>"Our failure to have a serious discussion about defining “cancel culture” encourages this. When some people vaguely complain about “cancel culture” in a way that lends itself to promoting this constant partisanship, other people not unreasonably see it as partisan."
Popehat seems to be falling into the trap of thinking the precisely defining something will lead to clarity. It rarely, if ever, does. Each one of us has our own conception of a term - wordfeel, if you will - and virtually no one actually knows or holds to the literal dictionary definition. We hear words and apply them if they seem right to us. Even if you managed to precisely define cancel culture, people would easily try to claim that some alleged cancelling event it is actually something else, "accountability", "showing you the door", etc.. Never underestimate someone's ability to lawyerly redefine what something is or isn't.
Additionally, I think Popehat is dead wrong here:
>"Saying we should “end cancel culture” means we’re saying some people should refrain from some exercises of speech and association to promote other people feeling more free to speak."
No rights are actually being infringed by this. It is possible to have cultural mores that are in the spirit of free speech. The opposite stance, not calling on people to end cancel culture, is also accepting a reduction in speech. Even so, by Popehat's own worldview, because the government is not restricting cancel culture this shouldn't be seen as some infringement of liberty. I don't know what Popehat actually wants here.
For people to stop calling it "cancel culture" whenever they face reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others would be a good start.
People not wanting to patronize or associate with you when you cause harm to people they care about is really not a bad thing, and it's not new either, and yet it is what gets called "cancel culture" by a lot of people.
Contextless social media that encourages misunderstanding, a lack of ability to find retractions, and the ability to dig up old sins and present them as present views are an issue, and result in people piling onto others over misconceptions. It's a real problem. That's almost never what actually gets talked about, it's just "I should get to say whatever I want without people disliking me".
> reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others
This is what is at issue. What does "reasonable consequences" mean for "harm to others"? Sometimes the harm to others is disputed, as the harm is almost always considered emotional. Sometimes what is considered "reasonable consequences" is something as significant as loss of livelihood.
It's not really an informative example. You're not losing your job in this case for emotional harm. It's because you insulted your boss. You could lose your job even if he didn't care.
If you had to let an employee go and caused even more emotional harm (brought on by their no longer being employed), you wouldn't receive a reprisal.
Why are you pointing out that speech sometimes is reasonable to punish? How does this clarify the question of whether we have become too punitive regarding political and controversial social speech.
The case we're talking about is I accuse you of calling me a fatty and get a bunch of people to tell your employer that they'll boycott, costing a bunch of people their income, people who didn't do anything, unless they fire you.
Note that I said "accuse". Maybe you called me a fatty, maybe you didn't.
Note that "get" is too strong. There appear to be people waiting for an excuse to go after "your employer" for pretty much any value of "your employer". I may not even be bothered - someone else may do the "get" even if all I do is mention that you called me fatty/thought that you thought of me as a fatty without any intent that someone do something.
I’m not convinced it’s different from “cancel culture as it is”. One common theme I’ve seen — including in this thread! — is people creating a dichotomy between “free speech” and “feelings”. Usually that means they want to say something controversial, but their own feelings get hurt when they receive pushback, so they try to reframe the debate in such a way that they’re the aggrieved party.
The “insult my boss” is a good thought experiment because it reveals that motivation. Is it really about “free speech” vs. “feelings”, or is there something else going on?
The boss situation is a lousy experiment because its result tells us nothing about what the result should be in the situation we're discussing. (For one, my boss isn't going to fire me by threatening the business if I call him a fatty.)
For example, it's relatively easy to figure out who the person is behind this account. The mob could decide that I've "done wrong" and go after my income. That's no where near me screaming at my boss that he's a Nazi or a fatty.
FWIW, "free speech" might not be the right hook - toleration might be more accurate. Many of the cancelers justify their actions as "we tolerate everything except intolerance."
I think it's broadly considered acceptable because insulting your boss is an aggresive behavior directed at a colleague. Simply stating an opinion is not.
Of course, it depends on what you view as harmful, and who's opinions you agree with. There is no obvious right answer. Pretending we can say "so this should never happen" is absurd in my view, it implies people have to give their money to people that will use that money to fund harm.
The core of free speech is that even abhorrent views should not face censorship by the government, because democracy requires it. If this is true, surely the right to not support people who's views you disagree with is just as necessary? (If not, is every Republican cancelling the Democratic party by not donating to them?) The answer, as with democracy and freedom of speech, is to make the better argument, get people to agree with you, and then use that to support the things you think are right.
We don't have a better answer than that.
I think there are obvious cases we can personally make better choices: seek context and clarity, don't jump to conclusions and pile on just because others say something without checking it is valid and proportionate, but again, that's never the "anti-cancel culture" argument.
> The answer, as with democracy and freedom of speech, is to make the better argument, get people to agree with you, and then use that to support the things you think are right.
I find this difficult to agree with but not because of the sentiment but because of the environment. If a bad faith actor wants to smear even totally reasoned speech by spouting complete fabrications, so long as they have the bigger platform/microphone on social media no amount of making a correct argument will resolve the problem. I agree in a perfect world without these sorts of algorithmic effects, this would be the ideal solution— but if you simply aren’t favored by the algorithm how can being reasonable save you from someone who is spewing lies?
Yeah, of course that's a problem, having a bigger platform gives you more political power.
This... isn't new. Money is the classic way to attain platform, and the US has repeatedly doubled down on the freedom to spend as much money as you want politically, as a core freedom.
Fox News is constantly broadcasting what I would classify as complete fabrications to their bigger platform, should the government be stepping in to stop that?
I agree these things are a problem, but that's the cost of free speech, the two choices are the government deciding who's speech is right, or individuals deciding who's speech is right.
Please note I never advocated for censorship. I’m only saying the ideal solution won’t work. I don’t want censorship either, but also I don’t believe simply more speech is the solution. I don’t know what the solution is.
If you define anything other than "simply more speech" as censorship, as many seem to nowadays, then a solution either cannot exist or must involve censorship.
> If this is true, surely the right to not support people who's views you disagree with is just as necessary?
Totally agree, but I think one of the nuances here is that what "support" means can be pretty narrow or very broad.
For example, if you don't like someone's message and they're speaking at your college, you can show your disapproval by choosing a point on a spectrum of refusals. You can start light by going to hear them speak but refusing to agree with them, and get a little more intense by attending and listening and then rebutting their arguments (i.e. refusing to approve the message). Sliding further along the scale, you might refuse to go to the talk at all. Further, you might refuse to attend the college that allows them to speak. Further, you might refuse to use any social media that allows them to post. And so on.
The further you go on that spectrum, the more your actions cause other people not to be able to support the speaker (or even hear them without supporting them), even if they want to. Not attending the speech yourself may cause the speaker not to be invited back if there is low enough attendance, which is just about the most minor form of that. Further along the spectrum, refusing to use social media that gives them a platform could get them banned if enough people do it, which is a more intense form of denying others access.
That's really long-winded but I hope my point is clear. I think "cancel culture" isn't so much about retaining the individual's choice to not support something, but rather denying that choice to other people. And it's not even about supporting really; the ACLU that defended Nazis because they realized that if Nazis' rights can be taken away then so can any minorities' be taken away might not exist any more. Certainly they didn't support Nazism, but they felt that they didn't have to in order to defend them in a court of law.
I think someone once said something like "it's the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it" and I feel like at a certain level you have to trust people to do that if you want to live in a democracy. My interpretation of opponents of cancel culture is that they don't want other people to keep them from entertaining ideas just because accepting them would be bad. You have to be able to entertain an idea to destroy it as well. The more you know about racist beliefs, for example, the more easily they're destroyed. The less you know, the more appealing they are. Best to bring them out in the light and let them be destroyed by the truth (would be their argument I believe).
I guess it's a difference in world view. Some think you can put people on the right track by focusing on providing them with the right information, and others think you can put them on the right track by keeping them from harmful information. The latter might be the way you can instruct a child, but for adults, the former is the only way it can work healthily (they would say).
Not sure whether any of that makes any sense, I could be completely wrong, would like to hear your opinion.
People have a right to expression, but not a right to a platform. Not everyone can go on TV every day to talk about what they believe, so it must be curated, and that curation is an expression in and of itself.
Should we try and be proportional and fair in our responses to people personally? Of course. Should we as a society try to limit people's responses? No.
There used to be literal lynching, and clearly active violence is over the line, but we allowed racists and other bigots to boycott places that employed people they didn't like and express their views like that.
Now that the bigots face being denied employment because of their bigotry, suddenly it's wrong to boycott and deny them their jobs.
Is it wrong to refuse to spend money at somewhere that employs (and therefore uses the money I spend there) someone who seeks to deny human rights to someone I love? It may get them fired if enough people take that stand. Does it hurt others if they can't access that bigot's speech? You can argue it denies them an opportunity, but then the fact I can't go to their boss and make my point is denying that person an opportunity to.
The reality is you are talking about pitting two pieces of expression against each other, and just because one came first and the other is a response to it seems entirely meaningless to me, neither should be restricted.
What do you think of the argument that the nature of boycotting has changed? In your example, people might boycott a restaurant they didn't like, but there were a ton of small restaurants, no one restaurant was very big. Now, we have a handful of websites that like 90% of all written human communication goes through, and people aren't boycotting a Twitter handle, they're boycotting Twitter itself (so to speak) to force it to deplatform someone.
I guess it's somewhat related to the other argument of proportionality of punishment. Is it right to boycott someone to an unlimited extent if they're bigoted? What is the limit? would be the questions along that line.
This seems like an argument to have better "public squares" and better regulations against monopolies, rather than enforcing private entities to platform others.
To me "consequences" are sought when someone wants to alleviate their own burden or guilt over the situation. Rarely is "restitution" sought. It seems to me that the latter would be a far more useful trend if we're going to continue trying to deal with social problems using the awesome power of the internet.
When I mention that I don't understand what Popehat actually wants, I'm looking at it in the context of the concept of "competing rights" that he writes about.
>"People complaining about “cancel culture” frequently suggest that it chills speech. Perhaps. But so does a vague denunciation of other people’s speech."
My confusion stems from the fact that Popehat seems to want to have it both ways. On one hand, he entertains the idea that "cancel culture" has a chilling effect. It is not a stretch to say that "cancel culture" is a kind of "denunciation of other people's speech". But he's simultaneously criticizing people who want to end "cancel culture" because he sees them as also committing a "denunciation of other people’s speech".
If Popehat's main gripe is that the liberty of speech is being limited, both "cancel culture" and "anti-cancel culture" lead to speech being denounced and limited. With this contradiction in mind, I don't understand what Popehat hopes to achieve.
>But he's simultaneously criticizing people who want to end "cancel culture" because he sees them as also committing a "denunciation of other people’s speech".
Right, but I think his criticism here is not that "they should not denounce other people's speech", it's that they are being hypocritical in their reasoning. He's arguing against the soundness of their denunciation, not arguing against their right to make it.
He's pointing out that many (not all) people complaining are asking for criticism - other peoples' speech - to be shut down.
There are a few sincere people out there. But most whining about cancel culture are just asking to be free from criticism. Sometimes it is blatantly obvious [1], more frequently layered with complaints about legitimately out of line acts and misdirects.
The answer to bad speech is more speech. End of story.
>"But most whining about cancel culture are just asking to be free from criticism"
This assessment doesn't sit right with me because I don't sense the people 'whining' about cancel culture are trying to get out of ideological critique. I sense they're calling for tolerance because the 'critique' is laden with threats to livelihood and societal standing.
From that perspective, I don't believe that calling on people to be more tolerant of other people's speech is a substantial reduction in speech. One could say it results in a net gain of speech.
I don’t know if tolerance of speech is always a net gain of speech. Communities can enter death spirals where only extreme speech exists because everyone reasonable is so turned off by the extreme speech that they leave. (Edit: I’m not saying that tolerance of speech is always a net negative either. I’m just saying it might be too complex to say.)
>Communities can enter death spirals where only extreme speech exists because everyone reasonable is so turned off by the extreme speech that they leave.
This never happens in a country, people will not abandon their land and their social networks because $MEAN_PERSON said something bad about trans people. What you describe only happens in online communities or hobby clubs, and not all of them at that.
In practice, fears from "unpolite" speech is almost always hysterical reactions by those unprepared and/or ill-equipped to counter speech with speech.
I’m super confused where I ever invoked the idea of what this looks like outside of online communities. I’m sorry if I caused you to misunderstand my speech.
But who decides what "actions they take that harm others" is?
If you look up if there are nazis in Ukraine army in US news, it will claim it's false, but international news sources say it's true.
Since nazis are the worst ever, don't you think it's important to get this right? And how can we tell if we can't have openly opposing sources that don't get cancelled?
Individuals make that decision, just as they do when it comes to democracy as a whole. That's the point of freedom of speech: we can't have an authority on the truth.
The alternative is you aren't allowed to dislike and refuse to patronize someone because of their actions, which is obviously absurd.
Everyone agrees people shouldn't face disproportionate responses, so arguing for that is nothing. Either you need to argue there are general things causing that (e.g: not looking into context, retractions, etc... before making judgements, which is a real problem) or argue the ethics of the particular situation, which is unique to a case.
Almost always, I see "cancel culture" used as a shield to avoid having to defend the actual harm done.
