I’m shocked and horrified at the people who up until two seconds ago supported free speech and opposed cancellation and have now gone completely in the opposite direction, calling for the persecution, firings and cancellation of the people who made pro-Hamas statements.
People, what are you doing? In the name of everything reasonable, what the flying fuck are you doing? If your psychological discomfort and feelings of being “unsafe” justify the persecution of others, then why isn’t a persecution of you justified? Surely, it’s not hard to find somebody wounded and made unsafe by something you once said.
What are you doing, people? You want to hound somebody as part of a morally outraged mob? You want to support and grow cancel culture? As long as you get to do the cancellation, it’s all good?
For shame. For absolute crying shame.
And those who say “liberals should have a taste of their own medicine now that cancel culture has turned against them” need to remember this moment well. For an extraordinarily important chance to feel momentarily smug on social media, they have given away every argument in favor of free speech. An actual moral advantage has been pissed away to cosplay an angry, self-righteous wokester for three minutes. What an achievement.
Imagine a woman who spends many years fighting against abortion. Organizes political campaigns, goes to clinics. But then an inconvenient pregnancy sends her right to Planned Parenthood for an abortion. “Well,” she says. “I’m not the one who made abortion possible. This is on the libs. I’m just living in the world they made.”
Everybody should say whatever they want. Everybody. Even the people I don’t like. Even the Russian propagandists. Nobody should be coerced into being silent. Freedom of speech only exists if it extends to everybody, not only the people I agree with.
You either have foundational principles or you don’t. Otherwise, you are a wokester who’s been unsuccessful at imposing your wokeness until now.
Clarissa's Blog 
Aye. It is depressing to watch.
If I’ve got a pro-terrorism contingent in my community, I’d rather know about it than not know.
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Exactly. Getting people fired doesn’t change their beliefs. They are still the exact same people, only angrier. So what have we achieved by getting them fired?
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Well, if you take things far enough, what you achieve is secret password-gated invitation-only meetings where people plan revolution, instead of dissipating their stupidity out in the open air where everybody can make fun of them.
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I mean: you WANT a culture where everybody’s encouraged to display their idiocy right out in public. Then you know who all the idiots are, and what causes they’re promoting.
Don’t you?
Apparently not. After years of griping about the conformity police, the right can’t wait to be the conformity police.
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And what happened to “I hate what you say but I’d die to defend your right to say it”? It’s gone? It was never true to begin with?
The simplest test of our principles, and we are failing it.
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I’m not sure it was ever true, for anyone in a position of cultural dominance. I mean, it sounds all noble when you’re outnumbered and outgunned. Nobody actually wants to do it when they’ve got the baton. In a culture that esteems virtue, you can push back on this very human tendency, but how long has it been since that was a thing here?
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We don’t have the cultural dominance, though. We are existing in an inhospitable culture and collaborating to make it even more inhospitable to ourselves. And for what? What is the big gain?
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I think in at least some parts of the conservosphere(tm), people feel like the tide is turning in their direction, and are eager to wield the stick that’s been used against them. It’s dumb, mistaken, and counterproductive, yes, but… they were educated in the same crap values as all their leftie enemies, so (shrugs). Still fighting the way they learned together on the inadequately-supervised playground, I guess.
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The theory (like that of freedom of speech) is the iterated prisoners’ dilemma.
In other words: “Persyns have called for and successfully cancelled these individuals. Therefore, we are calling on them to be cancelled now, for this, because we can. Take heed.”
This runs up against the fact that so many Conservative spox are frauds, and so many in the right are accellerationists who have nothing to lose, and general mid-wittery and short attention spans.
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“calling for the persecution, firings and cancellation of the people who made pro-Hamas statements”
Infantilism in action: Teacher! You said I could only have one donut and Tommy just had two!
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I see people all over, pissing themselves with glee that some pro-Palestinian lady was fired from her medical practice. It’s sad to observe.
