Henderson and TC Williams are making a really dumb and strategically unwise argument. "It's True Scotsman cancel culture when the other team does it because they are abusing the power of leveraging social power for coercive excommunication and they are bad people doing it for bad reasons, but, if you really think about it, it's not actually cancel culture when my team uses the power appropriately because we are good people doing it for good reasons." Well, not good, but 'well-established' which is of course totally uncontroversial, which couldn't possibly include well-established injustices which should be unestablished (but how?) which people won't just use the Royal Collective to assert brazenly even when faIse ("that's not who We are" - "these are Our values") and where debates are settled with consensus acheived easily and quickly and you can just look up the list of what's safe and what's not on the FCC Ministry of Cancelation's web page. Please. Nobody fighting the progressives should be doing apologetics for this stuff in anything other than the mood of being compelled by game theoretic considerations into doing so out of tragic necessity that penalizes unilateral disarmament, but with the ideal of reaching a credible agreement of mutual disarmament, the pluralistically tolerant truce at the heart of a free society.
Cancelation is simply one of many para-governmental social pressure tactics deployed in the perpetual struggle over the prevailing elite ideology and de facto state religion, as part of the endless cold civil war. It's true that a homicide in self-defense isn't murder, but it's absurd to say that "real homicide culture is only the bad, murder stuff, not the good self-defense stuff" and it's foolishly naive to think the left - which has been in the driver's seat of elite opinion making for a century - won't take this framework and run circles around the right with it when the shoe's inevitably on the other foot.
My ideal is all First Amendment protected speech, not criminal, is allowed to everybody, all the time they are not working. KKK racist, Nazi Jew hating, OK in your free time, but not while on the job.
Yet not slander nor libel, even of public figures. SCOTUS was wrong (in Sullivan?) to require “actual malice”, and Palin should have won against the NYT. Murry’s truthful Bell Curve shouldn’t have made him an academic exile labeled racist.
A missing #3 from Rob H is truth. One should not be free to lie about another, to call them a Klan racist or a Nazi, when they are not. The truth should not be censored.
We are far far away from this ideal, which is worth fighting for—with words! And with firing folk.
Getting all who celebrate murder fired is Rep supported cancel culture, but tragically necessary to teach Dems the superiority of pluralistic tolerance. Because it is only now, after 50 years of unilateral, well 90%, Dem domination in deciding who to cancel, that the shoe is on the other, Rep foot.
I laugh at all calls for restraint, losing Arnold and contrary to Handle here, with fears that “the other side will do it”. They’ve been doing it for decades, and lack of Reps doing it back has mostly encouraged them. Fight Fight Fight is the sad, tragic, yet optimal tactic now.
When Dems argue that only First Amendment violating possibly true speech should be a firing offense, which I don’t hear any claiming, then I’ll be more opposing Reps canceling others for Politically Incorrect anti-Rep speech. Lies & slanders should remain firing offenses for both sides.
Actually, there is a third component that is more pernicious than the two listed.
It’s a complete *lack of forgiveness* in our culture that defines everything. If someone makes a mistake and is genuinely contrite about that mistake, then forgiveness and reconciliation ought to be an option. But, such forgiveness is completely lost in the present times. Say what you will about Christianity, but they got the concept of forgiveness mostly correct.
> Combined, 30% of Republican men and women named children as important to a successful life, about four times the proportion of Democrats who named children.
And Republicans are the pronatalist party? 30% is still shockingly low.
“America’s future could be one party with all the money and the other with all the children”
There’s also a gender component here. The linked post notes gender parity among Gen Z who voted for Harris in their opinions of work but in absolute numbers there are more Trump-voting Gen Z men than Harris-voting. So we might rephrase that as:
America’s future could be one party with all the money and the women and the other with all the men and the children.
When you put it like that, though, you naturally come to the question of how, exactly, those men will have so many children with fewer women? And I think therein lies much of our present politics.
"To lose your job for calling someone the N-word or saying that women are inferior to men is not true cancel culture"
Here are some examples of stretching this to the limit:
1) A girl is singing rap lyrics in her car. Someone overhears her. She gets her life cancelled (this happened in my county).
2) A man cracks his knuckles out the car of his truck and its decided its a white power sign.
3) James Damore writes a manifesto pointing out the differences between men and women, some of which may mean that men are statistically better qualified for certain roles, and thus we should not apply disparate impact as a reason to statistically discriminate against men and in favor of women. He is cancelled.
