3541

Someone else sacked from their job due to cancel culture

and who deserved to be.

No doubt our resident right wingers will be shedding a tear for this womans career.

3542

And lets not forget the disingenuous nature of the complaints. After all, you don’t see them defending Harvey Weinstein, who deserved everything he got and more. And you don’t see them defending Al Franken, who probably didn’t.

When the law and systems protect abuse, don’t be surprised when other methods rise to take their place.

3543

Liberals: We need more government regulation, to prevent corporations from doing bad things.

Conservatives: Regulation is unnecessary! The marketplace of ideas will identify evildoers! And the invisible hand will make them change their ways! Corporations will be fully incentivized to do only good things!

Liberals: Fine, let’s try it your way.

Conservatives: Hey, stop identifying evildoers! And stop trying to change our ways! Corporations have the wrong incentives! We need to regulate the marketplace of ideas!

3544

LOL! Where is my like button?

3545

Really good take, and I agree.

3546

Hah, well played.

3547

And damn those Polish people for being so…white?

3548

sigh someone posts about what an irrelevant evil party that none of their critics support is saying as if that justifies anything, and 2 of the next 3 posts are agreeing with them.

The alt left is fully on board with “two wrongs make a right” isn’t it, at least when they can use it to excuse their own illiberal behaviour.

3549

It might be helpful if you were to ground your thought in concrete terms and try to actually run through your ideas and see if they are valid.

Like:

It’s about a culture where its clear that even questioning someone advocating for woke causes can cause you to recieve vile misogynistic abuse and death threats

You are questioning woke causes. How many death threats are you getting? I’m going to go out on a limb and say … 0. It’s a common number of death threats for people to receive from the “left”. I would also ask you to think about the chain of events that you are proposing. You are saying that out of the hundreds of millions of people in the Anglosphere, some small number have said that they have received death threats, presumably through Twitter, that were sent by … at worst case, would what might be dozens of people out of the tens/hundreds of millions of people on the left. And this is a sudden cause for your outrage and alarm. I think we can agree that death threats aren’t helping anything, but at the same time where were you over the last 20 years, when any woman, any where, said anything vaguely controversial on the internet and got tons of “vile misogynistic abuse and death threats”, mostly from right wingers? Like how many death threats and rape threats do you think Hillary Clinton got, or Sarkasian got, or any other prominent woman who threatens men’s egos? Why it is only now that you are becoming incensed? Is it because you are genuinely worried about victims, or is it because it is a chance for you to think of yourself as the victim?

Whew! One line down.

It’s about power, and showing, very publically and destructively, that you have it and your opponents don’t, because you control the mob and the state cannot stop them.

When you say the “Mob”, are you talking about Twitter? Because it sounds a lot like you are talking about Twitter. Like, most the harm that you are incensed about can be solved by logging out of Twitter. Again, try to make things more concrete. For example, a concrete Mob might be something like this that happened a few miles away from me:

where a mob, like a literal mob and not a metaphorical one, showed up to a random ass city council meeting at a random ass suburb with their AR’s out. This isn’t a rare occurrence! And while I’m sure the Tweets are very intimidating, maybe they don’t quite rise to the level of brandishing automatic weapons, which is the default stance of the right wing in this country. Again, have you been writing essays of concern about actual, physical right wing mobs? Or is it only the tweets that from 18 follower accounts that get you riled up?

This sounds pretty alarmist.

Yes it does. :D It is you desperately chasing after this beautiful dream where the left wing of this country is somehow as bad as the republicans. Again though, just to TLDR this, try having some sense of perspective about what is actually going on in America.

Ok I need to go eat some ice cream have a nice day.

3550

You’ve done great work here and deserve the ice cream.

3551

Non-conservative reactionary movements must be perfect and pure in their actions otherwise the entire cause is invalidated. Meanwhile no amount of collateral damage is too much in order to enforce conservative ideology.

3552

The lack of anonymity in social media directly enables cancel culture.