The harm done is very clear: the indented implication that Ukraine is controlled by Nazis is intended to justify Russia's illegal and unjustified war which is about control by Russia, and helps no one in Ukraine.
As you point out, while boycotting someone based on your perception of their opinion is not new, the modality of mass mob boycotts of individuals over things potentially taken out of context is entirely new, and that's exactly what "cancel culture" refers to. The underlying mechanism of Twitter is what gave birth to the term, regardless of whether it's used by haters to justify hate speech.
One other thing that's new, in America, is the idea that speech is less important than people's feelings. Coupled with the new notion that hurting someone's feelings constitutes a form of harm tantamount to violence, this allows proportionality in punishment to be abstracted away. If measures of harm are arbitrary and shifting depending on how much mob traction one particular issue recieves or how sensitive one person happens to be, then proportionality is impossible, and "cancel culture" captures a state where cancellation is the answer to any grievance of any severity which manages to find cultural purchase.
I was watching the news this morning and they were talking about the latest company that's boycotting Russia in response to the social media storm. It occurred to me that governments are becoming increasingly irrelevant. They don't have to impose sanctions (and their own rules make it difficult to do so) - the Twitter mob is deciding who to banish. It's a form of democracy, I guess - but one without any checks or balances or regulations.
> It occurred to me that governments are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
I've been thinking this for quite a few years now.
>the Twitter mob is deciding who to banish. It's a form of democracy, I guess - but one without any checks or balances or regulations.
Or swarms of bots shaping public opinion run by just a few people? As long as Govt's allow encryption, over the telecoms networks in their countries, the sooner govts become irrelevant.
The counterargument to that, of course, is that a handful of tech companies can't actually make your speech illegal, make their competition illegal, arrest you, imprison you, ban your speech across an entire country, burn your literature or have you and your ethic/religious/political group shot and dumped into shallow graves.
I mean, sure... getting banned from Twitter is momentarily annoying but Twitter having far more power to regulate speech than the entity that writes the laws that define Twitter's existence, that claims a monopoly on violence, and that in many cases directly controls the media and censors the internet? No.
It's a common argument but I've never really found it a compelling one.
> It's a common argument but I've never really found it a compelling one.
You can literally make your own twitter any time you want. My charitable view is that people are actually complaining about a monopoly on attention. It's an interesting subject but doesn't have anything to do with speech.
Epik was hosting platforms that contained extremist content, encouraged and celebrated mass violence and allowed conspirators to plan sedition against the government. Yes, if you're doing that, you should expect that some businesses may choose to reconsider their relationship with you.
It's not a problem even most garden variety racist assholes on the internet are likely to have, though.
Hopefully Russia banning FB will be just the start. I say that even though my highest upvoted submission since I've been on this website is a denunciation of my than Government apparently wanting to censor FB posts related to protests against it. That was back in 2017, I've since changed opinion when it comes to social networks and their vicious effects on our polities (be it a democracy or an autocracy).
Is it really companies boycotting Russia? Or is it that they're no longer doing business with people in Russia due to the sanctions (and therefore the likelihood that there would be no way to get paid), with some pretty marketing speak wrapped around it?
> As you point out, while boycotting someone based on your perception of their opinion is not new, the modality of mass mob boycotts of individuals over things potentially taken out of context is entirely new. … One other thing that's new, in America, is the idea that speech is less important than people's feelings.
They used to kill people for advocating for integration and civil rights. Actual mobs used to assemble to kill black men accused of hitting on white women. Not internet “mobs”, actual ones with guns and pitchforks.
Literally nothing you’re talking about is new, in fact it has gotten way less bad over the past few decades. In fact, arguing that its new and pernicious requires us to purposefully ignore the history of political and speech based violence throughout the 20th century and earlier.
They used to imprison people for sending information about birth control through the mail. I don't know what planet the "it wasn't like this in the good old days" people live on. The most common phrase quoted by people to describe a hypothetical rational limit on speech[*] was cribbed from a case that found it was ok to imprison people for passing out pamphlets against WWI.
> I don't know what planet the "it wasn't like this in the good old days" people live on.
Obviously not always, but often because you are viewing it through the a different lens: there is an unspoken "for people like me" missing from the end of their statement.
I think thats a big part of why powerful writers and journalists are complaining. They’re not used to the masses talking back to them, and they don’t like it very much.
There's a huge lack of education and cultural understanding about just how much freedom of speech we have today compared to what it was like in the past. Overall, people in America are more free today to say things than they used to be in the past, period. They have more mediums that they can publish to, it is easier than ever before for them to get support and to connect with communities, and legal protections have literally never been better.
I think part of it is that dominant parts of culture were never in a position to experience past censorship. Some of it might just be short memories. Some of it is probably bad faith, or that attacks on Twitter feel more real for some people. But the lack of perspective is a real problem. You don't have to go far into the past to find out that there were tons of taboo topics and ideas that could not be talked about, both because of legal restrictions and gatekeepers, and because of a lack of tolerance from society, and because the mediums through which to talk about them were just so much more centralized and exclusive than they are today.
Even today, I find that free speech advocates (and I consider myself to be a free speech advocate) are often uneducated about the scale of censorship that happens outside of mainstream culture.
It's really disappointing and frustrating. Academics get a tiny, tiny sliver of the kind of backlash that marginalized groups get when they protest dominant narratives, and it's the end of the world -- because many of them have just never encountered real, hard censorship before and they don't have a frame of reference. Or less charitably, they just don't care about having a frame of reference and it's all just a narrative tool for them.
They have more mediums that they can publish to, it is easier than ever before for them to get support and to connect with communities, and legal protections have literally never been better.
Yes. Now everybody has a megaphone and it's too noisy to hear anything. This leads to heavy self-selection of inputs. The real battle today is not over who can say what. It's what people should be listening to.
For the current war, not much is being censored after the source. You can read all the positions: Russia Today, China Daily, South China Morning Post, One America News Network, CNN, Fox, the Voice of America, the BBC, Reuters, the office of the President of Ukraine... Plus vast amounts of stuff on Twitter. Few people do that. They tend to obtain info from one source they more or less agree with.
> The real battle today is not over who can say what. It's what people should be listening to.
This is why the characterization of all speech criticism as cancel culture is so problematic. We have a segment of the population now that believes that free speech means not only that they can say things while being shielded by laws from government retaliation and by cultural norms from unreasonable forms of cultural retaliation; they now also believe that free speech requires them to be given exclusive, privileged priority on platforms and for them to be given extra control over what people hear. For them, it is cancel culture that their voice isn't louder than everyone else's.
Notably, they don't view it as censorship that other segments of the population don't have the same platform privileges in the first place. To them, the normal position of free speech is that their voice should always be specially audible, and they are less concerned about making it easier across the board for people to filter through the noise or about democratizing curation, and more concerned with making sure that their microphone is never threatened by other people's speech or association.
----
It is very important for us to talk about how people get information and about how to further decrease gatekeeping around curation and subscription of information; I think that's one of the next fronts in increasing free speech in America.
But it's also important for us to recognize that most people don't have exclusive contracts with major media networks and tons of advertising and promotion, and that demanding that people retain access to privileged speech platforms while their critics are characterized as censors for even just criticizing them or boycotting those platforms -- it's essentially the same as walking into a public gym and getting mad that everyone doesn't stop their own conversation and only listen to what one person has to say.
I think Popehat really hits the nail on the head when he talks about privileging the first speaker; some (not all, but some) of the backlash I see around online communication and criticism is coming from people who were used to being major voices that couldn't be ignored, and are mad that the increased noise means they no longer have that same level of exclusivity or respect, and are mad that opposing voices are increasingly given the same level of volume and attention and that those voices have more ability to respond to their speech. They're mad that their critics are on more equal footing with them in public debates and have similar levels of reach and volume.
This is why it's also so deeply important to express that there is a difference between a rando someplace getting fired from their job for a Twitter opinion they gave 10 years ago, and someone getting disinvited from an semi-exclusive speaking role at a conference because they are actively expressing bad or harmful ideas. Those are really not the same thing; one is a cultural retaliation against speech that might cross the line into unnecessary harm and mob justice, and the other is just people getting mad that they don't have a special right to an exclusive megaphone.
Can't speak for parent but I have refrained from discussions of things people have been cancelled for even when I agree what is leading to the cancelling is horrific, because the consequences of getting misinterpreted are too grave. Even asking a clarifying question for something you genuinely don't know could be misinterpreted as a dog whistle. It's hard to blame people for that because sometimes clarifying questions really are feigned ignorance meant to sink time or provoke, but at the same time there is a growing sentiment on Twitter and elsewhere that choosing the most charitable interpretation in discussion is actually bad and empowers bad actors. What you get is a situation where nobody trusts anybody.
In the 90s the culturally most influential people tended to mock censors and championed being “politically incorrect”. Al and Tipper Gore were roundly mocked for the record rating system they championed.
R rated movies were far more successful at the box office, with lots of questionable content by today’s standards.
Pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable to say was considered cool.
Today, the academic and cultural power brokers are the biggest champions of shutting down “objectionable” speech.
> Al and Tipper Gore were roundly mocked for the record rating system they championed.
Which has a direct mirror in the mocking of Republicans who are currently trying to ban books and ideas (CRT) they don't like. A lot of your idea rests on the concept of "culturally influential people" pushing these actions. Again, I don't see the evidence of that, seems like a boogeyman.
> R rated movies were far more successful at the box office, with lots of questionable content by today’s standards.
Odd to compare 90s box office to today's box office given the impacts of COVID and streaming. We didn't have Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, Paramount, HBO Max, Disney Plus, and more. You would need to add all the R-rated movies from those platforms to make a comparison. Either way, 4 of the 5 highest grossing R-rated movies (inflation adjusted) came out after 2000 [1].
> Today, the academic and cultural power brokers are the biggest champions of shutting down “objectionable” speech.
We definitely hear more complaining about it, today. I haven't seen evidence that it actually occurs more frequently. If anything, I see the opposite influence in the race to ban scary books and transgender people. Those ideas aren't coming from "cultural" leaders or "academics".
That said, it is far easier to be gay or transgendered today than the 90s. We also just had a President who described people as ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals.’ He also 'told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees …” [2] I don't think that would have been a good electoral strategy in the 90s, probably would have gotten him "cancelled."
The link to R rated movie statistics shows a steady drop in marketshare, excluding a weird blip in 2020. Probably an artifact of Covid?
Trump is the chief catalyst of Cancel Culture, in my opinion. His violation of every norm of decency and blatant cruelty created a backlash and a desire for retaliation for anyone seen to be in the same camp as Trump.
The drop in R rated movie share in the box office is almost certainly a result of streaming, not a change in cultural taboos. The linked chart only includes people who paid money specifically to watch a movie in a theater, and does not include movies watched on Netflix or Hulu.
> created a backlash and a desire for retaliation for anyone seen to be in the same camp as Trump.
Trump also demanded basically anyone who was ever insufficiently nice to him get fired. If anyone was for “cancel culture” it would be him. But like everything else in his life, he wasn’t very good at affecting those changes.
> In the 90s the culturally most influential people tended to mock censors and championed being “politically incorrect”
There is a sizable industry still doing that exact same thing today. Instead of saying that they’re “politically incorrect” they say that they’ve been “cancelled”. It seems like this line of discussion is not only alive and well, it is quite lucrative too, which more than a tiny bit undermines the core premise of what being “cancelled” means.
> R rated movies were far more successful at the box office, with lots of questionable content by today’s standards.
As a sibling comment pointed out, this is factually incorrect. You also need to adjust for the fact that the internet exists, and various social and economic pressures are sending more R rated content directly to streaming.
Are there fewer R rated movies in theaters because of how sensitive we are, or are you just preferring to watch R rated content at home rather than in the theater?
> Pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable to say was considered cool.
Given the rise of the alt right and the dirtbag left, pushing boundaries is still very popular and lucrative.
> Today, the academic and cultural power brokers are the biggest champions of shutting down “objectionable” speech.
Eh, ‘it depends’ - plenty of people got harassed, sent to jail, or outright killed for being openly gay during that time, among many other things. Not everywhere, but a great many places in the US.
Anti-obscenity laws were also going nuts around that time.
The internet was relatively mellow on that front, but that was because it was mostly unknown and super niche.
society was still trying to apply it’s rules to it, it was just far less competent at doing so.
I can see an argument for it, but it's worth noting that there was quite a lot of censorship in the 90s that people don't often remember nowadays. Remember when MTG and D&D completely removed "demon" and "devil" from their lexicon? Remember when Nintendo localization policies required removing every cross from every game?
That was, for many of us, our ability to be heard. Our ability to speak was not hindered by fear of having our lives ruined for holding an unpopular opinion or asking an incorrectly phrased question.
The most common battlefield on which these "cancellation" debates happen is people's access to Twitter, a service that did not exist in the 1990s (you could, obviously, get banned off a BBS for any or no reason). You see it in this very thread: people writing appeals to the amount of control tech companies have over speech, and how unprecedented that is.
Sure. And there are certainly disproportionate social and economical responses to speech, such as Colin Kaepernick finding himself unable to sign anywhere as a free agent after Donald Trump called for him to be fired for kneeling during the National Anthem, or David Shor losing his job at Civis Analytics after questioning the political effectiveness of violent riots protesting police misconduct. I'm sure if we dig, we can also find economic responses to speech that we'll agree aren't disproportionate.