These are all applications of a general principal (don't say mean things) to contexts where the principal is clearly wrong.
---
TMCs article makes no sense BTW.
"Rufo is blatantly unprincipled."
But he literally states Rufo's principals in the preceding paragraph:
"Rufo seems to want to overturn the conventional wisdom in many elite spaces that only white people can be racist. That cosmopolitan view begins with the premise that racism per se involves not only prejudice but also structural power. No matter the personal privileges or credentials of St. Félix, Jeong, and other people of color, the thinking goes, white supremacy has stripped them of the systemic advantages afforded to white people. Therefore, nonwhites, no matter the bigotry or bias they espouse, are exempt from being racist.
This assumption has begun to falter in the post-“woke” era that was ushered in with Trump’s reelection, and Rufo might have just accelerated its demise. St. Félix may not have lost a job, but her reputation has been complicated by a surge of negative coverage, and she has retreated from social media, deleting her once-prominent account on X. She is now a warning for anyone else who has thought that trafficking in anti-white tirades wouldn’t come with a cost."
Which makes the final paragraph baffling:
"Rufo is blatantly unprincipled. But his moral purpose here seems clear enough: to establish the cynical norm that white people aren’t the only ones who can be tarred by opportunists seeking to narrow the range of acceptable discourse. That is a terrible equality that must be disavowed no matter whose scalp is on offer."
So Rufo clearly wants to end the norm that non-whites can be blatantly racist against whites without consequence. To do that he needs to prove there are consequences to such actions. This is somehow "a terrible equality that must be disavowed."
Why? Does TMC think the norm that non-whites can be grossly racist to whites should continue? That its a good inequality that non-whites get a pass on their racism.
I wouldn't get too worked up about Thomas C W. I first noticed him in a recent Unherd podcast being interviewed by Freddie Sayers. The only reason I pay attention to channels like Unherd is because I take a perverse pleasure in watching avowed centrists flailing in their attempts to establish a sane middle ground. TCW immediately struck me as being manufactured -- some flavor of mixed race, articulate and mild-mannered, critical of wokism but afflicted with TDS. Modeled after Obama, his main function is to police the right rather than to counter extremism on the left. Unimpressive academic credentials. It doesn't surprise me that he is affiliated with AEI, which I gather has been largely displaced by the Heritage Foundation. DC 'Think Tanks' -- snort!
He's unprincipled because he has portrayed himself as pro free speech. If he had always said that what he wants is for woke principles to cover white people as well, then he would be principled (albeit stupid).
"But ask yourself: if someone attends KKK meetings, proudly supports their cause, and loses their job, is that cancel culture? No. The punishment fits the offense. Society has long agreed that membership in racist groups carries consequences."
Maybe it depends on the job but I mostly disagree. If they do their job while treating everyone fairly and with respect, I don't see that it should matter. The key is whether they can do their job.
And it's a slippery slope. What issues are truly settled? Is a belief that races are genetically different worthy of firing? What about someone who believes LGBT is a sin? That there are two sexes? Should we allow a flat-earther to teach science in k-12? What about a socialist teaching economics or history?
How many people would argue Charlie Kirk shouldn't be hired or should be fired if he were an employee somewhere?
In discussing cancel culture we should ask, what makes cancel culture sustainable? Basic economics tells us that people who act with racist, sexist, or other biased motives pay a cost for those biased actions. Does cancel culture deviate from this idea?
In examining this question, we should revisit the various types of monopolies and consider which type are most closely associated with cancel culture. We have state-sponsored monopolies and private monopolies. Universities are most similar to state-sponsored monopolies. This is where cancel culture is most prolific.
Perhaps we should simplify our definition of cancel culture to something more like: censorship and punishment inflicted by those with state-sponsored monopoly power.
Our definition of cancel culture should incorporate past cancel cultures such as the Nazi Party, the KKK, various state-sponsored churches, anti-communist movements, etc.
First, I disagree with your premise that racist, sexist, bigoted people pay a cost in our economy. It didn't seem to hurt Donald Trump. Add criminal to that list.
Also, I don't think our universities are monopolies; they are incredibly competitive. Their left wing bias, I think, is much more deeply rooted. In my opinion, the radical left intellectuals gained ascendancy after 1980 when everyone else was getting real jobs, and it's been self reinforcing ever since; Conservatives won't get a thesis approved.
