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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33388 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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So, you think if you were in Weimar Germany around 1930, it wouldn't have been acceptable to "cancel" Hitler (lol) if you thought that was a tactic likely to prevent his coming to power? To me there is no question it would be legitimate to disrupt Nazi rallies, throw pies in Hitler's face (a tactic Contrapoints discusses LGBTQ activists using against anti-gay activists), etc., if you legitimately thought it would prevent Nazism and the Holocaust. The problem for me with current activists is simply that they've set the bar for using these tactics way too low.

First off, there were lots of attempts to "cancel" Hitler and the Nazis and those attempts didn't work. Criminal laws against hate speech were brought to bear, and if anything those attempts at shutting down the Nazis made them stronger and gave them better rhetorical tools. "What don't they want you to know?" was their argument.

Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der Stürmer [Streicher's newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters.

But even if I thought it would work, I'm against censorship on principle.

I largely agree that cancellation is tactically counterproductive. But one could also say that the Woke left uses cancellation all the time and seems to have amassed a large amount of cultural power, which might indicate that in certain circumstances it is effective.

But even if I thought it would work, I'm against censorship on principle.

So would you be opposed to "cancelling" Hitler if it was guaranteed to prevent his rise to power? Or what if it provided a 50% chance of preventing his rise?

So would you be opposed to "cancelling" Hitler if it was guaranteed to prevent his rise to power? Or what if it provided a 50% chance of preventing his rise?

It depends on what you mean by cancelling, but if you mean violating his right to speak freely, then yes I would be opposed. The whole point of rights is that everyone has them, including bad people. The whole point of free speech is that it protects the right to say vile and reprehensible things.

Okay. Disrupt him. Throw pies at him. And then, shockingly, him and his ilk form brownshirts and distrupt the distrupters. The Nazis don't become reformed moderates when punched. Instead it's Hitler and his buddies beating and dog whipping people all the way to victory.

That's not an argument against disrupting Hitler, that's an argument for doing it harder.

Your reductio ad hitlerum is especially bad considering the history of why the Sturmabteilung were formed in the first place.

If you're saying that disruptions of Nazi rallies led to the creation of the Sturmabteilung and thus indirectly led to the rise of Hitler, okay. It doesn't really affect my point, because I specifically qualified the use of "cancellation" on the legitimate belief that it would prevent his rise. If you think that cancellation is counterproductive (I largely tend to agree), that's a tactical disagreement, not a moral one.

It doesn't really affect my point, because I specifically qualified the use of "cancellation" on the legitimate belief that it would prevent his rise.

I think part of the issue here is that a legitimate belief isn't necessarily a correct belief, and someone who genuinely wants to do good in this world has the responsibility to make sure that his beliefs are not just legitimate but also correct. That's an endless endeavor, of course. But in this particular case, one could argue that someone who has a legitimate belief that this sort of "cancellation" would prevent the rise of Hitler in the 1930s is someone who hasn't take on the proper responsibility of figuring out if his legitimate belief is also a correct belief.

This is rather far away from the initial discussion about "cancel culture" and its possible usefulness in general, though.

Hitler was the instrument the army of the Weimar Republic was using to cancel the German Workers Party. Kinda backfired on them.

I'd suggest that if it's okay to shoot someone dead, it's also okay to cancel them.

It's okay to shoot Hitler dead. But nobody's going to seriously argue that it's okay to shoot J. K. Rowling dead.

JK Rowling, maybe not. There’s definitely people who at least say they think it would be justified to shoot Matt Walsh or other prominent anti-gender-ideology activists dead, whether or not they believe it(I would point to the lack of any attempts on their lives as evidence they don’t), and these are regular and frequent targets of cancel culture.

But nobody's going to seriously argue that it's okay to shoot J. K. Rowling dead.

By "nobody", you mean "nobody here, out loud", right? Because I'm pretty sure I can find a whole lot of people in the general trans orbit who will in fact argue that it's okay to shoot J.K. Rowling dead. Certainly there were people making that argument for the Tennessee shooter regarding random Christian adults and kids, possibly including the shooter herself.

Certainly there were people making that argument for the Tennessee shooter regarding random Christian adults and kids

Were there? The closest is that one tweet from the "Trans Resistance Network" (the "network" being a Twitter account and a Wordpress website) that said that the shooting is a tragedy but it's also a tragedy that trans people are mistreated. It did not say that the shooting was justified.

There were definately additional twitter randos opining that the Christians had it coming and that Hale was a freedom fighter. I'm not claiming that they represent anyone other than themselves, but they do exist. I think there would be more people willing to make the argument for Rowling, since in her case no violence has actually happened, so the edginess draws less social oprobrium.

I'd agree with this as a heuristic for where it is absolutely OK to cancel someone. But certainly there's a middle ground? It can't only be either "I can only use reasoned debate to stop this person" or "I can shoot or cancel someone". Surely there's a place at which it would be acceptable to cancel but not murder someone?

Why should there be such a middle ground? "Cancellation" aims to make someone unemployable, which is several steps short of murder but absolutely moving in the same direction, and not in the slippery-slope sense.

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