "it doesn't exist, but it's good actually" argument. It would amuse my internal memeplex if it started getting quoted back to the the cancelled who were previously cancellers, but I'm not sure that includes the lady from Home Depot.

You’re probably right. I’ve been hearing it more and more frequently lately and associated it with twitter being a more free place and cancellation not working as well as it once did.

The real question was how much blood should be taken, with most responses landing somewhere between "massive" and "infinity".

You seem to be deliberately ignoring the parts where people were saying "Enough until the left no longer uses cancelation as a weapon/realizes what they've unleashed and decide to stop"

Given a realistic model of human behavior, that sounds somewhere between "massive" and "infinity" to me. How long will we keep kidnapping our enemy's children and torturing them to death on stream? Until the blood feud stops. Obviously.

People like to complain about blood feuds and the pointless deaths they caused, they don't seem to complain as much about the people who chose not to fight and were slowly thrown in the dustbins of history.

Scott and all the people who want to play the principled libertarian game don't understand that this isn't the game we're playing. We can only play that game in a society where somebody has won the power game. And to win that one you have to play by its rules. Or you lose.

We can't end blood feuds without a sovereign monopolizing force.

Either the state bans political firings, someone sacrifices enough cultural capital to make it more costly to fire somebody over politics than not firing them, or the weapon keeps being used by both sides. You'd think rats of all people would understand that Unconditional Cooperation is a bad strategy in iterated games like this one.

Given a realistic model of human behavior, that sounds somewhere between "massive" and "infinity" to me.

It wasn't "infinity" when it came to gas attacks in World War I. From the link:

The British expressed outrage at Germany's use of poison gas at Ypres and responded by developing their own gas warfare capability. The commander of II Corps, Lieutenant General Sir Charles Ferguson, said of gas:

It is a cowardly form of warfare which does not commend itself to me or other English soldiers ... We cannot win this war unless we kill or incapacitate more of our enemies than they do of us, and if this can only be done by our copying the enemy in his choice of weapons, we must not refuse to do so.

And I'd point out that blood feuds did end. Indeed, the development of "compensatory" law systems like weregild, or Somali xeer law, arose because people on all sides became tired of the costs of retaliation. Same with the European wars of religion giving rise to the Peace of Westphalia. The same with chemical weapons after WWI as mentioned above.

"Unilateral disarmament" is not a path to bilateral disarmament, and it is a path to peace only in that it's a recipe for the defeat of the side that adopts it. Indeed, the Left cancelling the Right would come to an end if the Right ceased to exist. But otherwise, as with the wars mentioned above, the only way out is through — the only way to get the side using these weapons to lay them down is when they're just as tired of being on the receiving end as the other guys.

All that said, I think that this current example is tactically unwise, and not something the right should be pursuing. It's too early, too weak, poorly aimed, and a diversion of effort best spent elsewhere.

One of the things Scott does not bring up is the lack of an easy narrative from the anti-woke right to allow people to an easy out. If you want victory over your opponents then make it narratively easy for people to recuse themselves until your opponent's coalition is miniscule. Give them plausible deniability, even if it's hollow. Make it as cheap as possible to defect from a coalition.

Your inspiration should be Winston Churchill fighting on behalf of Eastern Front legend General Erich Von Manstein to get him cleared of war crimes charges.

Within living memory of the war itself America & Europe constructed a narrative that recast Nazi's on the Eastern Front into Simple Soldiers merely Doing Their Duty, unaware of the war crimes amidst them. Even the former SS members were recast as what David Glantz describes "above reproach, knights engaged in a crusade to defend Western civilization against the barbaric hordes of Bolshevism". Which is bullshit of course, and to be clear Glantz arguing against this absurdity. But consider the power of the following narrative in giving people an out from their previous enmeshment with a regime.

The German army, or Wehrmacht, fought a "clean" and valiant war against the Soviet Union, devoid of ideology and atrocity. The German officer caste did not share Hitler's ideological precepts and blamed the SS and other Nazi paramilitary organizations for creating the war of racial enslavement and extermination that the conflict became.

The German Landser, or soldier, as far as conditions allowed, was generally paternal and kind to the Soviet citizens and uninterested in Soviet Jewry. That the German military lost this war was due in no way to its battlefield acumen, but to a combination of external factors, first and foremost Hitler's decisions. According to this myth, the defeat of Germany on the Eastern Front constituted a tragedy, not just for Germans, but for Western civilization.

For decades that narrative gave people an excuse. It took until the 90's for Germans to confront the reality of what the Wehrmacht did. But in that crucial period after the war there was a narrative path for millions of people to distance themselves from evil. Interested WW2 amateurs today decry the existence of wehraboo's and how many Japanese and West German officials were former members of their respective regimes but when I compare what happened with de-baathification it sure looks pretty efficacious.

and what's remarkable is that Scott directly links to Yarvin but only regarding Yarvin's coining of the term Brown Scare. And merely linking to Yarvin is a massive risk to Scott's reputability. But in spite of taking that risk he avoids the more relevant to the point at hand which is that Yarvin, from the ultra-right, makes a similar case for avoiding cycles of retaliation by means of giving people an out.