Henderson and TCW's definition is unprincipled. It opens the door to saying "this isn't a norm yet, but it ought to be." It's not wrong to enforce a new norm if the norm is good. So this definition makes cancellation a neutral thing rather than a bad thing.
I would define cancelling as punishing someone for their beliefs. Punishing people for their sincerely held beliefs is oppressive, even when it's a private entity doing the punishing.
Ending a personal relationship because you no longer think highly of someone is *not* cancelling. There's a fuzzy border between that and cancellation, but I think the idea is clear enough to be useful. If I don't know you personally, your beliefs are none of my business, and trying to get you fired serves no possible purpose for me except to punish you.
Your last paragraph makes me think of “tattling” which was a kiddie buzzword when I was little.
I was not a tattletale and I am trying to think why. Partly because tattletales interfered with play, outdoor play particularly, and I believed strongly that nothing should interrupt play, not even the sun in its heaven going down.
And tattletales tended to have certain other irritating personal characteristics which I may have conflated with tattling.
Also, I think I was bossy, probably, during outdoor play (indoors, I yielded perfectly meekly to girlier girls) and it wouldn’t have occurred to me that anybody should appeal to any higher authority lol. (We bossy children haven’t the self-awareness at the time that we are bossy.)
I realize that this is all very dated, and no child would ever be told now not to tattle. Instead, you should be brave and tattle. I don’t know anything about the exigencies of contemporary child rearing, so I’m not suggesting people should be anti-tattling.
But the other thing that I think was key was the feeling that the children were in one group and the adults in another. And we fractious kids should at least as a general principle, be suspicious of the edicts and meddling of adults.
With cancelling - even if you have the good fortune to be the cancel-seeker and not the cancellee - it has a groveling, toadying quality. It is announcing, there is a layer above us to which we are subordinate, both you and me. It can be true that the hierarchy exists, and also be something that person with any pride should shirk from admitting, in my view.
I’m not going to lie and say I don’t occasionally feel a brief (and quickly forgotten) schadenfreude when some notable I dislike gets this treatment - but the custom yet makes me uneasy, and I can honestly say that I would never seek to use this method of - speech? argumentation? - regardless of “side”.
I disagree. True revenge is the Scarlet Letter treatment. The longer the circumstances surrounding some cancellation are easily found online, the bigger the damage in terms of one’s reputation and ability to support one’s family.
I would have agreed about losing your job for using the N-word in say, 1995. At least it had shock value still.
But we’re long past the point where it’s become a trap, given its primacy in the dominant pop culture (which itself seems stuck in a Permanent Extended Present, a sign things aren’t entirely “organic” at the moment).
I’ve not read him but perhaps Thomas C-W has written somewhere, thoughtfully, in reference to the word’s shibboleth status as a triumph over whatever - but as presented it’s a nontrivial example of forced cognitive dissonance designed to keep people in their place, or else, the left’s usual penchant for keeping the possibility of (nearly all forms of) judgment in its back pocket in case wanted/required.
It was shamed, young people of my generation had thoroughly absorbed that, and the small remnant of the southern upper class was mainly distinguishable for not having used it in the first place - so the tear-it-all-down left had to stand it up again as a moving target.
Anyway, speech codes determined by fashion should be viewed with suspicion, when not derision.
Did anyone see the piece in the WSJ the other day - it was in the spot on the front page below the fold that the editors tend to reserve for the lightly humorous or wacky - about Nigel Farage as TikTok or firstly “Cameo” (?) star uttering nonsense-to-him “memes” that kids pay him ~$150k/mo to say?
This seemed less amusing to me than it did to the WSJ.
Speech codes work poorly in this post-literate environment. If they ever do - who would have guessed?
At this point in 2025, I can say with high certainty that the black community uses the n word at some multiple of what the triple k used it in their heyday. If it’s such an odious word, which it is, then stop using it. And, stop trashing the minds of America’s youth so that the parents don’t have to give awkward lessons to their children on “they can say it, but you can never think it.”
Which idiot piece reminds me - feminization sure but that gives a pass to - gaming culture!
Underrated cancer!
(Let me get ready for my cancelling!)
