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I don't know about witch hunts. But each time you push something through, you extend yourself and spend social capital. You can use polarisation and moral outr

I don't know about witch hunts. But each time you push something through, you extend yourself and spend social capital. You can use polarisation and moral outrage to win people over on one issue today. Say your thing is to convince people that JK Rowling is a bad person. But afterwards you'll be the annoying trans rights or SJW person, and people not on your side will be less inclined to listen to you when it comes to other issues. You can imagine political allegiance as a sigmoid function. It's zero on one side of the spectrum and one at the other. What's happening is not that the center is shifting. Rather, the function is getting steeper, it is turning into a step function. The strategy of cancelling people is effective, but it is alienating people at the same time. > How so? With each witch hunt their power will increase and they'll be feared more. Each one after that becomes easier, because people have been seeing the previous one and know what will happen if they don't comply, so they'll be even more inclined to go along with whatever you say. As, well, a leftist, that is not my experience at all. I think we are rapidly loosing ground in the middle of society. "Each one" may be the one that breaks the camel's back and makes somebody say "screw it" to us. And the far right capitalizes a lot on this. Fearmongering about cancelling is much more widespread than actual cancelling. (This is my experience in Germany, it might be different in the States).

luckylion 4y ago
Shouldn't we see "cancelling" pretty quickly die out if that was the case? Essentially, you'd build up social capital and then spend it with a bang and it's gone. No more cancelling. That's not what I see happening. Granted, I try not follow these things too closely, but I didn't get the impression that any social capital was spent -- quite the opposite. If you successfully cancel someone, you earn the points for bringing down a bad person, they were cancelled after all, which proves their guilt. And, like a war lord after a successful raid, you also gathered power, and you instill fear. Will one of your allies jump in front of you to protect someone they don't deem evil when they've just seen you destroy someone? I believe the likelihood decreases with each campaign. It looks to me more like a authoritarian state forming: in the beginning, you still have an opposition that will resist and fight. But the more of them you throw in prison, drive into exile or simply murder, the weaker the resistance gets and the easier it becomes to attack those that remain.

luckylion 4y ago

Shouldn't we see "cancelling" pretty quickly die out if that was the case? Essentially, you'd build up social capital and then spend it with a bang and it's gone. No more cancelling. That's not what I see happening. Granted, I try not follow these things too closely, but I didn't get the impression that any social capital was spent -- quite the opposite. If you successfully cancel someone, you earn the points for bringing down a bad person, they were cancelled after all, which proves their guilt. And, like a war lord after a successful raid, you also gathered power, and you instill fear. Will one of your allies jump in front of you to protect someone they don't deem evil when they've just seen you destroy someone? I believe the likelihood decreases with each campaign. It looks to me more like a authoritarian state forming: in the beginning, you still have an opposition that will resist and fight. But the more of them you throw in prison, drive into exile or simply murder, the weaker the resistance gets and the easier it becomes to attack those that remain.