"There's a funny fact about regime change. The federal republic of Germany is still paying pensions not only to retired Stasi officers but also to retired Wehrmacht officers. It is accepted that both of those regimes were Germany. If you served those regimes, and you wern't some major criminal who was prosecuted, yeah, you're entitled to your pension. And the way that shut down worked is, that the day the doors of the stasi building were closed and these people were sent home, you couldn't reboot that system."

Yarvin is also fond of telling parables of Caesar constantly forgiving his enemies. He tells a tale of Caesar winning a battle and scavenging a bag full of letters that would allow his faction to engage in reprisals against every single person who supported his enemies. And that's Caesar's response was to burn the bag. A point independently echoed by Mike Duncan of the History of Rome podcast where Duncan points out that resolution of the civil war basically required someone to take it on the chin and not engage in property confiscation and tribunals after total victory.

So lets simplify and add one more bullet to Scott's list at the end of how to approach this problem instead of massive retaliation.

  1. Remove the laws that give rise to this culture
  2. Encourage universities to follow the Chicago Principles
  3. Improve internet moderation
  4. Make what Cancel Culture is explicit, not generable
  5. Weave a narrative that allows for mass defection

after total victory.

That's the part you're eliding. After, it is possible. Before, it is not.

You conveniently omit the fact that despite his forgiving nature, Caesar was killed by people he forgave and another destructive Civil War ensued. What happened with Augustus is that he learned his lesson. He was murderous in his purges of hardcore elite - he had no issues with Marc Anthony's murder of Cicero and he ruthlessly persecuted hundreds of senators and other opponents. He also utilized other people like his second in command Agrippa to supposedly "overdo" some of the atrocities, only for Augustus to step in as a merciful one to chastise his supposedly overzealeous pet general while of course building huge temples for him as well.

It is similar to denazification: you need to have a way out for some people, but you also have to ruthlessly crush your main opponents and hang them like dogs in order to provide some incentives to defect. Otherwise you only invite snakes like Brutus to stab you in the back.

Per Machiavelli, you should do your evil all at once, then blame the subordinate you had do it, execute him and after that be conciliatory.

I agree strongly with this. In practice I think part of the difficulty is “oh I didn’t realize it before but now I get it” is a very common narrative but can be difficult to tolerate.

See the non-stop rampant accusations of “you just didn't care until it affected you!”

Maybe we need to accept chad_yes.jpg as a valid response….

What do Trudeau conservatives like this want? We can't kill our enemies, because then they win. So when we get power we ??? and profit?

It seems like the overarching theory is that we can induce some sort of stasis where, if everyone behaves and doesn't do anything self serving with power then we can live happily. OK, that's obviously not reality, as this entire rigamarole is fueled by people abusing the power they have. On top of that they have no reason to stop so why would they?

I'm more inclined to chalk this line of thinking to conflict aversion. It's not principle but cowardice.

@WestphalianPeace has a solid idea: win by making the opposition unappealing without removing all their exits.

  • Nazi and Stasi officers alike got their retirements.
  • 60s hippies got real jobs and mortgages and turned into boring adults.
  • Nixon got a pardon and spent 20 years being useful to the state.
  • My grandfather (and the rest of his generation of blue-collar workers) dumped Carter and became lifelong Republicans.

These outcomes are obviously better than stoking a generational feud! Massacring your enemies is a waste.

I really do believe that a boring-ass Mitt Romney candidate would peel away a ton of Democrats. Trudeau equivalents can’t run such a platform because Trump could and would splinter their faction. But it’s the best, proven way to disarm America’s radical left.

@WestphalianPeace has a solid idea: win by making the opposition unappealing without removing all their exits.

Your examples were not that. The Nazis were beaten by main force. The 60s hippies weren't beaten at all. Nixon was beaten before he was pardoned. There may be cases where an enemy, weakened but still dangerous, should be allowed to retreat or surrender and live rather than being wiped out, but the right is not in that position. First they have to be winning, and winning by such a margin that mercy looks like magnanimity rather than weakness.

I really do believe that a boring-ass Mitt Romney candidate would peel away a ton of Democrats.

LOL. Literal boring-ass Mitt Romney got spanked, and the Democrats attacked him with vigor. Dog abuser, binders full of women, "race-mongering pyromaniac", eh?

Eh, that was then, and this is now. The shit flung at Romney was tame by comparison.

He was also running against a healthy, charismatic incumbent in the wake of a recession. Biden hasn’t been very visible, and the closest he’s come to signature legislation is student loan helicopter money. The COVID management was mediocre at best. The infra bill got panned as a DEI sinecure. He didn’t offer the radical centrists much on campaign, but I think they’ve been disappointed.

No, his most important trait is Not Being Trump. Harris is running on a similar “platform”.