The point isn't that these processes are never abused, or even that they're rarely abused. The point is that the problem we're trying to nail down isn't "there can be economic consequences for unpopular speech", but rather "there can be disproportionate consequences for speech". People on the right and the left are scrambling to find a simple bright-line rule, such as "speech should never cost you your job". But push to shove, almost nobody really believes that; we can all generally think of viewpoints you can loudly advocate for that will rightly make you difficult to employ.
I could write more, but I'd just be relaying my own personal beliefs about what speech is or isn't OK. Instead, I'll note that Ken White was pretty careful not to do that, or really to try to resolve this dilemma at all. Again: he's just pointing out that the NYT editorial's effort to resolve this was poorly reasoned, and itself a threat to free expression.
As for what I wrote upthread, I'm just pointing out: one major impetus for this debate is people losing their Twitter accounts. That seems germane, since you yourself brought up that one issue at play here is the enormous influence tech companies have on access to audiences for speech. My point was, of course, that the access you're talking about didn't exist at all as recently as 20 years ago. What access there was at the time was governed by... large corporations, who (for example) deplatformed Bill Maher when he questioned the orthodoxy around the moral weight of terrorism compared to US military interventions.
I consider Twitter just a very successful BBS, and I'm all for them banning the shit out of most of their idiot users. It's ridiculous that people who couldn't figure out how to set up a modem in 1993 now think they have a right to post and be heard as if God stepped down and gave them a megaphone. I don't have any sympathy for their complaints about being banned. What I do have a problem with is services allowing people to be brigaded and have their families and jobs threatened, which as a sysop I would have shut down the brigaders for, not the asshole who wrote the inflammatory thread, even if I disagreed with him.
- Culturally, the 90's were ripe with moral panics over satanism, gender expression, obscenity, etc... That could be a longer conversation, but the short version is that there was a ton of speech suppression happening in the 90's and early 2000's.
- Technologically, our mediums today (as problematic as they are) still allow for a greater ease of communication with a wider audience than they did in the 90's. There are developments online since the 90's that I don't like, and I worry about centralization online. But the earlier decentralized Internet was also very insular and inaccessible to a lot of people, and I think that gets lost from conversations about Internet freedom. More people have access to the Internet today and more people have access to publishing platforms today.
- In terms of mass media, there is again worrying consolidation happening, but it is nevertheless still the case that getting your message out to a wide audience in 2022 is easier than it was in 1990. Podcasts, video streaming, site deployment, etc... is all easier to do today than it was in the past.
Stuff like game development, music production, and so on are also easier today than they were in 1990. That's not to say that they're perfect or can't be improved, but I think back to the Flash boom, and that didn't really start until the early 2000's and it really was a different level of accessibility for making games, including games about political and social topics. In the same vein, a quick reminder that Youtube as a site was not founded until 2005 and until 2010 the max video length was only 10 minutes. Podcasts didn't really start to catch on among the public until the late 2000's. Patreon was launched in 2013, providing a very simple, mainstream way for at least some creators to self-fund their own work by directly interacting with fans.
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I think people forget sometimes how new all of this stuff is. And again, that ignores how much straight-up censorship and how many moral panics were happening during that time period, but even just from a technological perspective, if I have a message I need to get out, I would rather do it in the 2020's than the 1990's.
I could maybe see an argument that we're on a technological downtick from the 2010's, but honestly I don't even believe that. Even with all of the platform problems we have online (and it is a problem for our online communication to be so centralized and there are problems about where some platforms are headed), I still feel like almost everything today about media production and dissemination is just so much easier than it used to be. About the only thing I really miss is Flash, and I don't even really think that's a tech problem, I think many of those developers have just moved over to programs like Unity.
Not to say everything is perfect or everything has gotten better, just... I think people have rose-colored glasses that they wear when looking back at those times.
How old were you in the 1990s? I’ve noticed that for a lot of people, the golden age of no strife just happens to be right before they became aware of how people actually behave in public.
I too looked fondly back on the 1990s, but I was also a child. Looking back as an adult I can tell that my recollection of the era was colored by my inexperience. To draw one example, I totally missed all the moral panics of the 1990s, and how many people that harmed just for liking D&D.
And they were "canceled" like crazy. People spoke up about all these issues, and were fired, beaten, jailed, killed, and worse. But a white dude totally could say what he wanted to, kinda.
This is a really toxic, ahistorical attitude that pays no attention to the many individuals of all races and genders who sacrificed for greater equality. It also fails to address the situation of a nonwhite person now who is cancelled for disagreeing with woke sloganeering, or explain how that's justified just because someone else was evil to someone else in the past.
I disagree. Believing the 90s were more free speech and ignoring the context of that era is the toxic, history-ignoring attitude. That's not to say we don't have problems currently, but it is better than it was in the 90s, overall.
I'm not convinced that history is just repeating itself. There does seem to be something qualitatively different about the possibility that nowadays a non-celebrity can spout an offensive joke or political take and have it be much more likely to be recorded and broadcast to the whole world with permanent consequences for them everywhere they go. Bad decisions are far more likely nowadays to be permanently recorded, and moving over to the next town, state etc is no longer enough to escape your history. There were implicit safeguards before in that most people were much less likely to have a wide audience that would remember what they said. It was much easier to change your mind about something and then pretend it was your opinion the entire time and save face. There are organizations with pet issues that dedicate themselves to recording offensive social media posts by college students and then making profile pages for each student on their site to publicly shame them. In the past these kids could graduate and then change their mind years later and no one would be the wiser as long as they never became celebrities or politicians.
> There does seem to be something qualitatively different about the possibility that nowadays a non-celebrity can spout an offensive joke or political take and have it be much more likely to be recorded and broadcast to the whole world with permanent consequences for them everywhere they go
Just don’t do it on Twitter.
Or any social media for that matter. The only difference is that people hadn’t learned yet about vitality and the truth is the statement that “in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”
You can still make all the crass offensive jokes you want around your friends.
>One other thing that's new, in America, is the idea that speech is less important than people's feelings.
Lenny Bruce was convicted of obscenity less than 60 years ago. The civil liberties around speech went through a series of challenges and expansions very recently. The ACLU used to defend nazis. Now they prefer not to, to the chagrin or dismay of more traditional civil libertarians.
The one thing that's remained constant from times when civil rights activists were imprisoned for "offending" people to now when right wingers are canceled for offending people seems to be that the bulk of the population is incapable of, or unwilling to, set the principle of speech over their own feelings about that speech. I think it's because most people just can't imagine themselves being on the wrong end of a censorship regime (civil, corporate, or otherwise).
This is why the ACLU was so important; that was the entire point of it. It was started by a Jew. I'm a Jew, and I contributed to it. Not because I like nazis or think for a moment that they'd give me the same chance to speak. But because inevitably, narrowing of speech will come for those who believe themselves immune. We will have a far-right government again, and whatever liberties we allow to erode now because it suits us will be used against us. Only the very young and those with very short memories think that silencing opinions they don't like is a winning strategy in the long run.
You are equating government imprisonment with public cancellation here because they both have a chilling effect, but we very quickly run into the paradox of tolerance: do you restrict the expression of "cancelling" to protect other speech?
Those Nazis you use an example of abhorrent speech that must be allowed were calling for communists to be rounded up and killed for their views. Surely that is partaking in cancellation?
Explicit threats, defamation, calls to violence, harassment, inciting riots, fighting words … these have a legal precedent for the reason that cause and effect are traceable.
By the same token, ‘cancellation’ if it leads to loss of livelihood etc. is questionable.
Being offended or hurt by someone’s words are much harder to quantify.
Who cancels the cancellers of the cancellers? You've hit the nail on the head: Cancellation is not a viable means of stopping criminal calls to violence, and it's pretty much useless as a rhetorical tool. For the former we have a legal system which should be shored up rather than undermined by vigilantism; for the latter we have a democratic political system which, ditto, should be treated with respect rather than undermined by stooping to the same dirty tricks one's political enemies pulled. Which is probably why cancellation usually appears like virtue signalling, since it serves little purpose in either stopping violence or improving the system, let alone convincing anyone but potentially violent imbeciles in one's own camp to holler and mob up on a target of rage for the benefit of whoever controls the mob.
It has nothing to do with justice. No matter how shitty a human the target of it is. It's always just a really transparent attempt for someone to collect "likes".
Who gets "likes" for calling for civil debate rather than attacking the group's enemies?
No one. Anyone who dares to would be cancelled too. That should tell you all you need to know about the nature of intolerance toward intolerance. It's categorically intolerant as well, and it is no longer on the right side of anything.
> narrowing of speech will come for those who believe themselves immune.
True, but on other hand, history has shown us the Paradox of Tolerance.
"Liberals" have learned this lesson. When I was growing up, people who I would consider socially liberal generally supported the "I disagree with what you say, but will defend your right to say it" position. These days, the same people are less confident. I'm one of them.
I want a free and open society where people can discuss ideas and those ideas are weighed on their merits and the ridiculous ones (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc) are laughed at.
But that's not what's happened. The Overton Window in the US has dramatically shifted.
I don't know how to fix this. I don't even know that there is a fix for this. But I can certainly understand the mindset that says "maybe we don't need to defend nazis?"
Of course we don't have to defend Nazis but we can defend free speech. We should attack Nazis' inhumane poisonous speech and misinformation. And especially we shouldn't amplify it. Twitter should not amplify the spread of fascist ideology in the name of "fairness". They should ban it. People still have their freedom of speech but Twitter has the right to not propagate hate and lies.
> I want a free and open society where people can discuss ideas and those ideas are weighed on their merits and the ridiculous ones (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc) are laughed at.
> But that's not what's happened. The Overton Window in the US has dramatically shifted.
Any evidence for this? To me it seems like things went in the right direction and never really stopped. That things are getting worse and therefore we need to police the people harder is just a lie, don't listen to them.
Example, a little over a decade ago the general consensus was that gay marriage shouldn't be legal, in what way was the overton window of gay rights better back then? Authoritarians always try to convince you that evil is growing so they need more powers, but they are wrong regardless if they are right wing or left wing authoritarians.
You miss the concept that gay marriage was controversial. Obama was against it. Therefore if that debate was held in the current environment proponents of gay marriage might be silenced and banned
That is the point, restricting speech isn't a good thing. The poster I replied to argued that restricting speech is a good thing since things are getting worse, even though we can see that things has steadily gotten better. There is no need to restrict speech to make things better, instead things are likely to get much worse by restricting speech as your example shows.
For the record, that is not at all what I was arguing.
I was arguing that completely unrestricted speech allows ideas that we really don't want (Nazism, etc) to become normalized.
This isn't even controversial; it's a well known phenomenon.
It's also very difficult to discuss this without talking about Trump and that instantly derails any conversation, but to address the elephant in the room, can you imagine even GW Bush saying "there were fine people on both sides"?
I also said that I don't know what the correct fix for that is.
I would say that the debate over transgender rights (bathrooms, etc) is in a similar cultural position to gay marriage a few years ago (i.e. liberals are fine with it, centrists are coming round to the idea and hardline conservatives are having a "moral panic"), yet no one is being silenced there.
This idea just struck me reading your post, but I think it's something novel. I've read a lot of responses here, and yours encapsulates the argument that speech is subordinate to tolerance better than most. As someone whose immediate family are the only survivors of mass genocide, I'm keenly aware of the dangers of giving intolerance a platform to poison innocent minds, or of tolerating it at all. But not tolerating it, to me, means taking the time to address it rather than attempting to silence it by another act that could be portrayed as intolerant and thus give ammunition to the enemy. So I think it's succinct to say I look at the Overton Window concept like this: Anyone who wants control will try to put the window of debate where they want it, and narrow it as much as possible. The solution is not to move the window but to stand by the value of widening the window and keeping it as wide as possible. The fact that it has shifted in directions some agree with and others disagree with is useless as an argument for restricting or expanding it. Where it is wide and debate flows freely, there will be more tolerance. Where it's narrow - wherever dissenting opinion, even intolerant opinion - is treated as beyond the pale, eventually your own opinion will be treated as beyond the pale, and no one will be left to speak for you. My grandparents were communists and their family was murdered in the Holocaust. To me the primary lesson of the 20th century was that all ideology is a source of horrific torture and murder. Only by absolutely widening that window of speech as much as possible can individuals hope to fight the excesses of whichever ideology happens to be in the middle of the window at the present moment. And living through several fascist-leaning American administrations has made me realize just how temporary the current leftness of that window is, so I really shake my head when I see people of the left attempting to narrow it.
I hope that makes sense programmatically, as an algorithm, if not emotionally.
Edit - because I'm just formulating this. I'd say there's no place the Overton Window can be which is tolerant. Some centers maybe more than others, but actual tolerance only exists where it is wide, and surely wherever it is narrow it will end with suppression of valid dissent.
I think you're making White's point for him. You're implying that free speech should be at least as important as other people's feelings. He agrees. Which is why appeals for a new norm of shutting up critics is so problematic. This is what he's talking about with his "First Speaker Problem" thing: the "free speech" you're alluding to is virtually always a response to someone else's speech. How do you coherently isolate the speech that must be protected --- the supposed "first speaker" --- from the speech that shouldn't (critics of that first speaker)?