*”the reason our computers don’t work anymore”
*”the smugness of gaming culture”
*ruined photography
*witless slang, perfectly designed for Our Dumb World
*gaming instead of doing anything useful
*has just this past couple of weeks captivated two certifiable enemies in the WSJ editorial side, and nutjob “disaffected” empty headed “youth” that have never held a job (in even the recent past people worked starting at fourteen, and nothing is so clarifying as work, what does gaming clarify?) who admire Kirk’s murderer
It’s too little for someone trying to earn a living as a writer.
I would like to subscribe to Moses Sternstein, and I would like to read him on more subjects, but substack has trained us to think of it as a buffet.
Of course, I realize at one point - and my elderly parents still - people paid hundreds of dollars a year to receive the paper, but substack doesn’t feel quite as “nutritive” as the paper: it would be like, if the paper was mostly punditry and a bit of the “lifestyle” (formerly “woman’s”) section.
Apologies to Moses S., he’s really good and measured a writer and I realize his newsletter is targeted at people with portfolios and the interest in managing them, with an eye to weathering upcoming events, and I know it is easily affordable to those folks.
He just strikes me as someone I would find relaxing to read if he had a newspaper column. Much like Rob H.
Nope. There's biological procreation, but there's also ideological procreation (i.e., conversion). The left has an advantage with conversion, especially for the elite class, and elites matter a lot in terms of the people who end up getting recruited to lead institutions, converting the institutions to the left as a consequence.
It's similar numerically to how, it seems for much of history, cities had high mortality and were population sinks, but countries could still increasingly urbanize on net because of all the population flows (i.e. domestic immigration) from the fecund countryside into the cities.
The left tends to benefit from "ideological immigration" of foreigners as well.
“America’s future could be one party with all the money and the other with all the children”
I’ve noticed this before, the irony is that those with all the money are tending socialist those with all the children not so much . Nonetheless, a focus on the average obscure the margins. I’ve observed the intrinsic inconsistencies (and resentments from the new well to do left) building over the past decade. Unsustainable trends always end.
Henderson and TC Williams are making a really dumb and strategically unwise argument. "It's True Scotsman cancel culture when the other team does it because they are abusing the power of leveraging social power for coercive excommunication and they are bad people doing it for bad reasons, but, if you really think about it, it's not actually cancel culture when my team uses the power appropriately because we are good people doing it for good reasons." Well, not good, but 'well-established' which is of course totally uncontroversial, which couldn't possibly include well-established injustices which should be unestablished (but how?) which people won't just use the Royal Collective to assert brazenly even when faIse ("that's not who We are" - "these are Our values") and where debates are settled with consensus acheived easily and quickly and you can just look up the list of what's safe and what's not on the FCC Ministry of Cancelation's web page. Please. Nobody fighting the progressives should be doing apologetics for this stuff in anything other than the mood of being compelled by game theoretic considerations into doing so out of tragic necessity that penalizes unilateral disarmament, but with the ideal of reaching a credible agreement of mutual disarmament, the pluralistically tolerant truce at the heart of a free society.
Cancelation is simply one of many para-governmental social pressure tactics deployed in the perpetual struggle over the prevailing elite ideology and de facto state religion, as part of the endless cold civil war. It's true that a homicide in self-defense isn't murder, but it's absurd to say that "real homicide culture is only the bad, murder stuff, not the good self-defense stuff" and it's foolishly naive to think the left - which has been in the driver's seat of elite opinion making for a century - won't take this framework and run circles around the right with it when the shoe's inevitably on the other foot.
My ideal is all First Amendment protected speech, not criminal, is allowed to everybody, all the time they are not working. KKK racist, Nazi Jew hating, OK in your free time, but not while on the job.
Yet not slander nor libel, even of public figures. SCOTUS was wrong (in Sullivan?) to require “actual malice”, and Palin should have won against the NYT. Murry’s truthful Bell Curve shouldn’t have made him an academic exile labeled racist.
A missing #3 from Rob H is truth. One should not be free to lie about another, to call them a Klan racist or a Nazi, when they are not. The truth should not be censored.
We are far far away from this ideal, which is worth fighting for—with words! And with firing folk.
Getting all who celebrate murder fired is Rep supported cancel culture, but tragically necessary to teach Dems the superiority of pluralistic tolerance. Because it is only now, after 50 years of unilateral, well 90%, Dem domination in deciding who to cancel, that the shoe is on the other, Rep foot.
