Comment by decimalenough
Comment by decimalenough 8 days ago
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Comment by decimalenough 8 days ago
[flagged]
> "Maybe gets you fired from your job" is someone's entire livelihood you're trivializing.
yes, the left doing that was pretty bad and I have gotten into many arguments over my left leaning friends over it. But it was largely private companies capitulating to pressure. To compare that to people being abducted and incarcerated by the government without trial or even an actual law being broken is worse.
You do understand why thats worse right?
How many of the conservatives complaining about it would support government regulations preventing people from being fired for expressing controversial viewpoints? AFAIK those complaining are the same people who support ‘at will’ employment and the liberty of religious organizations to impose more or less arbitrarily discriminatory hiring standards. So yeah, in that lax regulatory environment, your employer might decide to fire you if you (e.g.) feel the need to be an asshole to your trans colleagues.
Well for brevity I did trivialize it but I will expand:
The left side got people fired. This is objectively not as bad as getting people disappeared. You can get a new fucking job. You can’t get freedom from detention and you cannot easily return to the country (if at all)
Additionally there is the motivational factor behind both sides:
The lefts argument in policing language was to reduce harm to marginalized groups. You may not agree with it, but that is the rational.
The rights argument is to erase those marginalized groups.
These are extremely different in motivation. Asking you to respect a persons gender identity in professional contexts is far different than forcing someone to not be able to express it on federal documentation.
One side of this was “we want to create inclusive spaces that make people comfortable and if you don’t want to participate in that there is the door”. The other side is “we did not want to participate in that so go fuck yourself and we will do whatever we can to deny your right to express your identity”
“Any attempt to control speech” is an absolutist statement that is absurd in its fallacy. So I can say I can murder you? I can say you’re planning a terrorist attack? I can say you want to kill the president? Of course not. Speech is limited contextually and by law
You're still trivializing. The cancel culture would often follow the people it wanted to cancel to make it hard for them to get another job again.
Also, I'll add that the "there is the door" comment is entirely wrong. There are countless stories of open source maintainers being harassed to make language changes to their code base, master/slave, whitelist/blacklist. The harassers never offered to do the work themselves just demanded it be done for them or they'll keep harassing. These were people matching into someone else's "safe space" to police their private language.
The government disappearing people and dismantling the country is very bad, and nothing good can be said about it. What I'm talking about are the individuals on both sides not formally in power, and their equal efforts to stifle what they see as "bad speech". It's that mentality, on both sides, that led us to where we are.
> Maybe gets you fired from your job" is someone's entire livelihood you're trivializing.
People are being shipped to a Salvadorean mega-prison for having autism awareness tattoos. Law-abiding students who write peaceful op-eds are being disappeared to a facility in Louisiana. Yes it sucks to lose your job, but it sucks a lot more to be indefinitely detained without even seeing a judge.
> "Your side" isn't any better than the other's.
Your argument reminds me of high schoolers that argue the US was just as bad as the Nazis for operating Japanese internment camps. Yes, both were wrong, but one was much, much worse.
The problem with such reflexive absolutism, as I've pointed out many times, is that you end up advocating for the speech rights of people who are advocating for genocide. I shouldn't need to point out that killing people also terminates their speech rights and that advocacy of genocide is thus an attack on free speech.
You do not have to defend the free speech rights of people who are themselves attacking free speech (and free life). In fact, it is foolish to do so.
Eh, I’ve railed quite a bit against the left. But looking back, we should have fired and deplatformed more aggressively. The social menaces who weren’t fired or arrested went on to become a plague.
Good grief man, deplatforming, chilling speech and all that is how we got into this mess to begin with. Have you learned nothing from the past 10 years?
edit: Holy mackarel, I am this close to accepting the argument that the people on 'the left' need to be treated that exact way you described just so that they can understand why 'the right' feel aggrevied. I simply cannot accept Soviet Union style 'do not employ this man' brand. I feel dirty just thinking about it as an option.
The thing is, right wingers are very likely to protest over losing jobs. In Covid times, what made the right finally start actually marching in the streets was losing their jobs. They don’t protest over most things, but threaten their livelihood and yeah they’ll come for you.
