811–820 of 882 posts
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Exactly. It’s absurd the consequences of losing your job are so fundamental. It’s time civilisation moved forward from this.
I think we probably agree 100% about this, but the reality today is what’s important to people losing their job today. I don’t think you mean to downplay the impact of someone losing their job today, but that’s how it came across to me.
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I think we probably agree 100% about this, but the reality today is what’s important to people losing their job today. I don’t think you mean to downplay the impact of someone losing their job today, but that’s how it came across to me.
If there was ever a time we had a direct opportunity to change this dynamic it's today.
Very interesting take. This reminds me of Bob Altemeyer's work. He summed up his decades of research on authoritarianism in a free ebook at https://www.theauthoritarians.org/ . I invite everyone to read this, this is the single most important work of political science / social psychology I've ever read. Two categories he identifies, "authoritarian" and "social dominant" map to Graham's "passively conventional" and "a…
Altemeyer should be viewed with some suspicion: He thinks left-wing authoritarianism is a "Loch Ness monster", and in talks with David Friedman couldn't comprehend why eg. labor unions could constitute an authority to a person - he viewed union membership purely in transactional terms with little ideological content. His scale may identify a certain kind of authoritarian, but his work is almost assuredly blind as a b…
But you're also wrong on two counts:
First, he wrote this and did most of his work at a time when power structures were clearly right wing. But the mechanisms he describes are universal and independent of the labels used by those in power: authoritarians will strongly conform to the dominant ideology, and social dominants will pretend to adhere to it to gain power. He just used the labels reflecting the situation at the time.
Second, he specifically points out that authoritarians in the Soviet Unions were nominally left wing.
Consider that this kind of shift in dominant ideology is a slow process, on a period longer that one academic's career.
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If one did not know who the author is, the essay would be criticized as shallow and sweeping to the point of being a vague excuse to treat others badly by those that only half grasp ideas anyway. Strikes me as personal writing that ought to be kept personal.
>Strikes me as personal writing that ought to be kept personal Spoken like a true aggressively conventional-minded person.
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It's crazy to say "Everything the protestors are doing has probably set us back a decade." There have been literally millions of American citizens marching peacefully for change, and a very small number of bad actors. There is no way you are informed or serious about what is going on if you are willing to make such broadly derogatory comments about one of the largest civil right movements in history. And worse, takin…
There is no way you are informed... Who do you think you are helping by doing that? This kind of turning on people who agree with you in principle but might have some of the details wrong is exactly the kind of fractally magnifying divisiveness that some of these subthreads are talking about. We are all largely on the same side w.r.t. wanting positive outcomes for everyone. We will get there through deescalation and…
> We are all largely on the same side w.r.t. wanting positive outcomes for everyone. We will get there through deescalation and cooperation (not that I am perfect at either).
I'm gonna take this and run with it.
IMO, one of the major things that drives "cancel culture" is concern about "concern trolling". I spend a decent amount of time on Reddit, and I've been downvoted to oblivion in the past for expressing nuanced views on some political topics. It's frustrating; yet, I can understand it. Between brigades and individual trolls, there absolutely are actors who get "some of the details wrong" in bad faith.
It all comes back to Poe's law. IRL there's body language and other clues that someone might not be arguing genuinely. On the internet it's extremely difficult to tell the difference. Without moderation, this can lead to things getting out of hand.
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I think there are some important qualitative differences with the French Revolution, at least in its relationship with the academy (although I'm not an expert). During the French Revolution, most of the aristocratic cadre of scientists did lose their positions, but less than a year into the Terror, the Institut de France was established with more-or-less conventional takes on merit and the scientific method. In the c…
There was a section on this in the sci-fi novel Three Body Problem. The students force a professor of physics to recant his claim that relativity is a legitimate theory, and he refuses, then gets beaten by students. I remember thinking at the time it was such a bizarre piece of fiction, then I later found out this kind of stuff really happened.
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Sounds scary so long as everything is discussed in such vague terms, which is why those decrying "cancel culture" always keep it in the theoretical space. When the "conformity of the mob" is a concrete example, such as leftists fighting for basic human rights, eg. access to medicine so that you don't die, not getting murdered by the police, etc, well it's hard to make this sound troubling.
Cancel culture is equally strong in the UK, where they have free public healthcare and the UK police kills about 2 people per year (usually well justified). These issues seem to be orthogonal.