If Republicans had that on the table, I’m confident it would be very well received…amongst Democrats. And there’s the rub. So long as Trump can spoil the election, Republicans have to keep his base satisfied. That means not compromising.

No, his most important trait is Not Being Trump. Harris is running on a similar “platform”.

If Republicans had that on the table, I’m confident it would be very well received …amongst Democrats.

Do you mind elaborating on what Being Trump is? It seems to imply that Democrats are turned of by his crassness, and if only the Republicans would field someone more presentable, Democrats would be swayed (while swaying Trump's base in the other direction). The issue I have with this idea is that from hanging out with Trumpists it's less about surface-level characteristics, and really really not wanting another empty suit that will sell them out culturally to progressives, financially to corprations, and send them to fight in foreign wars. You can put someone more presentable with a similar platform, and Democrats will blow the "literally Hilter" gasket just the same (see: DeSantis).

So what is the Trumpness that Republicans are supposed to Not Be?

You can put someone more presentable with a similar platform, and Democrats will blow the "literally Hilter" gasket just the same (see: DeSantis).

Exhibit B: Van Jones ‘shaking’ over Ramaswamy remarks: ‘That guy is dangerous’

“And the smug, condescending way that he just spews this poison out, is very, very dangerous. Because he won’t stop Trump, but he’s going to outlive Trump by about 50 years,” he said.

“You’re watching the rise of an American demagogue that is a very, very despicable person. And I literally, I was— I was shaking listening to him talk because a lot of people don’t know. That is one step away from Nazi propaganda coming out of his mouth.”

I think netstack literally means "not being the actual person Donald Trump".

I'm a bit skeptical that this is enough. We already seen some samples of he enhitlering of DeSantis, for example.

It's wrong to analyze this event through the lens of a cycle of escalating violence. I did it myself, before I realized that isn't what's going on.

Left-wing cancel culture is when someone loses their job for violating any norm of the Left, no matter how unpopular and niche. It can be as small as donating years prior to support a popular California ballot measure. Or it can be literally violating a norm that the Left just made up (such as the gentleman that got cancelled for making an "OK" sign out his truck window).

Right-wing cancel culture is basically nonexistent. You can't get cancelled for blaspheming Christ, for example. The man who made a work of art out of statue of Christ in a jar of his own piss received government grants. There is only a small window of power here for celebrating the recent assassination attempt on their political candidate. It will probably last only a few weeks. And it only works because mainstream leftists are willing to support the taboo. It's a good thing they are! This means we are still in a state of politics, and not in a state of war, despite all the rhetoric about Trump being an existential threat to the system.

This taboo against celebrating political assassination is not a partisan thing. It's a load-bearing taboo for our system of government. We depend on political assassinations being rare for our way of life to exist. This taboo absolutely must not erode, or we descend into a system of election by carbomb.

So it's just wrong to model this as tit-for-tat violence. It's 10,000 tits for one tat. And the one tat is a nonpartisan tat that absolutely must hold.

That sounds like Russell conjugation. “I am firm, he is obstinate, you are making up norms as you go.” I expect the people cancelling, uh, Justin Timberlake insist that cultural appropriation is very serious business.

You’re right to be skeptical when a Twitter tankie suddenly discovers that cancellation is immoral. The converse is skepticism towards people announcing that, hey, this cancellation thing feels pretty good! Perhaps they don’t have the purest of motives?

I think there’s a solid case for reluctant enforcement of this critical taboo. I don’t think that it’s the most likely explanation for what we’re seeing. Triumphalism is usually a sign of the same old tribal psychology; this case isn’t any different.

The left claims things like saying "there are only two genders" creates a culture of violence that makes society hostile towards the marginalized and that people who say it deserve to be punished to deter further harm. And I claim that celebrating a recent assassination attempt, especially in public by people of influence, is a bad thing that could make the Republic unravel.

Maybe these are rival perspectives both equally blinded by partisanship. Or maybe one is a true, time-tested fact borne out of hard-won political wisdom and the other is ephemeral revolutionary nonsense.

“People of influence” like Home Depot clerks?

Look, I’d find your argument a lot more convincing if you could point to any left-leaning cancellations which you think clear this bar. Maybe the time they threatened Supreme Court justices in their homes? Those are pretty influential. Or prominent MeToo allegations, given the time-tested political wisdom of defending women.

Surely your criteria don’t exactly line up with your pre-existing politics.

Physical intimidation of Supreme Court Justices is another example of substituting violence or the threat thereof for the political process. Of course I don't support it. It's a shame those who did that were not made an example of, excepting the one who brought a gun to Kavanaugh's house. It's a "loophole" in our democratic system that if left open leads to the collapse of the whole system. Just like the loophole of politicians moving about the

If you're looking for a right-wing version of violating this principle, the correct example is January 6. Though it is notable that significant deterrence was inflicted on the perpetrators in that case. The justice system, acting under the cover of the media-propaganda system, was capable of punishing those who took part in it.