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I think to what extent freedom of speech can be exercised depends on societal volatility and danger of real conflict. It is a worthy value, yet not the only important thing we should think of. For instance, Quran desecration in Sweden results in clashes with police and burning cars (checked now on YouTube), while anything related to Al-Aqsa Mosque could put the entire Middle East on fire.
After the attack of 7.10.2023 , I think our police had a right to arrest Arab-Israeli actress Maisa Abdel Hadi for supporting Hamas assault on social media: “shared image of gunmen taking elderly captive with laughing emojis, captioned photo of terrorists breaching security barrier ‘Let’s go, Berlin style’”
Our police said in the official statement: ““The police fight against incitement and support for terrorism continues all the time.”
Where is the line between fighting terrorist propaganda and putting too many restrictions on free speech? Imo, this line will naturally pass in different places in Israel vs. USA.
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I’m not commenting on anything that’s done in Israel. Or Ukraine where many civil liberties were understandably suspended in war time. But there’s no war in the US, and people are making absolutely asses out of themselves for absolutely no reason.
As for incitement, propaganda, disinformation and hate crimes, these are all completely fake concepts that are designed to deprive us of civil liberties. I don’t support any of them because absolutely anything can be deemed “hate, incitement or propaganda”. Anything.
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“As for incitement, propaganda, disinformation and hate crimes”
I think ‘incitement’ comes in different flavors.
“The Nurbs are a blight on our community.”
“We have to do something about the Nurbs!”
vs.
“There’s a Nurb! Stomp him and kick his head in… NOW!”
“We have to kill the Nurbs in our town, tonight!”
In the classic US understanding of the issue, the first two are protected the second two are not.
There’s also the yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater (where there is no fire) but that’s more an academic than practical question.
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““The Nurbs are a blight on our community.”
“We have to do something about the Nurbs!”
vs.
“There’s a Nurb! Stomp him and kick his head in… NOW!”
“We have to kill the Nurbs in our town, tonight!”
In the classic US understanding of the issue, the first two are protected the second two are not.”
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“There’s a Nurb! Stomp him and kick his head in… NOW!”
“We have to kill the Nurbs in our town, tonight!”
These words may be construed at law as incitement with intent to kill and also as conspiracy to commit a crime. The law looks at the intent behind the words: as such, these are not protected speech.
The fact that Wokesters have manipulated well-established legal concepts for their own subversive purposes does not mean that we should follow suit. There is good reason for the law to continue to stand as it is: prosecute those who incite others to commit violence.
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I don’t believe in intent either. It’s like hate crimes, an exercise in mind-reading. Nobody can know anybody’s intent. It’s all a guess. And it’s wrong to punish people for somebody else’s guesswork.
These are my personal opinions. I know the law is different and I follow the law. 🙂
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I’m with you.
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Hmmm, and those that you have banned?
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Freedom of speech does not guarantee the right to an audience. Nobody should be forced to listen to anybody’s speech. For example, should people in a workplace be forced to hear an “anti-racist” speaker? No, of course not. Is their absence at the speaker’s talk mean they are infringing on his right to free speech? Nope. He can speak but they have the freedom not to listen. Or should have the freedom.
I am not upset, for example, that a faculty member gave a workshop on how all whites are bastards. I am extremely upset that I was coerced into being there.
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I have thought about it and now see a certain inner contradiction. Sorry since the below is a bit unclear, I am still wording it for myself and am unsure about it. At least, the example of free speech below is interesting, imo.
Freedom of speech is supposed to guarantee a lack of persecution by a nation state.
[ However, today the state delegates some of its former functions, including policing, to private economic actors, which naturally care the most about their bottom line and desire to please their clients, especially when doing so doesn’t cost money. ]
If consumers decide to boycott a company because of its choice of employees, are they engaging in cancel culture? A company will naturally fire all workers which attract negative attention for any reason, be it political beliefs or rudeness to customers.
Or are you talking mainly about university professors and workers at government institutions?
May I say that cancel culture is neoliberal partly since it uses economic pressure instead of civic engagement via honest public debates and etc. ?
Another example regarding free speech in Israel is relevant not only for us imo.
