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I'm with you as far as lamenting LW drifting from its original purpose, however you want to describe the direction, but what does that have to do with anything? If you want LW fundamentalism, you obviously lost the moment you waded into a CW forum - "politics is the mind-killer" and all that. For that reason alone, neither cancel culture nor opposition to it can be a core LW cause. If you are looking to describe a hypothetical shared ethos of the "annus mirabilis SSC reader diaspora", rather than the LW community, then sure, being against cancel culture is part of it - but making a fool out of LoTT was not cancel culture by any reasonable definition. The post you linked under
also does not seem to contain any argument for Trace either being in the "only bad targets" or in the "just kidding" class, or being in favour of cancel culture. Rather, it just appears to be a dunk that you are particularly fond of. Do you expect me to update in favour of anti-Trace after reading it, so I reason "Trace bad, cancel culture bad, therefore Trace likes cancel culture"?
The point of that subthread was that it was difficult to read the moralistic framing of thier objection as genuine or sincere when they had, up until very recently, been advocating for and engaging in similar behavior and that when confronted with fact thier responce was "screw you" instead of "I screwed up".
My point is that these incidents are not "unrelated" they are examples of the same fundemental failure-mode being discussed and make for a better example than Scott Alexander for the reasons stated above
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