The situation in America is not symmetrical between Right and Left so I reject any implicit demand to find a balanced criticism of each. I live in fear of Left cancellation. All my friends who were cancelled were cancelled by the Left. People who go to university have to swear fealty to the Left. I won't pretend that the Right shares in the Left's flaws equally, because it is not true. The couple of days that you weren't allowed to wish death on Trump in public just aren't the same kind of thing as the decade+ of threat I've experienced from the Left.

This is not a warning, in the sense that I'm not putting a note on your account, but I have two moderator-level questions about your post that I'd be interested in an honest response to, if possible.

The first is your rhetoric concerning the Motte. You wrote:

...while there were some voices calling for restraint...

Which can actually literally mean anywhere from one voice, to all voices; from a small majority to a large one, and anywhere in between. Then you wrote:

...many commenters demanded blood from the left...

Which literally means the same thing as the first part of that sentence, in reverse. However you chose "many" instead of "some," which paints a certain picture of this space. You then dropped four quotes. But weirdly, the first and fourth quotes are from the same post, and it is a post for which that user got banned, which you don't mention. So my first question is: why did you decide to portray the discussion here with such uncharitable rhetoric?

The Motte exists as text. One of the things that sometimes happens to places like this is, what sets them apart from other spaces gets amplified as it gets noticed. So for example people notice that reddit is a teeming hive of fedora-wearing atheists, which attracts more fedora-wearing atheists (and repels non-fedora-wearing-atheists) until the admin slashes-and-burns their way through the algorithm (or whatever), converting the site to a teeming hive of reflexively woke young adults. In a way I suspect this is analogous to Flanderization, but with a community rather than a fictional character. Maybe sociologists have a name for this process?

Anyway, this is a space for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. But our "open debate, no positions banned" policy meant that people with Overton-suppressed political views found this space unusually welcoming. One way we try to tamp down the "seven zillion witches" problem that this eventually Flanderizes to is by emphasizing individual arguments over discussion of "groups" wherever possible. I have often repeated the line "you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic" to people who make sweeping claims about the Motte. It applies to your post, here: the reason I don't want people making claims about the Motte is that I think it tends to Flanderize the space. People read your claim, and it shifts, however slightly, their priors on whether this space is "for them." But of course it's for them! As long as they follow the rules, this space is for everyone, no matter what they believe. That's the foundation; that's the bedrock.

My second question is: why did you include the ChatGPT summary? Did you feel the need to provide a summary but didn't feel up to writing one yourself? Were you just padding your word count in hopes of avoiding a "low effort" moderation action? I'm not accusing you of anything, mind--I'm just curious. You have a pretty good posting history so I was caught off guard by it. Not only does generative AI minimize engagement with your audience, it minimizes your own engagement with the text you're citing. No one benefits from it. It seems to me that ChatGPT quotes are quinessential low-effort participation, unless maybe you're showing your work on a post specifically about generative AI or something. I don't think we've explicitly made it against the rules but I do think it's incompatible with the rules we've got--but maybe I'm overlooking something.

For your first question, you contend that I'm interpreting the conversation in that other thread uncharitably, but I don't think I am. In my eyes, those calling the cancellations justified were a bit more common than those calling explicitly for restraint. It wasn't by a massive amount, and the exact split would come down to how you'd classify some of the people who were ambivalent. But for a quick calculation, check out the upvote totals in this back and forth between KMC and EverythingIsFine. For further evidence, confuciuscorndog's post is what I'd consider to be the most repugnant. This was the one with "eat their own dogfood" bit and the explanation of just how much he wouldn't care if this woman killed herself. Credit where it's due, this post was modded since it flagrantly broke the rules, but even despite this, the reaction from onlookers was "yes, this is the type of content we want to see more of", voted Motte users by more than a 3:1 margin. Then, the post explaining why he was getting modded stands at a nearly equal vote ratio.

You're correct the first and fourth quotes I had were from the same post. I think they're both quite extraordinary and worth highlighting, but I should have kept them together and noted they were from the same post. This was sloppiness on my part and I've corrected it. But... I also wasn't terribly short on bombastic quotes. I've added a few others to the pile after I've reread some of that other thread.

I understand your point about flanderization, and how it can become a self-fulfilling if people keep repeating it even if it's not necessarily true. But the way you're presenting it seems a bit overbroad here. A blanket ban on meta discussions of the forum's ideological split would be to put our heads in the sand and ignore an obvious phenomenon. As it happens, I've been having a relatively bad time with this site recently. One part of it has been conversations with a handful of users that have degenerated to accusations of dishonesty, ad hominems, or disrespect in ways that clearly violate the spirit of the rules while apparently doing just enough to avoid being modded. As someone who has views across the political spectrum, it's hard not to notice that my right-leaning views are received well, my center views are received somewhat well, and my left-leaning views are received with scorn and derision. I've been meaning to do a top-level post on this to make sure it's not just all in my head, but then one presidential candidate got shot in the head, and the other dropped out.