It's an aspirational norm, but it's nobody's practiced norm; virtually everybody has lines they draw. So what does it tell us that we can aspire to having that norm? I'd argue: not much.
I'm saying that society hasn't consistently had that norm, and flourished anyways, so the supposed norm is probably not as causative as it's being made out to be.
My opinion is that Joe Dingleberry* should shut up, because I've already heard his opinion and find it uninteresting. Are you open to my opinion, or just Joe's?
It's funny to see all the shifts on this. 18 USC 1001 was "chickensh-t" that they wouldn't pull back in his day to Ken... at least until it wasn't. We talked about chilling effects and heckler's vetoes, but now they're well-deserved social sanctions?
I've been reading him for probably a decade now, so it's hard not to notice how things change whenever the shoe is on the other foot.
I think White has been pretty consistent about 18 USC 1001 being chickenshit, even when it applied to Trump employees. It's important to distinguish between normative and positive arguments; whenever White talks about 18 USC 1001, he's making positive claims. If you're, for instance, talking about the All The Presidents lawyers podcast, he was there to handicap what was actually going to happen in cases against the Trump administration. He wasn't running the prosecution.
And, when he does, he virtually always points out how that statute is more often used to harass people we find sympathetic, even when it's being aimed at e.g. Trump's former lawyer.
(18 USC 1001 for non-Pope-Heads is the statute that criminalizes lying to the FBI).
I watched that podcast and didn't see it. Given that it was a prosecution over a difference of opinion over what constitutes discussion of "sanctions" in a call they had a recording of, with only an FD-302 for evidence of what was said, where the only copy was from months after the fact.
I don't know that I listened to every podcast, so you an point out a quote if there was one, but I sure don't remember anything like the word "chickensh-t" coming up. Instead, there were a lot of longwinded debates over who had the better substantive argument for how long a prosecution that was dismissed could be maintained by the court.
Which seems patently absurd given that they are violating separation of powers there. But it's political, so concerns about a judge playing prosecutor were simply tossed out the window? What was the end result of that supposed to be, anyway? A criminal referral... to the people dropping the case?
Those seem like awfully big concerns to sweep away in a mealy-mouthed discussion of substantive factors where he honestly didn't sound like he was taking a side.
And I'm pretty sure we've both been listening to him for a long time, since I sorta think it was one of your comments a really long time ago that made me start reading his stuff. Do you really not see any changes?
I'd say his tone started changing about the time he had that feud and split with his former friend Clark.
Not going to defend Clark here, just using that as a point of time reference and possible explanation for the notes of bitterness, since that was an ugly feud for former friends.
I was thinking of All the President's Lawyers in particular during the end of the trial (e.g. between dismissal & pardon).
What feud? He was removed from a moribund group blog, and then spent the next several years launching attacks on White's mental health and the propriety of his having adopted children from Asia. Are we sure any of us are better off digging into this? I think we're not.
It's extremely hard for me to imagine how anyone who's read or listened to a lot of Ken's commentary could walk away thinking that he was suddenly in favor of 18 USC 1001 just because of the existence of the Trump administration. He regularly criticizes the statute.
I don't know, I really just don't see it.
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Also, quick sidenote on the heckler's veto:
> We talked about chilling effects and heckler's vetoes, but now they're well-deserved social sanctions?
The heckler's veto isn't really the right term to use when talking about cancel culture or shouting down speakers. The heckler's veto is more about the government shutting down speech under the assumption that it might cause a riot or disruption in the future.
But for whatever it's worth, Ken also regularly criticizes shouting down speakers in public forums. I really just don't see this change in his opinion that you're talking about.
Oh, he hates the statute normally. He just failed to even express mild criticism of it when it was abused and he was discussing the trial, which stood out when he was literally discussing the merits of a trial centered on one. Maybe he made up for it on some episode I didn't listen to, there are a lot of them and there's no way I heard them all, but I was kinda surprised to see him fail to mention a hobby horse of his in a discussion of a trial centered on said hobby horse.
> The heckler's veto isn't really the right term to use when talking about cancel culture or shouting down speakers. The heckler's veto is more about the government shutting down speech under the assumption that it might cause a riot or disruption in the future.
You say that as if nothing got shut down or forced to pay huge security fees due to other people being moved to violence against the speakers, but there were and have been lawsuits over the same. One of which I think even involved Clark, though I didn't follow that particularly closely.
> He just failed to even express mild criticism of it when it was abused and he was discussing the trial
I don't know if I need to dig through however many X podcasts exist here to find examples, but for whatever it's worth I know that Ken criticized criminalization of lying to the FBI during the Trump investigation. You can believe me or not about that, short of digging through a bunch of transcripts I'm not sure what else to say about it other than I didn't notice the silence you're talking about.
> You say that as if nothing got shut down or forced to pay huge security fees due to other people being moved to violence against the speakers, but there were and have been lawsuits over the same.
Ah, first of all there's a difference between private companies doing this and public forums doing this. Not to say that it's never a bad thing if private forums do this, but it's not a heckler's veto in the legal sense. Second of all, it's still improper to characterizing things like shouting down a speaker as a heckler's veto, because regardless of whether or not public forums violate that standard, it's still the case that actual heckling is not a heckler's veto.
But regardless, this is something that Ken criticizes regularly, so I just don't get what the point is. I have seen Ken criticize shouting down speakers and threatening them even when he doesn't like the speakers.
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Edit: Okay, I did do a real quick 3-minute search online and not only do I see multiple instances of Popehat criticizing 18 USC 1001, I also see multiple instances of Left-leaning readers accusing him of being too critical of the statute when it's applied to Conservatives (https://nitter.42l.fr/Popehat/status/966388695505952768#m). Again, take from that whatever you'd like. I even (since you brought up the word) found a pretty recent example of him literally calling it chickenshit (https://nitter.42l.fr/Popehat/status/1486410486258102273#m)
I don't need someone gaslighting me about an article that I've just read. Here is what it says:
"The Times also errs by utterly failing to grapple with the problem that “cancelling” represents free speech and free association."
It's a strawman conundrum that White constructs all on his own. It might seem very clever to people who think freedom of speech is some kind of mechanistic rule to puzzle over. Not clever at all when one considers the reason why it became a value for modern societies.
Not only White conflates the two behaviors I mentioned in my post above, he reinforces the confusion by equivocating a riot at Berkley with ridiculing someone.
It’s always criticism about speech that parrots Republican talking points that rises to the level of cancel culture, not that people are fired for discussing worker power.
>modality of mass mob boycotts of individuals over things potentially taken out of context is entirely new, and that's exactly what "cancel culture" refers to
Wonderfully written, noduerme, and I comment first to expand on this part. The mob includes friends and family. To be shunned, or ostracized by friends and family can and does happen because of these incidents. To become associated with an ideology, even against your will, can put your employment at risk, as your employer does not want to be seen as supporting you. These are very dire consequences, equivalent to significant jail time, IMHO.
Second, I want to note that the phenomena is a failure of the justice system. That in an ideal world there would only be one justice and it would be fast and easy to access, and handle even the smallest matter promptly and fairly. These antics are wrong, but they point to a demand for righting wrongs that isn't being met by the current justice system.
> People not wanting to patronize or associate with you when you cause harm to people they care about is really not a bad thing, and it's not new either, and yet it is what gets called "cancel culture" by a lot of people.
Although nowadays, soft penalties scale and can be automated. So it feels sensible to explore regulatory frameworks that could rein in the worst excesses.
I'm not saying they don't exist: if I advocate for gay rights, and turns out my employer has a bunch of homophobic customers who get me fired because they don't want to spend money that ends up in my pocket, that would be deeply wrong in my view.
The question is, what does the "regulatory framework" do there? Force those customers to spend money that ends up funding someone that fights for something they see as morally wrong? Force my boss to employ me even though I hurt their business?
The whole point of freedom of speech is the government doesn't get to ban views they don't like. Not supporting someone because of their views surely needs to be as much of a protected view as any other.
> Force my boss to employ me even though I hurt their business?
Well probably the answer would be stronger wrongful termination regulation and then if they fire you for advocating for gay rights then you would probably get paid a reasonable amount of money for the loss you suffered, and your boss would have more of an incentive to think over if they really need to fire you to avoid losses to their business or if they should stand up to the people trying to force their hand.
OK, but then the government is deciding what speech should be allowed without losing your job.
If it's any speech, then do I get to tell people my company sucks and they shouldn't shop there without being fired? What about telling individual customers they don't deserve human rights? That very quickly becomes obviously absurd. So the question becomes "where is the line", and if they government gets to draw that line, then that no longer looks like freedom of speech to me.
> For people to stop calling it "cancel culture" whenever they face reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others would be a good start.
Someone having an opinion different than you does not cause you harm.
This is the Big Lie underlying a lot of the rhetoric that has been labeled "cancel culture".
The potential harm at shutting down the opportunity to find out you were wrong about something by hearing viewpoints different from yours, is far greater than whatever harms you fear from the words themselves.
I said "for actions they take that harm others", and you jumped to some trivial difference of opinion. If the difference of opinion is supporting policy that hurts me or people I care about, then yes, of course it can harm me.
You are saying that someone can use freedom of expression to say people I care about should not have human rights, but I can't say those people shouldn't be employed by some company.
Freedom of expression swings both ways. I agree we should think about the harm done, ensure it is real, and what level of consequence is reasonable before acting, but that doesn't mean there are no situations action is justified.
> "You are saying that someone can use freedom of expression to say people I care about should not have human rights, but I can't say those people shouldn't be employed by some company."
Like unborn fetuses? (I am pro-choice by the way.) The pro-life side care about them and feel they should have human rights and, by the silly paradox of tolerance people seem to love to quote, they're even justified in not tolerating those who don't tolerate their beliefs. So do you really believe that freedom of expression swings both ways and are willing to allow them to enact their consequences on those who don't agree with them?
Maybe you should rethink the implications of what you are saying.
Yes. I believe that those people should be able to judge me and socially shun me, including calling for my firing, if I express that I am pro-choice.
I think they are wrong, but it's on me to try and persuade enough people that I'm right.
If they see it as I support murdering innocent people, then how can I possibly demand they hand me money, interact with me normally, etc...? I'm certainly not going to employ someone who says "I think we should kill <group of people>".
I think they are fundamentally wrong about the core concept, I don't think it's right for them to "cancel" people over that as a result, but that doesn't mean it should be illegal to do so, because forcing people to support behaviour they find abhorrent is worse.
Nobody is getting cancelled for having a different opinion on tax rates or foreign policy.
There are very specific and narrow types of speech that lead to 'cancellation,' and it's almost always speech that attacks people's identity, race, and sexuality. Historically that type of speech has been equated with harm.
I agree that’s there’s a pattern for what gets you cancelled, but there is absolutely not a list published somewhere that tells you what subjects to avoid.
Nah, someone just needs to claim you are attacking someone’s identity. It doesn’t have to be true.
Commonly it’s someone attacking some progressive policy, and then progressives claiming it is an attack on identity, even when many people of the identity supposedly under attack share the same views.
Views that could be construed as endorsing capitalism, blaming the poor for their stations or attempting to deny them any part of the redistribution they are due, construing Western culture and values as somehow better or more legitimate than others, or supporting colonial/imperial projects are all absolutely cancellation-worthy offences.
How do you draw a distinction between writing an NYT op-ed to, say, support same-sex marriage, voting for a candidate who supports same sex marriage, and signing a bill to allow same-sex marriage? In every case you're "just" writing something down. When does one cross the line from "just" sharing an opinion, to advocacy for that opinion to political action on favor of a policy?
Phrased differently, if someone advocates for a policy that I believe will be harmful, why should I treat that differently than a stated intent to harm me?
> Phrased differently, if someone advocates for a policy that I believe will be harmful, why should I treat that differently than a stated intent to harm me?
For the same reason you shouldn't treat someone who wants to raise your taxes and give it to other people as if they intend to steal from you.
Isn't that generally a conservative opinion though, that taxation is theft?
Like the reason I don't object to taxes (in general) is because I think I get value from them, even in the redistribution sense. If someone proposed to raise taxes and give all the proceeds to Jeff Bezos, I would consider that a proposal to steal from me.
> Isn't that generally a conservative opinion though, that taxation is theft?
Yes, but you don't see conservatives fire outspoken democrats for thievery, or give them the ultimatum that either they acknowledge that taxation is theft or get fired. If conservatives did that then I would tell them to stop, say that what they are doing is against free speech ideals and if abuse got too bad I'd advocate for laws against it.
> while the views that usually result in people being fired are fringe and, in a word, vile
That is not true, a large majority don't agree with many radical lefts views, but would still get fired if they voiced those opinions publicly.
For example, should trans people compete in sports of their chosen gender? Almost two thirds thinks that they shouldn't, but saying that will get you labelled anti-trans and fired from many jobs, even though you might support trans-rights completely in every other regard.
> It would be deeply unpopular and ineffective, but I don't see why it should be illegal.
It would be extremely effective as most business owners are right wing. They just don't do it because they don't care what their workers thinks, they care more about profits. But if they banded together and made this policy at every right wing owned business you would see huge consequences, as the workers can't really choose to go somewhere else.
