Shortly after conquering Palmyra, on 27 May, ISIS released an eighty-seven-second video message promising to preserve the Roman ruins. That did not prevent ISIS a month later from initiating the systematic destruction of the graceful colonnades that stretched into the desert for nearly a mile along the ancient Roman road. Militants smashed the famed Lion of al-Lāt, a beautiful stone statue of a lion god protecting a gazelle that Polish archaeologist Michał Gawlikowski discovered only in 1977. Subsequent reports from Palmyra were vague about what was happening. Then, in late August, satellite photographs confirmed that ISIS had razed the site’s most impressive structures, the Roman-era Temples of Baalshamin and Bel. UNSECO head Irina Bokova called ISIS’s vandalism a ‘war crime’ and an ‘intolerable crime against civilisation’. ISIS followed those outrages with the destruction of Palmyra’s distinctive funeral towers that had stood for centuries at the fringe of the old city. If the jihadists stayed much longer, archaeologists feared, nothing would remain.

This is part of the process that creates polarization and echo chambers. If you see an attempt at social shaming and feel triggered, that’s the second-best result from the perspective of the person who put it up. The best result is that you never went into that space at all. This isn’t just about keeping conservatives out of socialist spaces. It’s also about defining what kind of socialist the socialist space is for, and what kind of ideas good socialists are or aren’t allowed to hold.

I think easily 90% of online discussion is of this form right now, including some long and carefully-written thinkpieces with lots of citations. The point isn’t that it literally uses the word “fuck”, the point is that the active ingredient isn’t persuasiveness, it’s the ability to make some people feel like they’re suffering social costs for their opinion. Even really good arguments that are persuasive can be used this way if someone links them on Facebook with “This is why I keep saying Democrats are dumb” underneath it.

“If Alan is right,” Neuborne concluded, “then the president is above the law and we have a very different system than we think we have.”