For your second question on chatGPT, I've gotten mostly positive reviews when I've posted summaries on other relatively high quality subs like /r/slatestarcodex and /r/credibledefense. By that, I mean nobody questioned it and people responded to the points earnestly. I don't really like writing summaries but people seem to expect them and it's the type of rote thing that I'd expect an LLM to excel at. Though, notably, I didn't include the fact that it was AI-generated in my other tests, so I'm wondering if there's some placebo effect going on here.

Somebody else pointed out that it might be hallucinating so I've replaced it with Scott's 9 points.

Thanks for the response.

Discussions of the meta are not banned, of course--and I would re-emphasize that my analysis of your comment was not intended in any punitive way. Several users have raised concerns about a slide in the quality of discourse. Two mods have left the site, citing this as a reason. "The discourse is degrading" is not a new accusation; analogous complaints are arguably why the CW thread got kicked off the SSC subreddit in the first place. I've been moderating for something like five years and "the discourse is degrading" has been a steady drumbeat all along. And yet some of the most highly informative and uniquely insightful posts ever contributed to the CW thread were written long ago by users with names like "yodatsracist" and "trannyporno."

So I'm (yes, probably as an exercise in futility) trying to understand the shape of what's really going on. The Sneer Club subreddit (now defunct) was created eight years ago. Most of Scott Alexander's best culture war posts were written in 2014. The underlying mechanism of being "a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases" has contributed to the development of numerous semi-famous and arguably even influential substack writers and podcasters and the like. And yes--it has also resulted in a metric shit-ton of weird stuff, conspiracy-theory level madness, flat-earther tier denials of reality, etc. It has always been that bad, and it has always been that great. And as specific individuals have found its usefulness to them personally to expire, they have on many occasions departed with the declaration that now the Motte is just too much a hive of scum and villainy. But... maybe this time it's different? That's kind of what I'm trying to understand.

I myself no longer find the CW thread as useful as it has been to me in the past! But that's very much about me. The idea of freewheeling discourse being totally cool was well within the Overton window before 2016 introduced the idea of a "Misinformation Age" (whether things actually happened that way or not), and today, well... today people are much more concerned about epistemic hygiene, I guess would be the charitable way to say it. "Wrongthink bad" is not a new idea, but I daresay it is much more fashionable now than it was ten years ago.

I don't know where that leaves us. I've never been the solutions person. I know @ZorbaTHut has expressed some desire to implement solutions in the form of code, but the demands of day jobs are a curse upon us all. (Isn't there something in the Bible about that?) Anyway, thanks for answering my questions, I appreciate the effort and reflection.

Two mods have left the site

I saw TracingWoodgrains posts about leaving here. Who was the other one?

I don't feel particularly enraged but I do think this post is the most clear-cut example of mistake vs. conflict theory I've seen in years if not ever - an acclaimed grandmaster of mistake theory politely addresses one side of the culture war (I don't have my dictionary but I think a "war" can be pictured as a kind of conflict), helpfully suggests that their course of action may be, well, a mistake, and is shocked to discover the apparent persuasive power of yes_chad.jpg. While I do not dare doubt Scott's ulterior motives and believe he really is this naive principled, I refuse to believe he is not aware of what he's arguing, he is this close to realizing it (emphasis mine):

From the Right’s perspective, <...> the moment they get some chance to retaliate, their enemies say “Hey, bro, come on, being mean is morally wrong, you’ve got to be immaculately kind and law-abiding now that it’s your turn”, while still obviously holding behind their back the dagger they plan to use as soon as they’re on top again.

Followed by 9 points of reminding stab victims that daggers are dangerous weapons, and one shouldn't swing them recklessly - someone could get hurt!

Disregarding whether or not the broadly painted enemies-of-the-right are in fact going to go right back to swinging daggers the millisecond the cultural headwind blows their way again (although the answer seems intuitive) - what compelling reason, at this point, is there to believe they would not? Does he really think that gracefully turning the other cheek will magically convince anyone on the obviously dominant side that cancel culture is bad actually - or (less charitably) even lead to any, any "are we the baddies" entry-level introspection among those involved at all? Does he expect anyone at all to be reassured by a reminder that daggers can't legally enter your body without your consent? I suppose he really does since from his list only 8) can be read as a psyop attempt and everything else seems to be entirely genuine, but I'll freely admit this mindset is alien to me.

Does he really think that gracefully turning the other cheek will magically convince anyone on the obviously dominant side that cancel culture is bad actually - or (less charitably) even lead to any, any "are we the baddies" entry-level introspection among those involved at all?

Do the people rationalizing the escalatory course of action as "something we'll do until the other side learns to stop" really think that their actions will lead to any basic "are we the baddies"-type introspection on the left?

No, I don't think any possible actions, up to and including total surrender, will spark introspection.

