[_bxg1]

But steroids only decrease the inflammation, they don't combat the original problem. If the inflammation is there because of a real pathogen, steroids are dangerous. Antibiotics decrease inflammation by tackling the original problem without a need to also increase inflammation.

(It is at this point I'd like to point out that I don't have a medical background and may be going out of my depth for the sake of analogy :P)

[lliamander]

Steroids are a typical treatment option for auto-immune conditions. The steroid Dexamethasone has proven effective at decreasing the mortality rate among COVID-19 patients who experience a cytokine storm leading to severe respiratory illness. Sure you may want to use antivirals/antibiotics alongside, but I don't know if it's always necessary.

I don't have a medical background but from what little I do understand, the cytokine storm is the result of a secondary immune response kicking into high-gear when the primary immune response fails to respond in a timely manner (perhaps due to poor health). Suppressing the secondary immune response enough to keep it from killing the organism allows the primary immune response to catch up and defeat the infection.

In other words, clamping down on cancel culture will grant reasoned discourse a chance to convince people to abandon right-wing ideologies without imposing severe economic penalties.

Of course, this assumes that right-wing ideology is a pathogen that is uniformly harmful to the body politic (which it may not be) but all metaphors have their limitations.

EDIT: I should clarify that I see the deplatforming as the cytokine storm. I.e. an unhealthy immune response that is damaging to our social organism.

[_bxg1]

> this assumes that right-wing ideology is a pathogen that is uniformly harmful to the body politic (which it may not be)

In the context of the discussion I was treating "bad-faith participants" as the pathogen, which I would absolutely say are uniformly harmful to the discourse. Of course subjectively the far right seems to take this approach more often than the far left, but that's not at all clear-cut and isn't the point I'm trying to make here.