Your example of an idea that isn't expressible without effective cancellation is funny, because it's the precise position that many conservatives have expressed, who still seem to have jobs (e.g. Jordan Peterson). Honestly it's so common of an idea, it's actually odd you think such an idea results in "cancellation" at all. It's the default idea, in fact. You can't swing a dead cat in conservative circles without hearing, verbatim, what you've written here.

And the "Can you write an OS in it?" is not a good metric for, "Can I write quality software?" OSes are not necessarily "well" written software by their nature. There are lots of good examples of "good code" that aren't written as part of OS code. Why would that, of all things, be your metric? Seems utterly nonsensical, the more I think about it the less sense it makes.

>who still seem to have jobs (e.g. Jordan Peterson).

Do you want a list of examples of other academics who were harassed and fired for saying this same idea to be convinced it's actually quite a cancellable idea, or is one academic not being fired (and not for lack of trying) enough for you to be convinced that "kindness" is an effective cancel shield?

>You can't swing a dead cat in conservative circles without hearing, verbatim

It's kinda a natural position when you can't swing a cat (dead or alive) in a trans community without both you and the cat changing gender. I, for instance, am not traditionally conservative (atheist and vegetarian, which are not traditionally conservative positions where I live. Also a moderate trans supporter.) and I still arrived at such an idea purely by observation.

>And the "Can you write an OS in it?" is not a good metric for, "Can I write quality software?"

My analogy was meant to convey the fact "Banning certain kinds of languages effectively bans certain kinds of expressions", no more and no less. You can't write an OS in a programming language that doesn't expose low-level memory primitives, and you can't talk about sexual predators grooming teens in a natural language that doesn't expose quite a lot of non-polite primitives.

You saying that you could write quality software without them being OSes is like saying that you could say truths in China without them being truths about Tiananmen square, yes off course you can, but if you do want to talk about Tiananmen square, you're out of luck. Nobody ever said censorship suppresses the full 360-degree field of conversation, just a very particular cone that upsets the censors.