(that was the joke)

Besides, {russell:fighting back/lashing out/escalatory course of action} once in a while has a far better track record of effectively stopping bullying than just gracefully taking it.

Do the "let's unilaterally surrender" people think the beatings will stop if only we submit more meekly?

"Don't fire back at them when they are shelling us. That will only make them shoot at us even more."

Nonviolence/nonslander as a response to violence/slander is a known part of game theory. It only works when someone on the side of the aggressors has both the introspection to see their actions as wrong and the power to halt the aggression. Otherwise, it’ll have to be tit-for-tat for survival.

At the moment, all such people are on the right, except maybe Obama, Oprah, and Anderson Cooper. (I’m only calling out names the undecided voters would consider following if they called for peace in the culture war.)

I don't think it will lead to introspection by most people on the left; most people in general are incapable of "are we the baddies"-type introspection. An escalatory course of action is likely to lead to a change in behavior by the left because when it's widely known that (doing whatever left-coded thing the right is able to push outside the overton window) will cost you your job, friends, social status, etc. then most people will stop doing that thing. The masses will make posthoc rationalizations for why they were justified in their prior behavior but now they know better.

If the right continues to "take the high ground", there's no reason for the masses to ever change their behavior or beliefs. The right would have to wait until the majority of the left decides to perform that "are we the baddies"-type introspection, and that will never happen.

If the right continues to "take the high ground", there's no reason for the masses to ever change their behavior or beliefs.

On the contrary: if the right abuses the tactics the left does, there's no reason that the masses will ever change their behavior or beliefs. They will see "the right is a bunch of hypocrites" (and they will be correct to do so), and continue to fight to put the screws to their enemies. After all, they thought the right was evil before, the right confirmed it in their eyes, so why shouldn't they fight to put them out of existence?

That's why people keep saying to not escalate things into a cycle of hatred where each side stabs the other as soon as it gets ahold of a dagger. Taking the high road is not a sufficient condition for peace, but it is necessary. Taking the low road simply ensures the conflict will continue unabated.

That does not match my predictions of social behavior or my reading of history. People do not pick sides based on which they view is more of a hypocrite; they pick sides mostly based on what's socially acceptable. The Peace of Westphalia was not negotiated because the Catholics "turned the other cheek" so much that the Protestants felt guilty. It was because everyone got tired of the killing.

The responses to StickerMule's milquetoast post-assassination-attempt call for unity tell me that the left is not close to being tired of the metaphorical killing.

People have already picked sides. The goal at this point is not "get people to pick my side", it's "get people who have already chosen the other side to stand down". And those people are going to double down, not stand down, if the right persists in this hypocrisy on cancel culture.

"Pick sides" in this context is "we should get our enemies fired from their jobs" vs "we should abstain from doing that". Apologies if that wasn't clear.

Regardless, that does not match my predictions of social behavior or my reading of history. From the standpoint of the right, the choices are:

  1. Your proposal, where the right takes the high road and keeps losing the culture war until they cease to exist, or
  2. Double down, expect the left to double down, and let it keep getting worse until both sides agree to stop

I disagree with your analysis. The two choices are, in my view:

  1. Take the high road, and by doing so gain credibility with the left which can be used to cool tensions, or

  2. Double down, expect the left to double down, and let it keep getting worse until both sides agree to stop. Which they may never, and it may not be in our lifetimes.

Option 1 is the clear superior choice in my view. Also note that in option 2, someone still needs to take the high road eventually. So long as people are thinking in terms of "fuck the other guy, it's his turn to get kicked now" (which is what many in this forum have explicitly argued for), the conflict in #2 will never actually end.

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and let it keep getting worse until both sides agree to stop

Do you have some reason to believe this is going to happen? Cold civil war turning to hot civil war seems much likelier.

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A public cancellation works a lot like a public execution: everyone viewing it becomes afraid of committing the same infraction. This occurs whether or not you think the person did the crime or deserved to be punished. It changes psychology mechanically, according to the number of trials / iterations of one stimuli paired with a feared stimuli. It works best when the exposure is random, and in this case it works best when the cancelleé is capriciously chosen and otherwise unworthy of attention. (“If even she can be cancelled, I can too.”) There’s a reason that when we write online, we feel some fear at fully writing the N-Word, and some people feel fear writing faggot and retard, not because of some ethical position everyone developed over decades, but because they have experienced trials that paired this formerly neutral word with a punishment. So when we talk about canceling blameless old ladies, we do have to consider that there are significant social consequences to the act of public consequences, making prominent progressives and liberals on Twitter a little afraid of doing similar things.

I want to register my distaste for quoting and upvote-analyzing prior discussions, and for ChatGPT summaries of articles. Idk that it's worth reporting, but it feels like something that shouldn't be done often. If you can't be arsed to summarize it yourself and the readers can't be arsed to read it, maybe just let it go.