I laugh at all calls for restraint, losing Arnold and contrary to Handle here, with fears that “the other side will do it”. They’ve been doing it for decades, and lack of Reps doing it back has mostly encouraged them. Fight Fight Fight is the sad, tragic, yet optimal tactic now.
When Dems argue that only First Amendment violating possibly true speech should be a firing offense, which I don’t hear any claiming, then I’ll be more opposing Reps canceling others for Politically Incorrect anti-Rep speech. Lies & slanders should remain firing offenses for both sides.
“Cancel culture has 2 components”
Actually, there is a third component that is more pernicious than the two listed.
It’s a complete *lack of forgiveness* in our culture that defines everything. If someone makes a mistake and is genuinely contrite about that mistake, then forgiveness and reconciliation ought to be an option. But, such forgiveness is completely lost in the present times. Say what you will about Christianity, but they got the concept of forgiveness mostly correct.
I agree with you yet it's worth noting that many of the contrite offenders are forgiven while others aren't.
> Combined, 30% of Republican men and women named children as important to a successful life, about four times the proportion of Democrats who named children.
And Republicans are the pronatalist party? 30% is still shockingly low.
They are pronatalist, but not personally natalist.
“America’s future could be one party with all the money and the other with all the children”
There’s also a gender component here. The linked post notes gender parity among Gen Z who voted for Harris in their opinions of work but in absolute numbers there are more Trump-voting Gen Z men than Harris-voting. So we might rephrase that as:
America’s future could be one party with all the money and the women and the other with all the men and the children.
When you put it like that, though, you naturally come to the question of how, exactly, those men will have so many children with fewer women? And I think therein lies much of our present politics.
"To lose your job for calling someone the N-word or saying that women are inferior to men is not true cancel culture"
Here are some examples of stretching this to the limit:
1) A girl is singing rap lyrics in her car. Someone overhears her. She gets her life cancelled (this happened in my county).
2) A man cracks his knuckles out the car of his truck and its decided its a white power sign.
3) James Damore writes a manifesto pointing out the differences between men and women, some of which may mean that men are statistically better qualified for certain roles, and thus we should not apply disparate impact as a reason to statistically discriminate against men and in favor of women. He is cancelled.
These are all applications of a general principal (don't say mean things) to contexts where the principal is clearly wrong.
---
TMCs article makes no sense BTW.
"Rufo is blatantly unprincipled."
But he literally states Rufo's principals in the preceding paragraph:
"Rufo seems to want to overturn the conventional wisdom in many elite spaces that only white people can be racist. That cosmopolitan view begins with the premise that racism per se involves not only prejudice but also structural power. No matter the personal privileges or credentials of St. Félix, Jeong, and other people of color, the thinking goes, white supremacy has stripped them of the systemic advantages afforded to white people. Therefore, nonwhites, no matter the bigotry or bias they espouse, are exempt from being racist.
This assumption has begun to falter in the post-“woke” era that was ushered in with Trump’s reelection, and Rufo might have just accelerated its demise. St. Félix may not have lost a job, but her reputation has been complicated by a surge of negative coverage, and she has retreated from social media, deleting her once-prominent account on X. She is now a warning for anyone else who has thought that trafficking in anti-white tirades wouldn’t come with a cost."
Which makes the final paragraph baffling:
"Rufo is blatantly unprincipled. But his moral purpose here seems clear enough: to establish the cynical norm that white people aren’t the only ones who can be tarred by opportunists seeking to narrow the range of acceptable discourse. That is a terrible equality that must be disavowed no matter whose scalp is on offer."
So Rufo clearly wants to end the norm that non-whites can be blatantly racist against whites without consequence. To do that he needs to prove there are consequences to such actions. This is somehow "a terrible equality that must be disavowed."
Why? Does TMC think the norm that non-whites can be grossly racist to whites should continue? That its a good inequality that non-whites get a pass on their racism.
Exactly right- tatters hate it when they get titted.
I wouldn't get too worked up about Thomas C W. I first noticed him in a recent Unherd podcast being interviewed by Freddie Sayers. The only reason I pay attention to channels like Unherd is because I take a perverse pleasure in watching avowed centrists flailing in their attempts to establish a sane middle ground. TCW immediately struck me as being manufactured -- some flavor of mixed race, articulate and mild-mannered, critical of wokism but afflicted with TDS. Modeled after Obama, his main function is to police the right rather than to counter extremism on the left. Unimpressive academic credentials. It doesn't surprise me that he is affiliated with AEI, which I gather has been largely displaced by the Heritage Foundation. DC 'Think Tanks' -- snort!