> right wingers are very likely to protest over losing jobs
Everybody protests over losing jobs. Currently, the MAGA crowd is busily putting itself out of work, so this really only comes down to taking action in the cities.
Not part of the rest of the conversation, just narrowing in on the idea of speech being free if there are consequences. That sounds like some sort of 1950's-era doublespeak. If there are consequences, how would speech be free? It's a very American-centric perspective that "Free Speech" is defined as "1st Amendment". Free speech means not getting fired, jumped, killed, poisoned, expelled, etc. Fired is something that would happen in Soviet Times as well, in the USSR, and in the McCarthy era, in the U.S.
Apologies for the "two sidesism".
When I see the left's recent brazen devotion to "winning" and "sticking it to the other side", sometimes it feels like Democrats have started acting like Republicans.
And it turns out that wasn't sustainable.
I know it's glib and coarse and lacking in nuance but when I hear American conservatives complain about the ways of the liberal countrymen I can't help but think, "That's how you guys sounded for a long time. Now they're doing it, lo and behold: everyone loses."
If you get fired for saying something stupid, you might want to consider the notion that you deserve not to have a job. They’re called consequences, and if you don’t like them, remaining silent is free.
Put otherwise, it’s very possible that your livelihood is trivial.
This is just asinine. Consider the same argument flipped around:
"If you get deported for saying something stupid, you may want to consider the notion that you do not deserve to live in the US. They’re called consequences, and if you don’t like them, remaining silent is free."
Both arguments are ridiculous because they present no evidence as to whether someone deserves a job or a visa stay.
They got themselves fired. People who wrote things didn't get themselves disappeared to a holding site in Louisiana.
By the same logic the students got themselves vanished by not strictly following the rules of the visa ( one example, student had a dui ). It is not better, but the moment you erode basic speech protections it spills over to a lot of other areas.
Extremism on any side is bad, period. 'But they are worse' is sort of moot point and most people don't care about details, you simply lose normal audience and maybe gain some fringe.
You really don't see a problem with this? I consider myself more on the left, but this practice has always seemed highly antithetical to liberal values to me.
If somebody in their off hours says something assinine, and telling (some might call that "snitching to") their employer in a public forum like Twitter (in a clear attempt to get a social media frenzy going to ultimately get them fired) is a good thing, then wouldn't it logically follow that an employer should not only be permitted but actively encouraged to monitor employees 100% of the time so they can fire them if they ever step out of the corporate line? Amazon does this to many low-level employees just on-the-job and most people think that's creepy and unfair, I can't imagine extending that to off-hours as well. At a minimum wouldn't it follow that it would be great for employers to set up a snitch line so anybody could (even anonymously) call to make reports on people? Is that a world you'd want to live in?
On the next line, let's say the person is fired from their job for a gross tweet. Should they be able to get a new job after that? If so, how does the previous history get erased so the prospective new employers don't see it and avoid them (this very type of thing is by the way, a huge problem for formerly incarcerated people especially felons). Add in that there was no trial, no standard of evidence, no due process, just a swinging axe from an executioner. Should this person (and often their families) just be relegated to extreme poverty the rest of their lives? Blacklisted from employment like the communists in Hollywood were?
You can’t win with these people. They don’t care if they aren’t personally impacted. The “sjw boogeyman” that could theoretically impact their cushy livelihood matters more than the very real right wing government that exists right now and is disappearing people.
But as long as they can still say the n word on twitter and call of duty everything will be okay. Who cares about those disappeared people anyway, they weren’t even citizens
One ban consists of the exercise of their right to... Not associate with you.
The other sends you to a Salvadoran gulag. (The silence from all the 'free speech' folks on this point is deafening.)
It's odd that one ban operates within the constraints of freedom (the freedom to associate requires the exercise of the freedom to not associate), while the other does not. It's almost like there's a categorical distinction.
It's utterly pointless to say that the starting point is the same, when one is an utter sabotage of all of society's rights and values... While the other is people affirming those rights.
>(The silence from all the 'free speech' folks on this point is deafening.)
As one of the 'Free Speech folks', I'll bite.
