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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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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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