The debate on this just reminds me that there are approximately seven principled libertarians, and everyone else is just using libertarian arguments when convenient. This goes at least back to the States Rights arguments around slavery that lead to the American Civil War, which flipped completely in regional and political valence the moment Abe Lincoln got elected. The slave states were pro-federal-power to enforce the fugitive slave acts, right up until they saw that power likely to be turned against slavery.

I want to register my distaste for quoting and upvote-analyzing prior discussions

This one doesn't bother me. The sentiment / revealed consensus of TheMotte is a valid topic of discussion for TheMotte, and past comments can serve as important data for many conversations.

ChatGPT summaries of articles

This one I agree with. LLM summaries shouldn't serve as a replacement for your own analysis and commentary, even when they're marked as such.

The sentiment / revealed consensus of TheMotte is a valid topic of discussion for TheMotte, and past comments can serve as important data for many conversations.

If you want to reply to a particular comment, reply to it directly and keep that thread going. Don't start a whole new argument trying to take the high ground looking down on them. Upvote analysis doesn't show revealed preferences accurately, it mostly shows the attention economy, a lot of which has to do with timing.

I read a bit, and then started skimming. Not enraged, just disagree with a few points (though I guess I was a voice of relative restraint):

1. Nobody Learns Anything Useful From Being Persecuted

(...) And now they say . . . that lefties must suffer terribly at the hands of cancellation mobs, because it will teach them that cancellation is wrong?

If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught you that. It obviously hasn’t, so try a different strategy.

That's silly. They don't want to do it because they think it's good, they think it's bad, and that his bad thing needs to be done to the people who were doing it with impunity for the past decade. So yes, it has taught them that it's bad.

3. You’re Not Debating Whether To Become Like Woke People, You’re Already Like Woke People

(...) One of the fundamental problems with wokeness was that it believed in collective guilt and collective punishment.

Much like his point about the necessity to define Cancel Culture, I think we need to sit down and talk out the limits of individualism and collectivism. Yes, I agree full-collectivism is bad, but full-individualism is plainly unworkable, and opens you to attack from hostile groups. We mostly know this already - no one is going to treat a hundred thousand Russian soldiers the same way they'd treat a hundred thousand individual Russians they met somewhere. Now one might protest it's obviously different, because an army is an official organization, with uniforms that makes your membership clearly visible from a distance, but I regret to inform you that not all collectives (not even all armies) are kind enough to uniform themselves, or have a clear hierarchical command structure, with a chain of responsibility.

I'd argue half the reason we're in this mess to start with is individualists insisting on individualism, and getting their ass handed to them by collectivists as a result.

I don't have answers here, but I think the question does need to be raised.

5. Most Cancellations Are Friendly Fire

(...) But they’re not stories about Trump, Tucker Carlson, or Nick Fuentes. The median victim of cancel culture is some center-left college professor who sent out an email saying that he supports BLM but questions some of their tactics.

I'd counter by pointing out that Nick Fuentes is, quite possibly, The Most Cancelled Man In America. Aside from that - I stood for a lot of these people when they were getting shot at, and was shot at myself for doing so, you don't get to push me away from them now, just because you've mentally put me in the "red" basket.

9. There’s Probably Other Options

All fine and well, but if you want to avoid a cycle of vengence, you have to at least offer some restitution (everyone that got throttled by Big Tech, will now have to be promoted by the algorithm!), or offer a different venue for the bloodlust. Here's my humble contribution: make it legal for cancellation victims to challenge their cancelers to a duel, and illegal for the cancelers to decline. If you got me fired for the OK handisgn, I get to pommel you in the Octagon until you black out. Bloodlust satisfied, no need for more cancellations, and we even have a mechanism to prevent future cancel mobs!

I think honestly people do learn from being persecuted. If they didn’t we’d never have gotten to this point. The very public cancellations will have some impact if they continue for longer, just like the Budlight thing is having an impact. I’ve noted a decline in public companies making overtly political statements since then. A lot of Pride related merchandising has declined. Companies are somewhat less vocal about DEI since the backlash against that.

What seems to work is targeted cancellations over a long enough time and having mere apologies not being enough.

This may be ungracious, but this is another moment where I cannot help feeling that kind of centrist triumphalism all over again.

The weapon was always bad. It was bad regardless of who used it. It was bad of regardless of who it was aimed at. It was, remains, and will continue to be bad.

"It's different when we do it" was never convincing.

Incidentally, what are people's feelings on these AI article summaries? It's not a long article, and I usually try to avoid that kind of AI summary on principle - especially because it would have been quite easy to just write a summary directly. What value does the machine add?

I feel like this is weak writing by Scott especially for a psychologists. Actions/behaviors change before beliefs. “Wr are what we repeatedly do” - said by some famous philosopher.

Enforcing social norms will eventually change beliefs to your side. This is basic civilizing of barbarians.

Scott’s central point that nobody learns anything useful from persecution feels wrong to me. I would like to live in Scott’s world of principle libertarianism and debating society but unfortunately I think our tribal instincts for bloodlust are likely correct.