I absolutely condemn the administration rounding up someone like Mahmoud Khalil if the only thing he did was speak a rallies. If you look up Uncivil Law's video on Mahmoud Khalil Deportation, he is saying the same thing.
Now, let's flip this around. Where are all my left wing friends willing to condemn the investigation into Trump for his Jan. 6th speech? Are you willing to join us now?
The speech isn't why he would go to prison in a just world (that would be Georgia, the fake electors, and the toilet paper documents), and the impeachment that was a consequence of the speech is always a purely political trial. Someone can be impeached for any reason and no reason whatsoever, that is unfortunately how the system is designed. Two kinds of justice, with a few batshit SCOTUS rulings that make a criminal president unprosecutable as long as 34 senators are willing to go to bat for him.
It's not his speech that gave him trouble with the DOJ (before he dismissed all charges against himself), it's all the other parts of his conspiracy to steal the election.
Notice how none of the talking heads on TV were in legal trouble over their speech on the matter.
Every one of the cases against him had a bit more to it than 'well he said some bad words', the same way that a conman doesn't go to prison just for saying some bad words, or the same way that a war criminal gets a noose, despite simply saying words - giving orders.
Wrong.
Yesterday the House January 6 Committee unanimously voted to recommend that former President Donald Trump be criminally prosecuted, for charges including conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstructing an act of Congress, and, the most serious, insurrection. A congressional criminal referral of a former president is unprecedented, and if Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Department of Justice decide to prosecute Trump, they will have to address a formidable defense: that Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021, no matter how irresponsible or how full of lies about a “stolen” 2020 election, was, after all, a political speech and thus protected by the First Amendment.
Prominent legal scholars—and one lower-court judge—have rejected that argument, countering that Trump’s speech, in which he urged his supporters to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell,” was sufficiently inflammatory to permit criminal prosecution.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/january-6-...
When Congress' January 6 select committee asked the Justice Department to prosecute Trump in connection to the Capitol riot
>https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-january-6-criminal-ind...
Here is some other ink that has been spilled on the topic as well:
>Trump impeached for 'inciting' US Capitol riot https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55656385
>Trump ‘lit that fire’ of Capitol insurrection, Jan 6 Committee report says https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-lit-that-fire-of...
>Trump incites mob in violent end to presidency | CNN Politics https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/06/politics/donald-trump-capitol...
So I will ask again, Do you condemn all those who called for Trumps prosecution for his Jan 6th speech?
I still call the charges and prosecution of Mahmoud Khalil as a first amendment violation, why will you not join me?
Or, do you believe that Trump incited the Jan. 6th riots? If so then the same fact pattern holds for Mahmoud Khalil.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/04/30/p...
> One ban consists of the exercise of their right to... Not associate with you.
Many people have been fired / expelled / and many more silenced by those examples. If you can't tell the truth about your side (from how you're writing I assume you think in sides) then there's no point saying it.
> The other sends you to a Salvadoran gulag. (The silence from all the 'free speech' folks on this point is deafening.)
I haven't heard about this. Who has been sent to a Salvadoran gulag for speech?
There's been a lot in usian news about people having been deported because of things like tattoo of the logo of some spanish or other soccer club.
Here's one case where the deportation seems to be based mainly on having worn sports branded merch and a hoodie, and some supposed anonymous snitch, which the state has agreed was an error:
https://www.newsweek.com/kilmar-armando-abrego-garcia-deport...
they agreed it was an error, to send him to that particular prison, not out of the country in general.
he is an illegal and his deportation defense in 2019 was he feared for his life from a "rival gang" indicating he was in the MS-13 gang that the feds and judge found him to be part of.
he's not just some "father", as the left leaning news likes to portray. he participated in human trafficking and himself admitted he was a gang member.
it seemed that the left did not care about vetting when gang members were coming into the country.
...but now they're being deported, it seems vetting is crucial (which is being done, but you're not always privy to (or aware of) the information)
and "anonymous snitch" is quite derogatory. you do know how evil MS-13 is right? listen to yourself.
they chop people up without blinking an eye. the fact someone risked their life to "snitch" saved so many people. this isn't playground shit.
If the past decade is any indication, nothing has stopped the long list of cancelled right wing grifters, racists, and various other flavors of fools and bigots from finding gainful employment and signal boosting and platforming among like-minded people who do exercise their right to associate with them, despite their behavior.