Then debate them, run against them or campaign for politicians that will prevent or change those policies.
Which is exactly how same sex marriage came to have such broad support, by the way. Andrew Sullivan in particular tirelessly made the case for same sex marriage, including to exactly the kind of people you describe, and changed many minds.
Sure I can do all of those things, but you didn't address my question. If I think someone will harm me, I can do all of those things, but why not also do more?
The type of people who complain and lash out when they face reasonable consequences for harming someone else are the least likely to follow any such guidance here though?
>For people to stop calling it "cancel culture" whenever they face reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others would be a good start.
That's never going to happen. Such people have a vested interest in gaining sympathy for their views and actions by discrediting their critics as nothing but a hateful mob or a conspiracy to silence and oppress them, and clearly their efforts are working. "Cancel culture" has itself become a moral panic akin to the Red Scare.
> For people to stop calling it "cancel culture" whenever they face reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others would be a good start.
the article is about free speech, but you sneak in the word actions, and then you label the damage (of free speech) as harm to others, and the consequences as reasonable. Therefore, I'd say you fit what this editorial is about, "many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech."
Where “cause harm to people they care about” means to take a view slightly to the right of the leftiest thing that’s ever been suggested on the topic, a view that is perhaps 15 years behind the Twitter/Tumblr universe.
> For people to stop calling it "cancel culture" whenever they face reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others would be a good start.
What about people facing unreasonable consequences for actions that don't harm others?
Without the definition, White says, the appeal to an "end cancel culture norm" is, overtly, a call to broadly restrict people's speech. If you dismiss the demand for clarity, you can't coherently rebut his assessment of what "end cancel culture" means.
>"If you dismiss the demand for clarity, you can't coherently rebut his assessment of what "end cancel culture" means."
I'm dismissing his standard of what counts as "clarity" because I sense he's expecting a lawyerly definition based on something akin to precedent and case law. In other words, he's seeking past examples of alleged "cancel culture" and trying to define what made each event count as, or not count as, "cancel culture". And then from that formulate a rigid definition. I believe such a rigid definition is flawed because it is reactionary, because vernacular consensus is not formed this way, and because the definition can easily be skirted around.
It would be like me demanding clarity on what makes something "cool".
I'm not sure I'm trying to do that. I chose "cool" as an example because none of us came up with the term, no one can confidently define it and have everyone agree on it, and it's a word we all seem to use without truly knowing what it means.
At the risk of stretching an analogy too far, I would not need to define what "coolness" is in order to confront people who I perceive to be overly critical and who are trying to get people to stop expressing themselves in ways they perceive as "uncool". In other words, if I tell someone "If you have nothing nice to say don't say anything at all", it does not seem reasonable to expect me to define what "nice" means in order to justify chiding someone for not being nice.
You're getting to Ken White's point, which is that we can't reasonably call for clear norms about "cancel culture" given how poorly defined it is. Without that definition --- and maybe we'll never have it --- "cancel culture" is mostly just an undisciplined tool for shutting down criticism.
White writes at length about the fact that disproportionate responses to objectionable speech happen, and are worth discussing. His take is that you have to talk about those things in their particulars, rather than trying to write staff editorials and open letters about the phenomenon of "cancel culture" (or, in the NYT's case, a [nonexistant!] right to express thoughts without fear of shame or shunning).
White's essay is about the NYT letter. It is not an attempt to end the "cancel culture" debate once and for all. I'd ask you to scroll through this thread and try to pick out the arguments here that recognize that fact, or the ones that are clearly premised on the notion that White believes he's "solved" the cancel culture problem (or doesn't believe it's real).
That's a more specific and coherent definition of cancel culture, but it's certainly not the current consensus definition: many "cancel culture" debates --- probably most of them --- are about speech or opinions that the individual stands resolutely behind.
And, of course, "for offenses that are minor in comparison" or "speculative" is almost always subjective; it just shifts the debate to a different set of words, but it doesn't narrow it or offer us any guidance. People think all sorts of things are minor, or world-ending; proven, or fabricated.
> And, of course, "for offenses that are minor in comparison" or "speculative" is almost always subjective.
They really aren't. I used the word "historically" for this reason. Years ago, for example, people would openly espouse directly racist views. Today, you can get fired for using a slur in the "mention" category, rather than in the "use" category.
And speculative inference isn't anything more than saying, "this person said x, y, & z... which means they _must_ also believe horrendous things a, b & c" when it is in fact logically possible to believe x, y & z without believing a, b, & c.
You can get fired for having the wrong hairstyle --- that is a thing that in fact happens more often than firings because of cancel mobs. So we're not really saying much yet. Similarly, you can use the logic in your second paragraph to insulate any kind of speech at all from approbation; if you take what you're saying to its clear conclusion, what you're really saying is that it's never OK to boycott anything over speech. That's far beyond what even the most vigorous anti-cancel-culture advocates are saying.
Cancel culture is like vetocracy: the most censorious opinion wins. Speech norms are nuanced and subjective and ought to be subject to community debate. The same for specific alleged violations of speech norms.
We manage this alright with even very serious crimes. It is okay to take the position during a murder trial that the killing was an act of self defense or that you believe the defendant’s alibi. It is also okay to take both pro and con positions about strengthening or weakening the laws in homicide edge cases, such as the castle doctrine or vehicular negligence.
In a cancel culture, onlookers feel they must echo the condemnation, or at least not challenge it, even as they privately offer support to the accused. Ideas like “even though three people are offended, this ought to be allowed” or “actually the context makes this not transgressive” are themselves outside the Overton window.
There's (topically enough) a NYT article about Hough's incident[1], which I will briefly excerpt:
> “In a series of now-deleted tweets, Lauren Hough exhibited what we believed to be a troubling hostility toward transgender critics and trans-allies and used her substantial platform — due in part to her excellent book — to harmfully engage with readers and critics,” Cleopatra Acquaye and Maxwell Scales, Lambda Literary’s interim co-executive directors, said in a joint statement Monday.
[...]
> Hough said Monday that she could not recall whether she had deleted any tweets, and denied that any of her tweets had been transphobic. Lambda did not provide examples of the posts they were most critical of. The Times has not reviewed any deleted tweets.
...now, my sympathies were honestly with Hough until I saw "could not recall whether [I] had deleted any tweets" attributed to her. Which, if she said that to a reporter, is not a good look. Because it makes my mind jump immediately to "I certainly did delete some tweets, but I don't want to admit to it because then I'll be asked what they said".
Nobody being willing to actually say what she's being judged for so that we can make our own minds up does leave us in the awkward position of having to rely on these proxy inferences.
> Popehat seems to be falling into the trap of thinking the precisely defining something will lead to clarity. It rarely, if ever, does. Each one of us has our own conception of a term - wordfeel, if you will - and virtually no one actually knows or holds to the literal dictionary definition.
I really disagree, I think he addresses this very specifically at the end of the article, where he writes, "I believe more specificity — action items — is the answer":
> Pointing to specific instances of “cancellation” and debating why they are inside or outside of our norms is a productive action item. Saying “colleges shouldn’t disinvite speakers because of controversy” is a good specific action item; we can debate it. Saying “Ken, stop piling on 20-follower Twitter accounts when they say stupid things” is an action item; I can debate it. [Shan’t.] Saying “stop demanding that businesses fire people for what they say off the job” is an action item. I might not agree but we can discuss it.
He's not at all falling into a definition trap! I think that misses the point of the article, which is one of the most coherent articles I've ever encountered on the subject.
> defining something will lead to clarity. It rarely, if ever, does
US politics is full of ambiguities, word games, and of course attacks that exploit these clarity gaps. See a list [0] of them below.
Of course slogans are useful, and trying to hold hypocrites to account by using their slogan against them, yet at the same time it seems the political discourse is extremely low signal-to-noise, and there's almost no general need/demand for clarity. For example the both the "rich people pay no taxes" and the usual "XY corp last year paid 3.50 in taxes" memes are just that, catchy memes.
And all of this puts a brutally counter productive shouting at the late night game feeling on politics. (Sure, there's a reason why political discourse is like this... we probably have to go through the catchy meme arms race.)
[0] BLM, defund the police, liberal and classical liberal, gender/sex, socialism, recently critical race theory, equality vs equity (equal outcome, equal opportunity), free speech vs. selective publishing/hosting of content free from government interference; safe space vs. safe space from certain ideas/trigger vs. safe space for expressing ideas free of consequences, and maybe also "no child left behind" too. (Of course a few of them are proper slogans, but then due to the ambiguity in semantics folks try to use these as concrete promises.)
> Popehat seems to be falling into the trap of thinking the precisely defining something will lead to clarity. It rarely, if ever, does.
Certainly it leads to more clarity. Two parties talking "past" each other is one of the most common sources of disagreement in my experience. Of course it isn't a panacea and there will still be disagreement on when the definition is being used correctly, and bad actors, and .... But it is an excellent (and I would argue necessary) starting point for any meaningful discussion.
> Additionally, I think Popehat is dead wrong here:.... I don't know what Popehat actually wants here
The headings of the sections work pretty neatly for me to distill this down (skipping the intro).
1) (Why) Working Towards A Definition Is Important -> dont just handwave
2) Propaganda Drives Perception -> rethink what you think cancel culture is
3) Everybody’s Rights Matter -> The person being cancelled may have been out of bounds and trying to cancel someone else too. Context is important
4) We Need Action Items -> stop these stupid articles that simply clutch pearls and propose something anything that can actually be considered
> Two parties talking "past" each other is one of the most common sources of disagreement in my experience.
A prime and recent example of this is "defund the police". You could talk to 10 people at a protest and get 10 different answers on what that means, and that's among supporters. Any actual conversation on the topic has to start with "well what do you mean?". You would often hear a refrain of "nobody is talking about completely defunding the police." but there was plenty of actual support for that in just-outside-of-mainstream groups.
So many movements are united behind such vague slogans that they garner widespread support because everybody has a personal and reasonable (to them) interpretation of it's meaning.
"Cancel culture" just the next "Occupy Wallstreet", "Black Lives Matter", "Defund the Police", etc. It's a leaderless grassroots phenomenon with no stated objectives or goals.
I think people are much more concerned with finding a community to fight with rather than actually winning the fight.
Yes, the "vague idea anyone can attach meaning to" is often an intentional aspect of these movements to gather larger support. Its also easy to subsequently exploit and I think the venerable CIA handbook from the ~60s goes into detail on that. Of course having a narrow focus doesn't really stop exploitation from a motivated counterparty with sufficient resources, especially when you need broad source support (e.g. large political reform issues).
This completely leaves out that the tolerance for speech, even minor offenses, which used to be acceptable are now being weaponized to destroy each other in visceral, tribal fashion.
You can have an accountable society and cancel someone for crossing the line. That line used to be for things such as Pedophilia, encouraging violence, promoting rape-culture, etc. Truly terrible things.
I hope people will wake up or we'll end up with a worse place than ever.
Popehat seems to be falling into the trap of thinking the precisely defining something will lead to clarity.
He does seem to be obsessing over nomenclature. A more useful question is, what happens if you express an unpopular opinion? Do you get fired? Arrested? Lynched? Torn to bits by a mob? Shamed on social media? Blocked by social media companies? Can't get published in major media? Attacked by TV pundits? Not invited to the good parties? Also, how long does this go on, and is it retroactive for things said in the past?
> No rights are actually being infringed by this. It is possible to have cultural mores that are in the spirit of free speech.
What do you mean by “rights”? Legal rights or moral rights? If legal rights, under which law in which jurisdiction? I agree very many cases of “cancellation” are not illegal, and as such not violating anyone’s legal rights - but a lot of people seem to approach this with a narrow focus on the US 1st Amendment (hereafter 1A), when this isn’t a US-only issue, and even in the US there are other laws involved than just 1A - a private company firing someone for their publicly expressed political views cannot violate 1A, but it might violate state laws against political discrimination in employment (such as California Labor Code section 1101), and those state laws can also be understood as creating (or recognising) legal rights. Also, law is not static, it evolves through case law and legislation, so something which is legal today might not be legal in the future-people who believe that we have a problem with “cancel culture” are likely to lobby for laws against it, and we’ll see if they succeed.
If one acknowledges the existence of ethics/morality independent of the law, it follows people may have ethical/moral rights which are violated even if their legal rights (in a certain jurisdiction at a certain time) are not being violated.
> The opposite stance, not calling on people to end cancel culture, is also accepting a reduction in speech.
I'm not sure that accepting certain spaces becoming unwelcome is the same as a reduction in speech.
The quote toward the end of the article really hits the nail on the head for me:
> The room felt tense... I was shaken, but also determined to not silence myself. Still, the disdain of my fellow students stuck with me. I was a welcome member of the group — and then I wasn’t.
Feeling tense and unwelcome in a space where people disagree with you is totally normal and to be expected. A huge fraction of people grow up feeling exactly like that in virtually every space they inhabit.
(BTW, I'd be unsurprised if the tenseness in this case was more about annoyance with a loudmouth once again derailing a seminar with what they think is profoundly courageous iconoclasm but is actually annoying low-effort culture war trolling that's spoiling a quite expensive educational product for the rest of the paying customers...)
