So, are we tired of cancel culture yet?

 I don't think I need to reiterate what happened to Jimmy Kimmel. It's everywhere. And I'm still stuck talking on a touch screen so I wanna make it short.

Basically, his show was cancelled because he criticized trump. The FCC pressured Disney and Disney owns abc so book, show gone. And conservatives are going all cancel culture happy over it. Ya know, it's okay for corporations to cancel people or fire people for expressing wrong think, free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. Who could have seen this coming? Oh wait...

Yeah I've been critical of cancel culture for years because of this. Because if you open the door for it over topics like racism, what happens when racists who don't care about norms get in charge? Oh crap. We're seeing that now, aren't we? I hate to say that I told you so, but I told you all so. 

Free speech should be free speech. And private entities are just as dangerous to free speech as the state in some regards. If your financial well being is tied to a private institution, and that institution can fire you for expressing your free speech, you don't functionally have free speech. It exists on paper, but not in practice. 

I know I came around to supporting some level of cancel culture shortly before this happened, but I wanna reiterate, I was talking open Nazis and people openly talking about putting people in literal camps. And I'd be fine with cracking down on tankies who do that crap too. But that's the thing. I'm for censoring people advocating for literal political violence against others and only in narrow ways. I don't support that being used regularly. For me, the paradox of tolerance requires we tolerate people we don't like. It's only when they advocate for violence against others that we escalate to "cancelling". And it doesn't matter the political motivations. When you get that extreme you're dealing with horseshoe theory. All illiberal extremists end up looking similar despite ideological differences. And defenders of liberal democracy need to band together against illiberal people, regardless of ideological stripes. And that's my only motivation there.

Other than that we should not use cancel culture or any authoritarian measure to further political goals. And I'm fine with politics being a bit crass and uncivil. I grew up liking rush Limbaugh and his irreverence. When I shifted left I became a new atheist. And I didn't really care about the alt right and their offensiveness until they got as bad as they've been since 2021 or so. We shouldn't censor political opponents unless their views are so extreme they're inherently a danger to others. And that's a high bar to reach. And yeah. That's my view.