For (allegedly) being so persecuted and silenced, it's weird how so many of them have so much more power, reach, and wealth than ever before.
Perhaps getting booed at in the last college campus they held a rally at is not quite the yellow star, or the mark of Cain that they convinced you it is.
If the argument is that it's not a big deal because it doesn't even work, then why collectively are we even bothering? Either it works and is something for reactionaries to fear and is effective social pressure, or it's a bunch of ineffective sound and fury that gives cover to your right wing aunt to tell stories about how "someone she knows" got fired for telling a joke. If it works, then let's own it completely, with all its flaws. If it doesn't work, then why bother at all? If it doesn't even work, then why try to defend the practice? Do we want it to work? Do we want it to be an effective form of social control?
In the past decade, the left got so cancel-happy that "cancellation" by the left-wing activist crowd lost pretty much all of its weight among anyone who isn't an ideologue. In 2016-2018, if you got canceled, you would have a very hard time finding any white-collar job afterward.
Everything is a flip side of the same coin if you abstract away from all the important details.
Oh the right say that some things are bad? Well the left say that some things are bad too!
These lazy equivalencies only breed cynicism and give intellectual cover to the Trump administration’s executive power grab. By all means criticize the left as much as you like. But the specifics are important. The current administration’s deportation of green card holders without due process isn’t somehow a mirror image of whatever excesses of left wing ‘cancel culture’ you may be upset about.
This false equivalency, if you honestly believe it, is shallow at best.
The ‘left’ has identified speech that is likely used to belittle or negate someone else’s existence and will appropriately label it as hate speech. Any structural changes to make these words frowned upon have taken years to get into place; people were allowed to adjust (and the length of time to do so is ridiculous in its own right), and what little change has happened did so in a way where the people who must change are barely inconvenienced. There have been few legal repercussions for the use of hate speech by anyone with a modicum of power. Sure, you could identify a few, but there are a ludicrous number of flagrant violations of any such laws (which are few) which go unpunished. The ‘left’ here being any sane member of society which has publicly pointed out that certain words are singularly incendiary.
Meanwhile, the grifters of this ‘right’ have conned the honest conservatives into believing that DEI is a term of hatred against conservatives. The ‘right’ has identified that they wish to say whatever without punishment and are structurally creating a cost for using inclusive language in any official capacity. The grifting part of the ‘right’ also doesn’t mind breaking any semblance of stability for everyone else. The ‘right’ here being the near-narcissistic people who have happened upon positions of privilege and believe that they are superior, have earned it, and that only those similar to themselves should ever attain such a position in the future.
But no, you have reduced your observation to ‘two sides are banning words.’
Not really. In both cases, compulsion is the problem. Neither side has the right to compel anyone to do anything, but they operate on the premise that they do, usually characterized by indignant self-rightiousness. The irrational extremists of both sides, the ones screaming the loudest, naturally, seek to enforce their version of "how things should be" on to other people, regardless if their objections are rational or not, while also constantly changing the rules or shifting goal posts, which keeps us forever locked in a state of not knowing if we are breaking them. It's mind-numbing to a degree that apathy starts to seem like a perfectly valid option. It's also a tactic historically used by totalitarianism.
They are two sides of the same monster, like Jekyll & Hyde.
Surely one can find ways to fight the irrational, inconsequential leftists (which there are many) without bullying institutions by cutting their funding, or kidnapping people in broad daylight in the street?
Civilized western countries do it all the time.
Absolutely. A functional civilization hinges on rational, equitable and cooperative solutions. Extremists are not interested in those things, though. They want what they want and they want it now with all the petulance and emotional regulation of a spoiled toddler.
> That's because the extent of the illiberal behavior of the radical left was yelling and "cancel culture" while the present behavior of the illiberal right is abductions and overseas slave camps. You can see why people might find having the two equated a little ridiculous, right?
You are correct - one is objectively worse than the other.
The unfortunate truth is that, also, one is a consequence of the other.
Trump is simply doing what his voters wanted[1]. And they voted for him precisely because `of the illiberal behavior of the radical left was yelling and "cancel culture"`.