I grew up non-straight and atheist in the midwest, decades ago, and not in a city. The feeling of tenseness described here is totally normal. Gays are not entitled to a complete absence of tenseness in midwest churches or sports bars. That tenseness and unwelcomeness will result in lost opportunities for socialization, employment, etc. even without overt discrimination.
Not everyone will feel comfortable in every space. Not everyone will fit in everywhere. That's life.
To me, the entire cancel culture thing can be summed up as: "apparently some people went through a lot of life without ever desiring to inhabit a space where they weren't 100% welcome and, unsurprisingly, react in an emotionally stunted and frankly embarrassing way when encountering this situation."
IDK. Half the country -- and a much larger percentage of its landmass -- is wholly hostile to anyone who isn't a died-in-the-wool conservative. Whence the entitlement to fit in perfectly everywhere else with zero friction? As a queer person, I don't even have that much sympathy for fellow queer people who try to get along in conservative religious communities. You have a right to free association. If you don't like feeling tense and unwelcome, exercise that right.
I'm going to preface this by saying that I'm a dark-skinned POC straight man that grew up in poverty (and that in the SFBA I feel like a unicorn, especially in my climbing gym where sometimes I'm the only dark-skinned POC for my entire workout).
> Feeling tense and unwelcome in a space where people disagree with you is totally normal and to be expected. A huge fraction of people grow up feeling exactly like that in virtually every space they inhabit.
I grew up very used to the idea of feeling unwelcome because of my skin color. I didn't and still do not feel the most comfortable in many spaces. That uncomfortability has made me keenly aware at how alienating the feeling is. When I see other people feel uncomfortable, I don't think "good now you feel how it's like to be me", I feel that humanity has lost yet another victim to intolerance. I do not think that normalizing this feeling helps anyone, even if the person feeling this pain is a straight, white man.
Moreover when someone hates me for my skin color (and perceived behaviors associated with my skin color), I certainly become uncomfortable and angry, but at the end of the day I realize it's something I cannot fundamentally change. My skin color and body type will stay with me for the rest of my life. But when people become uncomfortable by _my ideas_ that's what hurts more; I feel that people disapprove of the fruits of my own agency. It's why I've always felt so keenly for transgender folk who endure endless discrimination for simply choosing how to live their own lives.
> I certainly become uncomfortable and angry, but at the end of the day I realize it's something I cannot fundamentally change.
This is the point on which we agree. When I say
>> Feeling tense and unwelcome in a space where people disagree with you is totally normal and to be expected. A huge fraction of people grow up feeling exactly like that in virtually every space they inhabit.
I'm not excusing intolerance. I'm simply saying in my own way what I quoted from you above. One must choose: either avoid discomfort or grow some callouses.
As far as I can tell a lot of the noise around cancel culture is from folks who were climbing 5.12 in a soft gym and are now demanding the guidebook author soften the grades because they can barely huff up a 5.9. The ground shifted and they aren't willing to put in the work but feel entitled to the send.
Is the area sandbagged? Sure. Does that suck? Sure. We can commiserate for a bit. But eventually I expect that the complainer will either suck it up, leave, or write their own book. Endless complaining about not being comfortable in all circumstances eventually becomes tiresome and comes off as entitled.
> Popehat seems to be falling into the trap of thinking the precisely defining something will lead to clarity
No, he’s very clearly making the argument that vigorously avoiding defining it at all while trying to argue about it prevents any coherency or utility, not that precisely defining it leads to clarity.
"Popehat seems to be falling into the trap of thinking the precisely defining something will lead to clarity."
It's not a trap, it's essentially true. Clarity doesn't mean solvability, but reducing ambiguity, or at the very least getting some better consensual agreement on terms among adversaries usually helps flash out the discourse beyond tropes and jabs.
There has to be some kind of term for making your case against the absolute least sympathetic adversary ("We're allowed to boycott giant corporations right?") while using the same word that describes the absolute most sympathetic cases ("Are all companies allowed to get together and jointly refuse to sell food to farm animal rights activists?")
"Motte and Bailey" is the term you're looking for - although I wish there were a less pretentious term (or at least one that didn't have two words that you then have to define when you use it).
I've heard it called a "non-central example". That has a negative connotation though, I wish there was a more neutral term. The statement "all natural numbers are greater than 1" is false, and it's not helpful to object that 0 and 1 are noncentral examples.
(It's not a motte-and-bailey, that's about a particular sort of shifting goalposts)
When using the same word is the main problem, that’s equivocation. When the problem is treating distinct situations as if they’re the same, that’s false equivalence.
How does one define "distinct"? When I hear the term "false equivalence" is used, it seems to be a stand in for selectively-favored arguments - even non sequiturs - rather than an objective evaluation of relevant differences. And when that doesn't work, the arguer would move the goalposts.
If we take the example given by gp, is there a relevant distinction between the between animal rights activists and corporations selling food in their respective right to boycott?
'This Times editorial is watered down almost to the level of a public service announcement written for the Cartoon Network, or maybe a fortune cookie (“Free speech is a process, not a destination. Winning numbers 4, 9, 11, 32, 46…”). It made the Harper’s letter read like a bin Laden fatwa, but it’s somehow arousing a bigger panic.'
A hit piece by the Huffington Post on a thread about cancel culture. Focused on Matt Taibbi's words from 23 years ago, for which he apologized several times. This is part of the problem, and I hope you can realize that. Every single person that has been in the public light for over 20 years will have some ugly events in their past, get over it.
That isn't true. Most public figures never have something like this in their past. Nor would you have ever forgiven an MSM publication for shouting that Russia would never invade on their front page for months. The NY Times is still living down Judith Miller after 20 years and she's been cancelled from journalism for what Taibbi has done.
Let's go with the false equivalence first. The MSM has not only been wrong about many things in the past, they have actively supported egregious crimes from the US administration. It's not only Judith Miller, they were all completely and utterly wrong about Iraq's WMDs, with disastrous consequences. Since you brought up Russia, the NYT and friends have consistently lied about the "Russiagate" events, including key elements of this narrative. Taibbi was one of the very few journalists with the courage to expose this for what it is. In the present war, yes, he was wrong that Russia would not go to war - an opinion shared by a majority of people at that time, by the way - and admitted so less than a week after the war started. These "mistakes" are not even remotely comparable.
As for your first statement, you will find that yes, every public figure has some dirt on them, if only because the definition of dirt keeps changing. For example, the comments made by Taibbi when he lived in Russia ~23 years ago~ are reflective of what the culture at the time found acceptable to say. Cancel culture is so obnoxious because it is used for hit jobs exactly like the one you are presenting here: find one or two events from someone's past and use that to close your ears to whatever they have to say at present, no matter how valid. Throw in some demands for them to be fired as well, because why not. Oh, and you have no way to atone for your supposed sins; even if you apologize you are tainted forever. It's time we fight back against this idiocy.
"The MSM" isn't really a single entity, but it's thousand and thousands of journalists. How many get cancelled for mistakes or behavior? Like 0.01%? And how often does a major outlet really report misinformation? Very rarely. Media attacking media gets big headlines, but in raw numbers it's really an insignificant number. And things like "Russiagate" are made up by detractors. No respectable journalists reported anything untrue. The facts of the Russian involvement in the 2016 and Trump's relationship to it were never embellished. The fact that there isn't a criminal case represents the gap in admissible evidence and prosecutorial will. The facts are well established. Taibbi's life's work would fill one weekday edition of the NY Times and yet he blew the biggest story of his lifetime. And his behavior 23 years ago was not ever acceptable. And that doesn't mean he is banished from living a life or personal freedom, but I would not trust a single word he writes.
You could choose to look at it critically and decide for yourself what you believe in. It is a factual, point-by-point destruction of your claim above. Zero percent of it hinges on how perfect Taibbi as a person is, or was 20 years ago. Your ideological purity, or whatever it is you think you are standing for here, serves only to close your mind.
Wow, that has aged poorly. All of the stories he insists should be walked back have been confirmed. Manafort and Flynn were both pardoned by Trump despite definitely having communication with Russian agents and lying about it. Roger Stone was also convicted for his role in coordinating the DNC email release with GRU via WikiLeaks. Russian agents visited Trump Tower to sell the campaign emails. Trump lied about his business interests in Russia. And it's absolutely journalistic malpractice to say that Mueller declined to issue indictments when he very specifically said he did not evaluate criminal charges at all because he didn't believe he had the authority. That is just a talking point straight from Bill Barr.
The impeachment trial laid out the details of the Trump campaigns relationships with Russia. No, Trump wasn't taking direct orders from Putin. That was never even suggested. All the MSM stories described back channels, influence, complimentary strategies and that was all true. Trump and the right-wing media upgraded the accusations to a level they knew could never be proven in order to reset expectations to something unattainable. Then obstructed every investigation, waited for convictions on obstruction charges and issued pardons so no one could ever be forced to give up details. Taibbi is framing the story exactly how Trump wants it framed and ignoring the reality. Nothing he references in the MSM reporting was actually incorrect. The hype around what the result of this reporting would result in was never promised by any of the legitimate reporting.
Bonus content, here is Taibbi casting doubt on the Ukrainegate whistleblower based purely on his personal bias about what a whistleblower should look like. Again, he was carrying water for Trump and was 100% incorrect in his agenda-driven reporting:
The only thing that has 'aged poorly' is the #russiagate debacle, which as a result has seriously undermined the credibility of what's left of the legacy media due to their choices to promote endless conspiracy ideas which turned out to be untrue.
This has nothing to do with the endless 'mastercard or visa' team sport that is US politics, which is stitched up by the DNC & RNC and their media so no new parties or politicians can play. We need quality independent journalist more urgently than ever as a result...
Neither you nor Taibbi have actually called out any mistakes the mainstream media has made. They reported accurately. The story resulted in impeachment. Taibbi attacked a straw man. We don't need independent media, we need honest, factual reporting be it independent or otherwise. Taibbi isn't it. He didn't uncover any facts, just sit on the sidelines and cast stones.
It is unquestionable that Russia tried to influence the election. They hacked the DNC and released it via WikiLeaks. They spread disinformation in Trump's favor. And that they invaded Ukraine. Trump at every turn supported Putin and hindered Ukraine. And so did Taibbi for his part. And then he says this story wasn't worth reporting because it didn't result in a criminal conviction?
> Nothing he references in the MSM reporting was actually incorrect.
You clearly have not read my linked article, as most of your points are covered there. Here is a short collection of paragraphs that might interest other readers of this thread who are more inclined to a honest intellectual debate:
"Even the mistakes caught were astounding. On December 1, 2017, ABC reporter Brian Ross claimed Trump “as a candidate” instructed Michael Flynn to contact Russia. The news caused the Dow to plummet 350 points. The story was retracted almost immediately and Ross was suspended.
Bloomberg reported Mueller subpoenaed Trump’s Deutsche Bank accounts; the subpoenas turned out to be of other individuals’ records. Fortune said C-SPAN was hacked after Russia Today programming briefly interrupted coverage of a Maxine Waters floor address. The New York Times also ran the story, and it’s still up, despite C-SPAN insisting its own “internal routing error” likely caused the feed to appear in place of its own broadcast.
CNN has its own separate sub-list of wrecks. Three of the network’s journalists resigned after a story purporting to tie Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund was retracted. Four more CNN reporters (Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, Jake Tapper and Brian Rokus) were bylined in a story that claimed Comey was expected to refute Trump’s claims he was told he wasn’t the target of an investigation. Comey blew that one up, too.
In another CNN scoop gone awry, “Email pointed Trump campaign to WikiLeaks documents,” the network’s reporters were off by ten days in a “bombshell” that supposedly proved the Trump campaign had foreknowledge of Wikileaks dumps. “It’s, uh, perhaps not as significant as what we know now,” offered CNN’s Manu Raju in a painful on-air retraction."
You seem to be under the impression that Taibbi is some sort of agent working for Trump, because that's what the current zeitgeist is: if someone disagrees with your opinion, they are evil, and likely working for the enemy too. You already relied on your hit piece to try to prove Taibbi was evil, now you are trying to suggest he is a right-wing agent. This is delusional.
Strongly disagree. Taibbi & Greenwald along with Michael Tracey (who is currently in Poland on the Ukranian border) are some of the few independent journalists with the cojones to take on the establishment, who spend a huge amount of time smearing and discrediting them because they are impartial and provide invaluable commentary on all sides.
They exist to be contrarian. Taking on the MSM is an end into itself and when the MSM is exactly right they'll just go be wrong. There's no shortage of fact-based independent journalism. Try emptywheel on Twitter.
I'd suggest that openly discussing the fact that Ukraine has a huge neo nazi problem is responsible reporting. I'm frankly surprised the many BBC and other documentaries on this huge problem from the last few years have not been removed from youtube given the sudden transformation of Ukraine into white hats in the current 'western'.
This is why I read Taibbi, because the legacy media has lost so much credibility.
(It should go without saying the Russian invasion is obviously appalling and wrong but many people appear to have calcified into 'any criticism of Ukraine makes you a Russian 'apologist' etc etc)
It's "neo-nazi infantry battalion is fully integrated into the state security apparatus" big, or "Hero of Ukraine award given to antisemite and Nazi-collaborator" big.