He's unprincipled because he has portrayed himself as pro free speech. If he had always said that what he wants is for woke principles to cover white people as well, then he would be principled (albeit stupid).
"But ask yourself: if someone attends KKK meetings, proudly supports their cause, and loses their job, is that cancel culture? No. The punishment fits the offense. Society has long agreed that membership in racist groups carries consequences."
Maybe it depends on the job but I mostly disagree. If they do their job while treating everyone fairly and with respect, I don't see that it should matter. The key is whether they can do their job.
And it's a slippery slope. What issues are truly settled? Is a belief that races are genetically different worthy of firing? What about someone who believes LGBT is a sin? That there are two sexes? Should we allow a flat-earther to teach science in k-12? What about a socialist teaching economics or history?
How many people would argue Charlie Kirk shouldn't be hired or should be fired if he were an employee somewhere?
In discussing cancel culture we should ask, what makes cancel culture sustainable? Basic economics tells us that people who act with racist, sexist, or other biased motives pay a cost for those biased actions. Does cancel culture deviate from this idea?
In examining this question, we should revisit the various types of monopolies and consider which type are most closely associated with cancel culture. We have state-sponsored monopolies and private monopolies. Universities are most similar to state-sponsored monopolies. This is where cancel culture is most prolific.
Perhaps we should simplify our definition of cancel culture to something more like: censorship and punishment inflicted by those with state-sponsored monopoly power.
Our definition of cancel culture should incorporate past cancel cultures such as the Nazi Party, the KKK, various state-sponsored churches, anti-communist movements, etc.
First, I disagree with your premise that racist, sexist, bigoted people pay a cost in our economy. It didn't seem to hurt Donald Trump. Add criminal to that list.
Also, I don't think our universities are monopolies; they are incredibly competitive. Their left wing bias, I think, is much more deeply rooted. In my opinion, the radical left intellectuals gained ascendancy after 1980 when everyone else was getting real jobs, and it's been self reinforcing ever since; Conservatives won't get a thesis approved.
Henderson and TCW's definition is unprincipled. It opens the door to saying "this isn't a norm yet, but it ought to be." It's not wrong to enforce a new norm if the norm is good. So this definition makes cancellation a neutral thing rather than a bad thing.
I would define cancelling as punishing someone for their beliefs. Punishing people for their sincerely held beliefs is oppressive, even when it's a private entity doing the punishing.
Ending a personal relationship because you no longer think highly of someone is *not* cancelling. There's a fuzzy border between that and cancellation, but I think the idea is clear enough to be useful. If I don't know you personally, your beliefs are none of my business, and trying to get you fired serves no possible purpose for me except to punish you.
Your last paragraph makes me think of “tattling” which was a kiddie buzzword when I was little.
I was not a tattletale and I am trying to think why. Partly because tattletales interfered with play, outdoor play particularly, and I believed strongly that nothing should interrupt play, not even the sun in its heaven going down.
And tattletales tended to have certain other irritating personal characteristics which I may have conflated with tattling.
Also, I think I was bossy, probably, during outdoor play (indoors, I yielded perfectly meekly to girlier girls) and it wouldn’t have occurred to me that anybody should appeal to any higher authority lol. (We bossy children haven’t the self-awareness at the time that we are bossy.)
I realize that this is all very dated, and no child would ever be told now not to tattle. Instead, you should be brave and tattle. I don’t know anything about the exigencies of contemporary child rearing, so I’m not suggesting people should be anti-tattling.
But the other thing that I think was key was the feeling that the children were in one group and the adults in another. And we fractious kids should at least as a general principle, be suspicious of the edicts and meddling of adults.
With cancelling - even if you have the good fortune to be the cancel-seeker and not the cancellee - it has a groveling, toadying quality. It is announcing, there is a layer above us to which we are subordinate, both you and me. It can be true that the hierarchy exists, and also be something that person with any pride should shirk from admitting, in my view.
I’m not going to lie and say I don’t occasionally feel a brief (and quickly forgotten) schadenfreude when some notable I dislike gets this treatment - but the custom yet makes me uneasy, and I can honestly say that I would never seek to use this method of - speech? argumentation? - regardless of “side”.