If you ask anyone on the Right what they think about police brutality or racism, more than 99% will agree with those on the Left that is an issue. We're pretty unanimous in this regard, but we disagree on what to do about it. The mob wants to sew division, so they will try to get you to "take the knee" to prove you're on the right side, but in fact, taking the knee is simply bowing down to the demands of the mob. If you don't take the knee, you're obviously "a racist" and deserve to be cancelled. The problem is the mob has a ringleader, the innocent sounding "Black Lives Matter", which is an openly Marxist organization which is using the race issue as a shield against criticism of its real aims. The clever naming means that when you criticize the organization, you're criticizing it's name, so you mustn't care about black lives - you're racist, again.
Everyone will agree that you have a right to life - there is no division here. In the US, this right, among others, are constitutionally protected so that lawmakers cannot (should not be able to) change the law to say otherwise.
Interestingly, those "fighting for human rights." are largely the same people trying to deny others their basic rights, such as possessing firearms for their personal protection.
In regards to "access to medicine", this is not a basic human right. GP is simply misunderstanding what is meant by the term. Anything that involves action from another person or group is not a right - it's a privilege. A right can only apply to an individual. You have a right to receive healthcare, go and forage for ingredients to make your own medicines, or provide healthcare to others - but there is no "right" that confers other people to provide you healthcare. Providers of healthcare and medicines have the right to request compensation for their services. How much compensation they want is up to them. The state should not be involved. The state cannot grant rights, it can only take them away.
It is state involvement which causes medicines to be so highly priced - because the State enforces patents - a tool which strips away your natural right to produce something because somebody else has declared a monopoly on doing so. If there were no patents in medicine, all medicines would become cheap generics, with the lower bound on price essentially being the cost to produce (which declines over time).
It is also state involvement which props up the salaries of healthcare providers, because they're protected from wider competition through licensing and regulatory capture. In the UK, however, the State involvement puts an upper cap on what most healthcare providers can earn - particularly nurses who are essentially minimum wage earners and can't take their services elsewhere, because there's (almost) no competition to the NHS, which of late has itself become part of the mob with the cult-like celebration of its workers. The conformists are precisely the Thursday evening clappers, and those who don't clap, for whatever reason, are terrible people who ought to be shamed.
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Matt Taibbi's had a few good articles on this recently. Some excerpts: "Cancelations already are happening too fast to track. In a phenomenon that will be familiar to students of Russian history, accusers are beginning to appear alongside the accused. Three years ago a popular Canadian writer named Hal Niedzviecki was denounced for expressing the opinion that “anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other p…
Many people arguing against "cancel culture" like to say that it ruins people's lives when they're fired, and it's a statement that is inextricably rooted in privilege. Millions of people are fired or laid off every year - why should one only care when it's because someone said something and got cancelled?
- Since the internet does not forget, someone who is fired due to mob justice is likely to have it affect their ability to hold a job in the future in a way that isn't necessarily true for most firings or layoffs.
- Both losing ones job due to mob justice and due to other factors such as economics can ruin someone's life.
Loved this essay. The phrase “aggressively conventional minded” is genius, and may contribute a lot towards the solution. As someone coming from an ex-soviet state, I’ve felt personal alarm bells ring more and more, as I experience the kind of intolerance and double speak America is heading into. Both the left and the right my opinion are missing the key points on freedom (the left suppressing and labeling, the right…
Also from an ex soviet state. Also feel alarm bells going off. I'm legitimately scared. I've seen this before, I know where it goes. It's really hard to convey my feeling of alarm to people here though. Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it, I guess. Doesn't help that the conformists have been allowed to frame the narrative as 'either you agree with us, or you're literally Hitler/Stalin' depending on…
I grew up in the US but have spent a lot of time watching how other countries have fallen and listened to both survivors that stayed and those that left. I also listened carefully to my elders’ stories both rich and poor about their lives in wars and how totalitarian and fascist regimes work.
Being called both a fascist and commie now by random people depending upon their alignment worries me because we are losing the ability to have nuanced conversations that might actually fix our problems without a full blown war.
It really is a sad sight to see as second generation immigrants when our parents worked so hard to leave oppression or for economic opportunities see these very things repeat.
And yes, I’m going to say that America’s “free speech” experiment has escaped the lab and is a Godzilla monster out of control. I don’t even care who’s at fault frankly as much as I want people to sit down and stop having bad faith arguments against each other as a rule.