// the Negev Police ordered a resident of Beer Sheva, A., to delete a false post she published on Facebook, in which she defamed a branch of the food chain “King Store” in the city, after claiming that it collects donations for the residents of the Gaza Strip.
…
According to A, a few days ago she came to shop at the chain’s branch in the city and came across many signs in Arabic at the entrance to the place. She photographed the signs and posted on the Facebook page alongside the call for a boycott.
…
The police investigation revealed that these were signs calling on the general public to donate to needy Bedouin families in the sector … “We tracked down the surfer and demanded that she delete this offensive post,” says a police official. “We explained to her that she was shaming and just hurting the business owners.”
After realizing the mistake, A deleted the post and apologized //
Should police interfere in such cases in Israel? In America?
Neoliberals could tell they one can always sue, yet taking a matter to court would take at least months, more likely years, after doing great damage to business owners.
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You are absolutely right. The cancel culture is a neoliberal phenomenon. This is why trying to deploy the nation-state methods against it is a mistake.
Cancel culture will be solved by neoliberal means. I’ll write about it in a separate post.
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“You either have foundational principles or you don’t. Otherwise, you are a wokester who’s been unsuccessful at imposing your wokeness until now.” Many right wingers are open about this. To be fair, they do have foundational principles, free speech just isn’t one of them.
“And despite the meta-cultural similarities between wokeness and deplorablism (look, we don’t have a great name for it yet) there are incommensurable structural differences. People who engage in both-sides-ism like to downplay the fact that state power, legal power, and military power all exist solely to support wokeness. The counterfactual world, where “the fascists” are in power does not have transexuals in the military, it doesn’t have pride month or Juneteenth, there is no such thing as a gender “reassignment” clinic, and the penalty for drag queen story hour is lynching. We are so far from that world, it hurts. One of the first things the nazis did when they came to power was raid the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft and burn all their cursed books. If “the nazis” or “the fascists” were in power in America, there would be exactly zero living transexuals on American soil. That’s how you know.”
https://zerohplovecraft.substack.com/p/zendaya-and-the-art-of-multiverse#footnote-anchor-8-136955036
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These people will claim “there has always been cancel culture.” They are right in a very narrow sense; there have always been outer bounds of socially acceptable speech. If you openly express a sexual attraction to 5 year old girls, you’re going to be a social pariah and you’re going to find yourself closed out of many jobs. And this was as true 20 years ago as it was now. But the latitude of acceptable speech used to be much broader, and the boundaries used to be much much stable and clearly defined. You wouldn’t inadvertently anger a cancel culture mob by saying something that used to be acceptable 5 years ago. It saddens me that all these people can imagine is right wing woke world. Don’t they remember the 90s?
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As for me personally, I don’t have the will to expend a lot of energy fighting for these morons, especially considering they’d turn around and call for me to be canceled in an instant. But I am of course against it, and I commend anyone who can be the bigger person and stand up for free speech.
In addition to principle, it would be ridiculously short-sighted of me to support this. Many of the exact same people who are pushing for this find pro-life views equally abhorrent. Why dig my own grave?
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Counterpoint: rabid fanatics who want you dead are not influenced by “the marketplace of ideas”, what they need is a kick in the teeth. Decades of unilateral disarmament from conservatives hasn’t worked out all that well, you’ll agree.
This is such a perfect opportunity to fracture the left, associate BLM and DEI with murder and rape, use this line of attack to starve the quasi-permanent grifters embedded in all our public institutions. Purge, purge, purge. Use every underhanded trick that libs use to purge conservatives.
https://x.com/JakeBequette91/status/1714744842432184410
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This would all be great but it’s not what’s happening. Some no-name doctor lady and a couple of adjunct instructors get fired while the real bastards who created and unleashed the BLM, etc denounce “antisemitism and islamophobia” and take the high moral ground.
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Let’s fire them all and let God sort them out. 😀
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Nobody likes free speech 😦 Not the lefties, not the righties. It’s sometimes good to side with one or another of those two camps when the other one is getting too mouthy, but if principles weren’t in such short supply, the landscape of the discourse would look different.
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