Had the first thing not happened, then the consequence would have been a fictional story in an alternate timeline.
But here we are, and we don't get to say "Sure, we were assholes to 50% of the population, but your response is worse".
[1] Spoiler - they may not even want it anymore!
The unfortunate truth is that, also, one is a consequence of the other.
This is just the 'you made me do it' defense argued by every abuser ever. Someone is behaving as an ass, they get told 'you're an ass, stop that' and then they escalate and say 'you made me do this'. It happens in families, it happens in schoolyards, it happens on streets, it happens in business, it happens in dictatorships. Just yesterday, the president of South Korea was formally removed from office after trying to stage a military coup and this was his whole defense.
> This is just the 'you made me do it' defense argued by every abuser ever.
Meh. You can say that about every consequence ever if you determine a priori, like you have, that consequences are only performed by abusers.
In any case, it's not a defense when many many people were saying this before it happened.
IOW, it was a prediction before the fact, not a defense after the fact.
Free speech in the US is about not having consequences for what you are saying. In particular not having consequences from the government. Therefor you can only say that it is a legitimate consequence if you disregard free speech. Free speech in the US is about being able to be an asshole to 10%, 50% or 90% of the population without having to be responsible for what that part of the population does. And even more so what they do with the government. As such if you believe in free speech the government's actions stand on their own. What you actually don't get to say is that it is a consequence. Because that is what free speech in the US is supposed to prevent. Consequences from the government.
In many countries in Europe we have hate speech and defamation laws, we don't have at-will employment and many of our universities are public. This means there is less freedom to make others upset, questioning someone's character, firing them and ways to affect our education. This is by definition illiberal. (Worse or not is an open question). In Europe we can't say that "I might have offended 50% of the population, but sending me to prison is worse" because our laws says it isn't. In the US you can.
Does US law also say that the government can do all kinds of things, including pardoning criminals? Yes, but it still goes against the credibility of free speech in the US. One of the things the US still had over other countries.
> Free speech in the US is about not having consequences for what you are saying.
If a mob harasses you, your friends, you family, your workplace and your children with mass amounts of harassment and death threats, I would say that the target of the harassment has had their rights infringed on even though it wasn't literally the government.
No, you cannot have a mob send mass death threats to people, stalk them, and harass them because you didn't like a tweet that they made a decade ago.
The person who called it "cancel culture" chose the wrong word.
They should have called it "death threat culture" or "illegal mob harassment culture", as that would really drive the point home about what the issue is.
But, of course, you don't care about that or what happens to people's families when they are targeted. Instead, the only thing people care about is "Oh, but what was in that tweet that they made 10 years ago? I need to figure out if their family deserved it!" ("it" being the death threats and harassment, of course)
> Therefor you can only say that it is a legitimate consequence if you disregard free speech.
I didn't say it was a legitimate consequence. I was aiming for "it was a predictable consequence".
Sure, that is what I said as an argument. Free speech being a right means there is no merit to it being a consequence.
Being in a car crash might be the consequence of driving a car. But if someone drives at high speed in the wrong lane and then crashes into you it is a consequence of them not respecting traffic laws and not of you just being in a car. That is why we have traffic laws, so you are able to be in a car without someone crashing into you.
You could never be in a car, and you could also never speak. But then you wouldn't need free speech. Free speech exist so you can speak. In the US without consequences from the government. If you then speak the consequences of that speech aren't a consequence of you speaking but of the government not respecting free speech. Because to not have consequences you would have to not speak and then you wouldn't have free speech.
Someone getting deported by the democrats once they get into power would now be a predictable consequence. They then equally can't say "Sure, we were assholes to the other 50% of the population, but your response is worse". So then you have no free speech.
Eh, you can prove anything but starting history at a particular point.
For instance, "GamerGate", where a bunch of anonymous people on the internet tried to get a number of women in the game industry fired, predates "cancel culture" by a year or two.
Or how the whole #MeToo movement was, you know, a response to powerful people abusing people in their power, and firing or otherwise limiting their careers if they resisted.
If <insert famous talking head from ten years ago> didn't want to be "canceled", well, he could have always just not sexually harassed his underlings.
