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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.
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.
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.
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.)
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