@oh_sigh It's completely irrelevant whether other nation states have a 'huge' or small far right wing neo nazi problem. The Ukranian oligarch Kolomoyskyi is behind the current Ukranian leader's media and political rise and is also a major funder of neo nazi 'battalions'. The Ukranian media was just 'unified' to be one voice (ie far right autocrats now control all their state media).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ihor_Kolomoyskyi
Given the very serious diplomatic disaster and subsequent hot war is now endangering the planet the tight focus is on that nation state's leadership.
I consider Russia a fascist country that lost tens of millions to the nazis last century. There is a fringe far right in the US with little political power, but those two realities are of minor importance compared to the disaster that has been inflicted on the Ukranian people who absolutely don't deserve this.
Why is a Jew giving neo Nazis money, and why are neo Nazis taking Jewish money? Do they not hate Jews as a central tenet now? Shouldn't be be afraid they'll just kill him?
Ukraine has a small and irrelevant Nazi problem. Far right parties barely mustered 2% of the last election. Less than the US. Reporting on it now only serves Putin's propaganda machine. And making some sort of academic argument about journalistic freedom is maybe technically true but you can't just ignore the reality of the world. The legacy media has been doing a far better job than the agenda-driven substackers.
Could you provide some context? I have not been following them closely lately, but am familiar with their work and generally find them very respectable journalists.
Taibbi’s most recent article on Russia gives the history of how the US made several calculated moves which placed Putin in power. This the same history that the corrupt mainstream media is trying so desperately to whitewash lately.
We need another 1000 Taibbis with the same passion for fact based journalism. “Apologist”, yeah… sure he is.
Cancel culture happens because it works, and it not even be true. Until businesses, universities, and institutions say no to the digital mob, it will continue.
Cancel culture isn't particularly new, either - the name is, but it was going on when I was a kid. The only difference was that the same people who are cheering it on now (like, I'm sure, Popehat) are the same ones who were raging against it when it was the religious right doing it.
The religious right continues to do it. They've somehow been grandfathered in while we gather lynch mobs to attack pink-haired community college liberal arts professors.
I think it should continue. For a while I was leaning against it, but on reflection I realized that there is no obligation for me to listen to or engage with people that have abhorrent views. Rarely will doing so actually change their mind, or mine.
What corporations are allowed to do is one thing, but as an individual I've decided to take cancel culture to heart. When possible, I now just put anyone with awful views on my personal ban lists. Twitter and Reddit both allow this. I no longer see any of their posts and they don't see mine.
I'm far happier having done this an I don't think the world has lost anything by it. There are definitely issues I'm willing to engage on and discuss, but there are many that I am not. Hearing the same tired old propaganda talking points from people in certain camps is just poison to me.
Cancel Culture would be actively seeking to enact consequences on those people beyond disagreeing with them, blocking them, or calling them a poo-poo head.
Like contacting an employer to get them fired, trying to ruin their business, trying to get them banned from social media sites or organizations, etc.
> For a while I was leaning against it, but on reflection I realized that there is no obligation for me to listen to or engage with people that have abhorrent views. Rarely will doing so actually change their mind, or mine.
I don't think anyone disagrees with that, but your notion has pretty much nothing to with what other people call "cancel culture".
If there is a talk about topic "X", you not showing up is not "canceling" anything and nobody cares.
Sure, but as a private institution you also have no obligation to give a person a platform to talk about "X." The counter to this is why not give free promotion to people who can't afford it? Why are we biasing "speech" towards those who can pay to be loud? That's not freedom either. The poor are by default "canceled" in many ways.
You got downvoted, but I think it's an excellent insight that gets to the heart of the matter.
You can't stop mobs from forming or trying to do damage, but for sure we can attempt to shield society from it.
Businesses should learn to not panic when a mob calls for the firing of an employee. Often it's done in a blackmail scenario: I will stop using your products if you don't comply.
They didn't use your products in the first place, and if they did, they won't stop using them in numbers. The economic threat is a bluff. Call the bluff. Nothing happens. Then, just wait out the mob as they get impatient and move on to the next target. Stand like an oak, not like a twig in the wind. Don't let a bunch of weird anime avatars tell you how to run your business.
As this return of sanity will not magically happen, I would support legislation to offer employees some reasonable protection from mob terminations.
Universities are perhaps the hardest to fix. Students needs to be taught to be resilient, open to opposing points of view, understand the concept of a zeitgeist and stop seeing being offended as the end of the world.
(1) Not associating with someone who you know has done some wrong.
(2) Not associating with someone where there are unproven public rumors that they've done some wrong.
(3) Not associating with someone who associates with someone who is subject to unproven public rumors of wrong doing.
(4) Publicly attacking people over unproven rumors of wrong doing for which you have no personal knowledge.
(5) Publicly attacking people because they failed to engage in public attacks against a third person who is subject to unproven allegations which the attacking party (nor the party being attacked) have no personal knowledge. ("If you won't denounce Albert Einstein as a vile traitor here and now then you're a supporter of communism yourself!") -- or the N-th generation version of that ("You meta-meta-meta communist scum!").
(6) Complaining that the people with torches and pitchforks might be acting in a way which undermines the fairness or even viability of a civilized society.
While I'm not remotely surprised that Popehat has come out as a huge fan of cancel culture (at least as it's currently being manifested and not against him, yet), I'm utterly shocked that the NYT has dared to speak even cautiously against it.
People on both ends of the political spectrum are pretty constantly trying to cancel Ken White. People on the left claim he's a pawn of the Koch Brothers (especially for his vocal support of FIRE), and on the right because he's vehemently opposed to Donald Trump. He's received semi-credible death threats.
This seems like another instance of what Dan Gackle refers to as "notice-dislike" bias: you're unlikely to notice as much when people say things you don't find objectionable, but notice acutely when they say things you find problematic. We all have that bias; it's a limitation of our cognition.
That's a pretty tendentious view of both Popehat's expressed opinion and the NYTime's article.
Popehat is pretty clearly against what he defines as "cancel culture," and the NYTimes article is primarily about journalists and elite opinion writers not liking backtalk from their readers.
Seems he is against it until conservatives are victims of it. Then suddenly it’s a good thing. You have a right to not patronize someone who you disagree with. Just like I think there will be a backlash against those who call for the pitchforks - they’ll find people peacefully protesting them outside of the their workplaces, places they frequent, outside their homes. Just another ACLU shill in this article.
One of his cited examples of actual "cancel culture" is the shouting down of Ilya Shapiro, an act he characterizes as "fascist and contemptible," and two others are either cancelings within social justice spaces or involve circular firing squads on the left. To me, this is maybe an indication that he is operating on principle more than politics.
I think it is part of an effort of the democratic party to move back to the centre ahead of the midterm elections. A lot of the progressive agenda is toxic electorally.
At the risk of outing myself as a skeptic of certain orthodoxies, I also found the Times op-ed in question to have a rather un-serious tone. However, I think there were different things I latched onto than the author of this critique. I didn't find the lack of clear distinction between the legal definition of free speech and the common definition to be particularly problematic. As the author mentions, a lot of people felt it was reasonably clear that the Times was referring to the common notion of free speech. But I noticed passages such as this one from the Times op-ed:
"Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech. Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms."
For the supposed paper of record, I found the choice to use the decidedly contemptuous language to refer to the right wing (that I italicized above) very telling. There were a handful of other telling moments in the Times article where the authors clearly revealed their bias and intellectual stake on certain issues. Even if I mostly share those views, I found the overall article to be rather ineffective at encouraging any but the most sympathetic readers to reconsider their rhetoric. On some level, the Times authors seemed to want to continue to cling to a sense of righteousness that must actually be at the root of the problem in question.
>For the supposed paper of record, I found the choice to use the decidedly contemptuous language to refer to the right wing (that I italicized above) very telling.
I genuinely don't know how else they could describe what's going on. Braying means speaking loudly and harshly - an accurate description of how many public figures on the right discuss cancel culture. It's colorful language, sure, but it's an op-ed, which mean's its someone's opinion.
I don't disagree that it is an accurate (and somewhat inflammatory) description of how figures on the right discuss cancel culture. What I'm saying is that it is an ineffective means of changing anyone's mind that they must care about changing.
As participants in the culture war often do, they claim to want peace while also wanting victory.
Why must the tone always be conciliatory? Why must both sides have a point? Why must we write everything to try and change minds on every topic at once?
Maybe for the rational people, the argument you’re talking about is over; at this point maybe we’re just discussing the problem directly. Maybe everyone who would be convinced has been convinced, and the people who remain can be dealt with differently than how we’d deal with genuine difference of opinion.
Regardless of how we feel about cancel culture, I think we can all agree that the quality of thought coming from the NYT Editorial Board is (and always has been) pretty mediocre at best.
I'm vaguely anti-cancel culture (with a lot of nuance and context-dependence) but I don't feel particularly galvanized by the Board coming out for or against me. They don't think or write clearly enough for it to make any difference in my mind.
And so long as we're on the topic, some of the worst "cancel culture" incidents have been perpetrated by NYT management itself, such as the firing of veteran science reporter Donald McNeil for "using the N-word". He did not use the N-word, he mentioned the word in a context where it came up, as the NYT and other prestige media have themselves done in a variety of situations. And as John McWhorter has reminded us over and over, the use-mention distinction is relevant here but for some reason completely ignored.
> Our failure to have a serious discussion about defining “cancel culture” encourages this.
Can we please just define it so we can move on as a society? I'm equally tired of this game where snarky writers try to pretend it doesn't exist. The first amendment doesn't protect against secret blacklists or mobs but we can still agree they are "bad things" and could agree on at least some new set of common courtesy.
All sorts of examples come to mind of unfair public shaming spectacles against largely undeserving targets:
I feel like he just kicked the can down the road and introduced additional ambiguities by invoking the concepts of norms and decency. Both of which are very contextual and highly variable.
Because "solving it" can look radically different depending on the definition or group trying to do the "solving." Platforms enforcing their terms of service to ban, say, holocaust deniers, is not what I consider "cancel culture," but a lot of people on the right would disagree.
Similarly, I think that David Shor was unfairly maligned and fired over hugely disingenuous misreadings of his work, but how do you solve that in any meaningful way? I don't think we should make "twitter user" a protected class, but I fail to see how else you can realistically prevent businesses from responding (read: caving in) to bad PR.
Some are disproportionately harsh. Some are disproportionately lenient. Some are just right. Popehat has discovered that human perception is subjective and imperfect. Wait until he discovers this applies to literally everything.
In my mind it's just a colloquialism for a certain kind of illiberalism:
> "Cancel culture" is the belief that certain beliefs about race, gender, and equality are so utterly indefensible that anyone holding them is necessarily acting in bad faith and consequently deserving of punishment.
In practice, this means moral condemnation in place of consideration and argumentation, which is precisely illiberalism.
What distinguishes "cancel culture" from, say, the conservative hatred of communism, is the whiff of hypocrisy that comes from the use of mob rule to enforce what are ostensibly academic positions, and the frequent reference to inclusivity as a justification of social exclusion.
It doesn't have a definition and doesn't need one. It's liberally applied to all forms of "people being offended". It exists in the space between behavior that is legal yet morally unacceptable. Like abject racism. The actual quality of offending is purely subjective and always has been. Someone can be considered "cancelled" when a critical mass of people agree and refuse to support them. This is how every society has existed forever.
> The perception that “cancel culture” is inherently partisan is also driven by the fact that many complained-of “cancelations” are the result of discussions about race, gender, and sexuality — issues on which social mores have changed rapidly, and issues that are often partisan.
But it is mainly partisan. The "social mores" around the quoted issues above haven't changed at large -- they've only changed among a minority of loud leftists who bully, shame and cancel anyone who disagrees, leading to people staying silent due to fear of losing their jobs.
The examples he gave of right wing cancellations are laughable. For example, a website with a list of whackjob professors. Just taking one at random: https://professorwatchlist.org/professor/adamkotsko: this guy claimed that white people exist solely to legitimate the subordination and exploitation of other races and that they should "commit mass suicide". Yeah, I'm all for firing his ass for being actually racist and stupid. But cancelling someone who says "biological men are not women"? Give me a break.
The mainstream media is getting choked with pressure from social media and alternate news sources. I have seen a pattern across many of the major outlets who used to have more conservative approach to reporting, are now becoming more and more daring and bombastic with headlines for clicks and attention
> The mainstream media is getting choked with pressure from social media and alternate news sources. I have seen a pattern across many of the major outlets who used to have more conservative approach to reporting, are now becoming more and more daring and bombastic with headlines for clicks and attention
All the journalists working for these media outlets spend their day tweeting random bullshit and hot takes. So it's only natural their "professional" work sound more and more like the tweets they author all day long.
These journalists have zero credibility, because they optimize for their followers and twitter brigades, not for integrity or reporting news.
Seems to be keeping things afloat though. You would think if all the predictions were correct that mainstream media would cease to exist at this point, now that it's common for literally everyone to have a smartphone and social media. And yet, it survives to this day, so clearly there's demand for whatever they are serving.
I got blocked by Sacramento Bee (a California newspaper) Editorial from their Facebook page.
Pretty sure that they didn’t like the different facts that I have pointed out over several different times as rebuttal to their dated opinions … with using each of their own website pages as counter-citations.
But hey, Editorial folks reserve the rights to cancel me for their own idiocy of their own makings.