Provably false. I;ve been complaining on QT3 about this kind of behaviour on social media for years. I’ve also been very clear that the far right are at least as bad - I just see a lot less of that.

Condemning the abuse. Given there’s little misogynistic abuse on QT3, I’m not sure how you’d know.

Yep, I’m mostly talking about twitter, although there’s a similar, more local problem on facebook, which is a lot less visible, a lot less destructive to people’s careers, but probably more powerful in terms of exercusing peer pressure for people to be ideologically orthodox within their circles.

I’m sure you read the part of my post where I said this bigger problem you correctly identify was in fact part of a bigger and more urgant problem than cancel culture. You just elected to ignore it, because, well, I guess the readers can answer that one for themselves.

3553

That’s a pretty extreme view! Since I presume you are being facetious it’s also a view expressed by noone in this thread.

3554

It’s sarcastic, and is the basic essence of current conservative complaints about “cancel culture”.

3555

I read your post again and then again and I can’t find the part where you said anything about ‘this bigger problem’ (actual armed right-wing mobs trying to intimidate legislators).

Here is your post produced in full. Maybe you can point to that part?

The concern isn’t about edgelords like Milo though. Indeed, it’s not really about professional politicians at all. If they enjoy any real public support then attacking them in this way generally strengthens their dedicated support.

It’s about respected establishment journalists lying about an interview on twitter in order to get the subject fired, and openly celebrating when they succeed, and not getting fired by their left-wing employer when their lies are exposed.

It’s about a culture where its clear that even questioning someone advocating for woke causes can cause you to recieve vile misogynistic abuse and death threats, and utter silence from the left about this conduct - because it’s helpful to them.

It’s about if you are on the far left, and claim someone is using their past sexual abuse as a “justification for discriminating” - all you have to do is apologise and the mob will leave you alone. Because you are on their side really.

It’s about making people who are not in the club afraid to contradict those who are. It’s about power, and showing, very publically and destructively, that you have it and your opponents don’t, because you control the mob and the state cannot stop them.

I mean, the idea of using control of the mob(*) to denounce and intimidate those who oppose you, in a situation where the state is unable to protect people from the mob for whatever reason is hardly original. The refinement for the social media world has been surprisingly effective. But is that the playbook you really want to be reading from?

This sounds pretty alarmist. We’re still at the early stage. Relatively few people have been successfully targetted. There are other, greater, concerns - toxic politicians of the right who have got further and faster than we could ever have dreamed a decade ago. But - why give these methods a foothold? Trust me, you don’t need them, and though they make the base feel good the idea of keeping the centre in line through fear is a self-defeating strategy if you actually want to live in a democracy.

(*: Which does not represent a majority, but a sufficiently numerous and angry minority that they are willing to contravene the norms of society in order to harm the targets you nominate)

As I read it, this entire screed equates online behavior with threats of physical mob violence, while saying nothing at all about actual examples of physical mob violence.

3556

Two wrongs don’t make a right. But the alt left is using the only tool it has left to fight the abuses that nobody else will fight. There are certainly less destructive tools available, but their owners don’t want to use them.

You are focusing too little on what the left has accomplished using social media, and too much on the minor collateral damage. It’s like pointing to the ruins of a building in 1944 Berlin and asking if “two wrongs make a right”.

This is as gentle a revolution as you will ever find.

3557

Not entirely true. The evangelical movement’s adherence to party over teachings is having an impact. It’s just slow.

You can also see this in the Confederate Flag support. The overton window moved really, really fast there. Look at Mississippi changing their flag, NASCAR, etc.

3558

In case it does not go without saying I shit on the current american conservative movement and any complaints they might have.

3559

And in case it wasn’t clear I’m speaking of the american conservative media and political machine’s current railing against cancel culture, not anyone’s posts here.

The whole issue is just more campaign rhetoric. Conservative victimhood propaganda. “See, this leftists/democrats want to ruin your life for thought crime”. Slightly more subtle than the “BLM mobs are coming to burn down your house” but made of the same stuff really.

3560

It’s just railing against political correctness with softer branding. That’s it.