> Eh, you can prove anything but starting history at a particular point.
I'm not trying to "prove" anything; I'm merely pointing out that while it is true that $BAR is objectively worse than $FOO, it is equally true that $FOO is a direct consequence of $BAR.
In my other response to another poster I pointed out that many of us on forums that effectively silenced opposing viewpoints reminded readers that it's best to refrain from going to extremes because the pendulum always swings back, and that is what we are seeing now.
In much the same way, I'll point out that the pendulum always swings back and we are going to see a return to the previous extremes when people get tired of this extreme.
It's not an equation in what it does to people. Yes, abduction is worse than being yelled at.
However, it's pointing out that the general principle has been established: "People whose opinion I don't like can be banned from society." At first, it's only removing individuals from public discourse (cancel culture), then it's removing people physically (deportation).
This is always the endgame of eroding core liberal values. This has been pointed out to the illiberal left time and time again, to no avail.
Part of the problem here is that you're abstracting the actions of a handful of relatively powerless people to a principle: "People whose opinion I don't like can be banned from society." The 'I' here is, from your framing, the 'left' or something.
Strawman. The fired people you're talking about weren't banned from society by the people pointing them out on the internet. If someone's on an international flight yelling racial slurs and causing a commotion, and someone else publishes video of that person yelling racial slurs on an international flight, it's not the people commenting on the video who fired that person from their job. It's their employers. What would be the alternative? No one takes video of the person yelling racial slurs? Or, if the video is posted, no one comments on it? Or, maybe, the person yelling racial slurs could simply avoid losing their employment by not yelling racial slurs on a flight full of people with their phones out? Or maybe the employer could choose to ignore the negative publicity and keep the person on staff despite the risk to their revenue? Who exactly is the responsible party here?
I generally find it pointless to point out that 'right' perspectives suffer from a lack of practical logic--pointing out the fundamental irrationality of a position rarely changes the mind of the person holding that position. But, your position ignores power differential between people--your argument is a matter of 'principle,' but this isn't fundamentally about principles.
Is your argument then that a person yelling racial slurs on a full airplane shouldn't have their employment threatened by their behavior? That their employer shouldn't fire them?
First it’s people disagreeing with me, then it’s deportation to the death camps. There is zero nuance and the slippery slope is basically guaranteed so I should have freedom of consequence for everything I do!
talk about zero nuance, people here started comparing to concentration camps, and now you are at death camps
just a quick reminder, the ghettos which had far better living conditions than concentration camps (not death camps), had people living on 180 calories a day and ended with more than a half a million dead
so please, proportions, this is an insult to history
> while the present behavior of the illiberal right is abductions and overseas slave camps
Can you provide examples of people getting abducted and sent to "overseas slave camps" purely for their speech?
Took me all of 5 seconds to find an example. Tattoos are a form of protected speech: https://archive.is/2025.04.03-041258/https://www.theatlantic...
> it is valid to be more annoyed by the ways they are the same
Is it? One side has a vocal minority who took defense of minorities to the point of harassment and was ultimately rebuffed. The other side controls the government and is enthusiastically renditioning legal residents to prisons and defying the constitution and courts to keep doing it.
To be more upset about both sides being imperfect than the injustice of irreversible deportations to foreign prison seems ... absurd.
all parties are beneficiaries of the institutional structures that allow for a party to do those things
so the things you are bothered by and demand everyone to prioritize are actually solved by addressing the underlying mechanisms, as opposed to simply trying to propagate your preferred party's numbers
something... both sides... might actually be into. if the other party is afraid of the opposition party doing the same thing to different people, then there might actually be overwhelming consensus to change the thing that a "both sides" person is trying to point out
I'm making no demands. Only pointing out an absurd false equivalence.
Change to the polarizing system would be great. I doubt that will happen by softening protests to obscene injustice. Rather it's likely to reenforce the shifting Overton window further into authoritarianism and kleptocracy.
To break the two party system we need things a large portion of the populous has been (falsely) taught are bad for them: same day primaries, ranked choice voting, making campaign bribery illegal, unwinding corporate personhood, etc. Can you guess which side is most attached to the system of political machines and the lies that reinforce them?
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