You don’t end a cultural civil war by being nice to the other side. When your side is in power you enforce new cultural norms and hope they stick.

I think he is fundamentally wrong that people don’t learn anything from being persecuted. HD lady will learn that she has the wrong memes. And then if you do it correctly accept your memes as correct. Starve or learn new memes.

HD lady will learn that she has the wrong memes.

As I pointed out the last time this topic came up (though perhaps not to you personally, I can't remember): if this were true the culture war would be over by now. Because the right would've learned they have the wrong memes, and changed. The fact that this hasn't happened should be glaring proof to everyone that cancelling the left isn't going to teach them a thing. It will simply further stoke resentment and lead to further conflict.

As I pointed out the last time this topic came up (though perhaps not to you personally, I can't remember): if this were true the culture war would be over by now. Because the right would've learned they have the wrong memes, and changed.

They have. Everything's moved left.

You don’t end a cultural civil war by being nice to the other side. When your side is in power you enforce new cultural norms and hope they stick.

In this case aren’t they the same thing? How is swinging back enforcing a new cultural norm?

This may be ungracious, but this is another moment where I cannot help feeling that kind of centrist triumphalism all over again.

There was something about your response that rubbed me the wrong way the last time, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but with my response to the article, I think I managed to crystallize it: Yes, it's wrong when we do it, but for us to become unburdened by what has been (sorry, couldn't resist), you have to offer people some form of catharsis. It can be material, or it can be symbollic, but you've got to give them something, otherwise you're asking for saintly levels of forgiveness, and I'm not even a Christian.

I think that's fair? There's still a reasonable discussion to be had about what kind of catharsis is appropriate, but I'll grant that demanding unconditional forgiveness and generosity towards one's ideological foes can be difficult. In particular, while I hope we can all agree that an emotional, id-driven impulse towards vengeance ("they made us suffer so we must make them suffer!") is wrong, considerations of justice or even just making it psychologically possible to move on might require... a kind of penance, or amends?

If it were a war between two clear opposing parties, you could imagine conditions for that. We don't just take all your cancellations and then forgive them full stop - we may, while not cancelling in return, nonetheless ask for recompense. Reinstate or compensate unjustly-cancelled people. Offer them some kind of sincere apology. Remove previous cancellers from power and don't trust them again. All the kinds of things that you would expect from an aggressor who is defeated in a war - not just to stop, but to apologise and attempt to make it right.

That's why, for instance, the sacrament of penance and reconciliation (most often in the Catholic Church, but also more broadly) requires four things - sorrow for the fault, a firm resolution to repair its effects, sincere confession of wrongdoing, and then the sacramental penance itself. While vengeance remains wrong, there's a case for asking the wrongdoer to repair the harm as much as possible, and to demonstrate sorrow and a reformed conscience.

This is much more foggy, however, when dealing with large and vague camps like 'the left' and 'the right'. As Scott's post points out, most people who identify on the left are opposed to cancellation! Moreover, many enthusiastic cancellers as individuals seem very unlikely to recognise their wrongdoing (likewise for right-aligned cancellers) or repent. In fact, often they double-down and blame the other side even more. So there isn't a central organisation to ask for repentance, and it would be wrong to take it out on individuals who weren't involved. Perhaps the best we can hope for is for left-wing organisations to disavow cancellation as a strategy?

Incidentally, what are people's feelings on these AI article summaries?

Use the LLM to give you the first draft of a summary, review it, correct it, post it.

Do not mention you used one, and if you do, make it very clear it was reviewed carefully - of what use is the summary otherwise? I can generate it myself, and you come across as lazy, just padding the post out. Take full responsibility for the post.

Frankly, for a forum like Reddit, I think you can proofread an LLM's output, and nobody would be the wiser. That's the dataset it's trained on anyway.

Here, though, it's pretty obvious when someone's using one. If you're going to go through the effort of cleaning it up to seem like an intelligent human trying to persuade, you might as well have written it yourself.

If it's a way for a reply poster to "skim" Scott's article without reading it, then that's also anti-ethical to what we're supposed to be doing here.

Some right-wing voices advocate for principles and restraint, while others argue for vengeance to teach the left a lesson about the consequences of cancel culture. The article highlights the long history of punitive social practices and argues that adopting a forgiving public ethos is essential to avoid a totalitarian society where everyone is held to impossible standards of public discourse.

But rightists already are. It is like advicating that a rebellion in a death camp will be counter-productive because nazis might massacre those who rise up.

dismantling government support for it,

Stare sponsored persecution of whites and white adjacent peoples will increase in severity with time, as long as the US remains a democracy. In a democracy the vote of Mexican-American, Somali-American or Polish-American each have the same weight, and as the fraction of US citizens with ethnic ties to Europe decreases, the political power of them will follow the same trajectory. So the values held by "legacy Americans" will become less common and be popular to discriminate against.

Don't blindly assume demographic trends will continue forever. WWIII would upend quite a few of them, and it's looking more likely this decade than it has since '91.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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