AI changes everything about "cancel culture," of course. True revenge would be silence, oblivion.
I disagree. True revenge is the Scarlet Letter treatment. The longer the circumstances surrounding some cancellation are easily found online, the bigger the damage in terms of one’s reputation and ability to support one’s family.
I would have agreed about losing your job for using the N-word in say, 1995. At least it had shock value still.
But we’re long past the point where it’s become a trap, given its primacy in the dominant pop culture (which itself seems stuck in a Permanent Extended Present, a sign things aren’t entirely “organic” at the moment).
I’ve not read him but perhaps Thomas C-W has written somewhere, thoughtfully, in reference to the word’s shibboleth status as a triumph over whatever - but as presented it’s a nontrivial example of forced cognitive dissonance designed to keep people in their place, or else, the left’s usual penchant for keeping the possibility of (nearly all forms of) judgment in its back pocket in case wanted/required.
It was shamed, young people of my generation had thoroughly absorbed that, and the small remnant of the southern upper class was mainly distinguishable for not having used it in the first place - so the tear-it-all-down left had to stand it up again as a moving target.
Anyway, speech codes determined by fashion should be viewed with suspicion, when not derision.
Did anyone see the piece in the WSJ the other day - it was in the spot on the front page below the fold that the editors tend to reserve for the lightly humorous or wacky - about Nigel Farage as TikTok or firstly “Cameo” (?) star uttering nonsense-to-him “memes” that kids pay him ~$150k/mo to say?
This seemed less amusing to me than it did to the WSJ.
Speech codes work poorly in this post-literate environment. If they ever do - who would have guessed?
At this point in 2025, I can say with high certainty that the black community uses the n word at some multiple of what the triple k used it in their heyday. If it’s such an odious word, which it is, then stop using it. And, stop trashing the minds of America’s youth so that the parents don’t have to give awkward lessons to their children on “they can say it, but you can never think it.”
“Alexa, play today’s hits on Pandora.”
N bombs everywhere.
“Alexa, please stop.”
Which idiot piece reminds me - feminization sure but that gives a pass to - gaming culture!
Underrated cancer!
(Let me get ready for my cancelling!)
*”the reason our computers don’t work anymore”
*”the smugness of gaming culture”
*ruined photography
*witless slang, perfectly designed for Our Dumb World
*gaming instead of doing anything useful
*has just this past couple of weeks captivated two certifiable enemies in the WSJ editorial side, and nutjob “disaffected” empty headed “youth” that have never held a job (in even the recent past people worked starting at fourteen, and nothing is so clarifying as work, what does gaming clarify?) who admire Kirk’s murderer
Substack is getting expensive. Two years ago Rob Henderson was charging $5 a month.
It’s too little for someone trying to earn a living as a writer.
I would like to subscribe to Moses Sternstein, and I would like to read him on more subjects, but substack has trained us to think of it as a buffet.
Of course, I realize at one point - and my elderly parents still - people paid hundreds of dollars a year to receive the paper, but substack doesn’t feel quite as “nutritive” as the paper: it would be like, if the paper was mostly punditry and a bit of the “lifestyle” (formerly “woman’s”) section.
Apologies to Moses S., he’s really good and measured a writer and I realize his newsletter is targeted at people with portfolios and the interest in managing them, with an eye to weathering upcoming events, and I know it is easily affordable to those folks.
He just strikes me as someone I would find relaxing to read if he had a newspaper column. Much like Rob H.
I guess I really just want newspapers back.
If the left is not procreating the outcome is obvious.
Nope. There's biological procreation, but there's also ideological procreation (i.e., conversion). The left has an advantage with conversion, especially for the elite class, and elites matter a lot in terms of the people who end up getting recruited to lead institutions, converting the institutions to the left as a consequence.
It's similar numerically to how, it seems for much of history, cities had high mortality and were population sinks, but countries could still increasingly urbanize on net because of all the population flows (i.e. domestic immigration) from the fecund countryside into the cities.
The left tends to benefit from "ideological immigration" of foreigners as well.
“America’s future could be one party with all the money and the other with all the children”
I’ve noticed this before, the irony is that those with all the money are tending socialist those with all the children not so much . Nonetheless, a focus on the average obscure the margins. I’ve observed the intrinsic inconsistencies (and resentments from the new well to do left) building over the past decade. Unsustainable trends always end.