It’s just the slippery narratives of their overlords that they are trying to propagate (or is it propagandizing).
sure, they’re rallying people at the behest of the governor against the middle-class. sure enough, they got what they wanted and we are paying dearly for it to this day.
I don’t know of any definition of cancel culture that would fit. That’s moderation.
Cancel culture would be if they put your profile or picture on the front page as an example of being a terrible person who has done things every right thinking person should not, and no one should think of employing or working with you - because they didn’t like your comments.
That's a lot of words to say "people are free to steer clear of people they don't like and always have been". And not much of thought into "what changed that now it is a problem perceived by some?"
There has been a fundamental change to our reality over the past couple decades: things you say and do are now by default in public and permanent record. If your not-too-famous grandpa said something outrageous, he ruined the relationship with the people that heard it and the people they talked to. In the worst case it went into a filler column of the local newspaper. He had a limited number of people to apologise to. And in the worst case could move to another town and start fresh.
If you write an outrageous blog post today, you're hosed. Even if you're not famous, or in any other way a "public figure". But just because your outrageous writing (or second-hand - someone else writing about a thing you said) is in public record today, you will find that some people in the far future will get offended by it. You get hired in 20 years as a VP of a large company in another country? Well, someone will dig up that post and before you know it you're out of a job. Saying sorry and that you're wiser now, than when you were a teenager, is likely not going to help. Bonus points if what you wrote is within the mainstream today, but the cultural norms move in the following decades.
I think that's a problem. But it cannot be solved by laws. Right to be forgotten won't work well enough (just a hunch, but international enforcement of soft issues like this doesn't have a reassuring track record). Nor by telling people they have to listen to jerks. That's what the OP deconstructs as obviously absurd. What we need is to build into our culture and understanding that people do change and can reach redemption.
> If you write an outrageous blog post today, you're hosed.
This just isn’t true, and I’m not sure why the discussion around cancel culture is framed like it is true.
It’s exceedingly hard to be cancelled if you’re acting genuinely, kindly, and with empathy for the topic you’re discussing. You can say literally anything you want if you can figure out how to be nice when you say it, but you do have to put real effort into that endeavor.
Getting canceled isn’t a landmine, it’s a tar pit.
Sufficiently talented communicators more or less only have these "cancel culture" problems through choice, not through inability to express themselves.
Which is honestly why I have little sympathy for the "cancelled", in many cases.
Occasionally, I do feel a pang of empathy for people like Gina Carano, for example, who genuinely don't seem to know how to say what they want to, and may not have intentionally wanted to harm others, but through ego end up refusing to reword their expression or to account for how their words might hurt others.
It's a small pang, and not a long lasting one.
I can see how the confusion might happen, but even for the least articulate among us there are clean off-ramps that get ignored.
My point is cancel culture is not very chilling if you're a competent speaker/writer, and it ought to be even less chilling than it is (possibly not chilling at all).
If you believe you're entering a conversation with positive intent, a genuine point of view, and empathy for others, you are more or less immune to being cancelled.
>If you believe you're entering a conversation with positive intent, a genuine point of view, and empathy for others, you are more or less immune to being cancelled
Any sufficiently selective style guide is indistinguishable from a censor.
It's bizarrely hilarious how "Progressives" mirror religious fundamentalists, down to the particular language used to dispel accusations of censorship and closed-mindedness. "You can say whatever you like, just in ways we like (which will sometimes include you shutting up entirely)" looks painfully familiar for any closeted atheist.
>Censorship is the prohibition of the expression of certain ideas, not the prohibition of the expression of specific language
You completely missed the point, the "selective" part is doing most of the work. By having a vague and ill-defined rulebook that nobody but an ideologically homogeneous group of people can invoke and enforce, this group acts as a censor that selectively switches on and off certain expressions it deems "not polite".
You also uncritically assume that polite language is universal, capable of expressing any possible issue. If I told you "you can write any program you want, just don't use C/C++/Rust" I have effectively banned you from writing a huge variety of programs, from OSes to Interpreters. Similarly, some things are inherently non-polite to say, because they express non-polite truths, and those truths will always exist because the universe is under no obligation to be polite. You can never discuss (say) Putin's human rights abuses in polite language, nor can you ever discuss how sexual predators use a trendy identity to escape retribution in a polite way using nice words.
>The parenthetical is a strawman, and not what I said, nor is it true.
Not at all, see above for my reasoning for why this is a natural implication of your words. You are free to dispute the major 2 points it rests on.
You are not any less capable of writing quality software if you are prohibited from using specific programming languages, I don’t think that analogy helps you as much as you think.
Let’s stop being abstract; what idea is not expressable except in a way that results in effective cancellation?
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.
If I have a log across a river, most people with decent balance can reasonably expect to cross it. Therefore, adding crocodiles to the river will not make anyone less likely to use the log bridge.
Could not agree more. Time and time again I've seen people broach taboo topics on various media and walk away unscathed, often lauded if anything for their tact. Likewise, I've seen many people do the same with an air of arrogance and superiority, get lambasted by the general public, and go on to preach about how they're a victim of some new, alt-left system of oppression.
Guile and wit get you just as far in today's 21st century "cancel culture" as they did in a 1800's gentleman's club, a 1400's king's court, or a BCE Roman senate. What you say is much less important to most people than how you say it.
> It’s exceedingly hard to be cancelled if you’re acting genuinely, kindly, and with empathy for the topic you’re discussing.
Sure, but that isn't the premise of what I wanted to express. You've had a bad day, or are a genuine jerk, and wrote something that you really shouldn't have. Passage of time, personal growth, change of opinions, conduct that demonstrably disagrees with the post and an apology does not prevent that from possibly ruining your future.
Who of us wasn't an easily influenced jerk as a teenager? Well, right, some weren't. But many more outgrew that. Some took more time than others. Some remained jerks, at least for now. But I prefer to hope they will change for the better. And would prefer if we recognized the change in those who succeeded.
We have no idea what the prevailing norms and taboos will be 20 years from now. Something you write today that is benign and uncontroversial, might be utterly offensive in 20 years, and all someone has to do is dig back in the internet archives and find it. I think back to 20 years ago, and I know I've told some (at the time) harmless, slightly off-color jokes, which today would get me fired instantly. You don't know which way the sensitivity wind will blow in the future, so your only safe play is to limit yourself to Rated-G "genuine, kind, and with empathy" speech, as you put it.
>It’s exceedingly hard to be cancelled if you’re acting genuinely, kindly, and with empathy for the topic you’re discussing.
This a hypocritical Isolated Demand For Rigor[1], or in this case for Niceness. Many people doing the cancelling don't have to be and don't bother with civility or politeness, they are entirely ok with the worst slurs if it came from mouths they support. The kindness they demand is a thin wrapper over ideological conformity, and the demands are demonstrably done in bad faith to silence the discussion not to shape it.
It also, rather naively and hilariously, imagines potential cancellers as ideal rational censors who will read all of your words before arriving at a fair judgment. This is in stark contrast with what actually happens, where cancellers read a headline and then reach a red 100 Celsius before reading a single additional word. The off-the-top-of-my-head example is a whole ironic saga of twitter cancelling a trans scifi author[2] because a pro-trans story just so happened to have an "offensive" title (that turned out to be literally true in the world of the story.)
>Getting canceled isn’t a landmine, it’s a tar pit
Both are public dangers that civilised societies hunt and eradicate.
There's no difference between the people doing the cancelling and the person being cancelled, from a "what are their fundamental rights?" perspective. Both must be kind, and both can face shame and shunning for failing to do so. "The Demand for Rigor" here is not Isolated.
More "cancellers" should be shamed and shunned for failing in this way. Isabel Fall should not have been ridiculed for her work, Ken White would agree with you on that.
> It’s exceedingly hard to be cancelled if you’re acting genuinely, kindly, and with empathy for the topic you’re discussing.
Sorry but I don't even undstand what that would mean. I can understand not being a jerk or insulting someone when voicing an opinion but to me this sounds like you want people to only voice opinions in a docile way that acknowledges all the other positions as just as valid. You can be genuine, kind and nuanced and have a firm position I think. Not being a jerk is just half of the equation, the other half is if people are even receptive to discussion.
> I think that's a problem. But it cannot be solved by laws.
I actually think that there is a solution that not many people have mentioned.
What we can do is actually fund enforcement of the actual really bad stuff that people do during these hate/harrassement type situations.
And by that I mean, when people make death threats against someone, or harassment or target them in a similar way, then you have a government run doxxing squad that finds out who sent the death threats, and they arrest them, send them to jail, and put a felony on their record, even if it is a 1 time/first offense.
Right now, if you send a bunch of deaths threats to people, you'll probably get away with it. But if the government actually enforced the law, and sent you to prison, the first time you did that to anybody, well I think the worst of the "cancel culture" type harassment would end really quick.
What changed is politics. One side of the political spectrum was tired of being called out for unacceptable speech that they didn't understand and decided they could make hay by stirring up a fresh culture war. They've discovered that they can be offensive and hateful then blame "cancel culture" when they get called out and gain favor with their base.
His “First Speaker Problem” is exactly why I’ve hated these discussions thus far; why is the speech of one person sacred, but speech in response to that person not? The idea that the First Speaker is, themself, responding to yet someone else is a great follow up that I hadn’t considered.
I also have very low expectations for this community’s ability to discuss this reasonably. So far is seems like folks are posting responses to the topic, rather than the article, and that hardly bodes well.
>> Saying “colleges shouldn’t disinvite speakers because of controversy” is a good specific action item; we can debate it. Saying “Ken, stop piling on 20-follower Twitter accounts when they say stupid things” is an action item; I can debate it. [Shan’t.] Saying “stop demanding that businesses fire people for what they say off the job” is an action item. I might not agree but we can discuss it. Saying “if a minor says something racist in a semi-private setting we shouldn’t put them on blast and make them infamous” is an action item. We can grapple with it. We can’t grapple with “the culture makes me feel uncomfortable speaking.” Saying that just returns us to our cultural and partisan priors.
The problem with the debate on "cancel culture" is a lack of specificity. The fact is that there are certain occasions where "canceling" seems fine, and others, where it does not. And I think a problem with the progressive argument is the refusal to acknowledge that there can ever be any excesses.
For example, there is the case of Dorian Abbot, who was disinvited from an MIT lecture after he wrote an op-ed criticizing affirmative action [1], even though the MIT lecture had nothing to do with affirmative action. I just don't see how allowing him to speak about climate science significantly impinges on the free speech of the members of the MIT community who found his views objectionable. I think it's also significant that 73% of the US population agrees with Abbot (I support affirmative action for the record). Basically the message that I get from MIT's behavior is that if you have a thoroughly mainstream opinion, you better not mention it in public if you want to have a successful academic career. This is chilling for science. If I were still a practicing social scientist, I wouldn't touch any hot button social issue with a ten foot pole. Or at least not if I wasn't prepared to p-hack a socially acceptable result.
I also think that shutting out views that you disagree with is terrible for personal intellectual development. Only hearing views that correspond to your priors is a recipe for group-think and intellectual laziness. I make a point of trying to read a wide range of opinions (National Review to Jacobin) because I believe having my ideas challenged makes them stronger. I don't see how you can have an informed opinion about anything without doing the same.
Lastly, if the polls that nytimes cite are true, "cancel culture" is a huge political mistake for progressive. It risks making the democratic brand toxic so that electoral victory, and any real change is impossible.
>The problem with the debate on "cancel culture" is a lack of specificity. The fact is that there are certain occasions where "canceling" seems fine, and others, where it does not. And I think a problem with the progressive argument is the refusal to acknowledge that there can ever be any excesses.
Actually, many progressives do acknowledge that. Plenty of people on the left feel that cancel culture sometimes goes too far, including marginalized groups who feel it appropriates their struggle and does more harm than good, primarily serving as a way for outsiders to virtue signal allyship in ways that don't really threaten their privilege, or require skin in the game as it were.
On the other hand, given a corrupt system which often protects and insulates powerful people from the consequences of their vile actions, cancel culture is sometimes the only lever people have to effect progressive change in that system. I mean, cancellation, protest and collective action are the only reason certain issues are even part of the greater cultural conversation at all.
Although that depends on what you mean by "successfully" cancelled.
Plenty of politicians and celebrities have been cancelled for racist, sexist and otherwise abusive behavior, but I don't know what your line for "genuinely" powerful is, either.
Trump was banned from twitter after he already lost the presidency, and banning from a mediocre low-IQ forum is not how most cancel culture opponents define it, the dominant conception has an essential material aspect to it, such as firing from a job, harassment or extra-legal violence.
>Plenty of politicians and celebrities have been cancelled for racist, sexist and otherwise abusive behavior, but I don't know what your line for "genuinely powerful" is, either
Not OP, but I suspect his\her line for "genuinely powerful being cancelled" is that the cancellation is not planned and catalysed by a "more powerful" entity. When and if "cancelling" is ever used against a powerful person, there are often extremely obvious marks of an equal or superior in power person(s) behind it. When this doesn't happen, the cancellation attempt fails (e.g. Sexual allegations against Joe Biden failing).
>Trump was banned from twitter after he already lost the presidency, and banning from a mediocre low-IQ forum is not how most cancel culture opponents define it, the dominant conception has an essential material aspect to it, such as firing from a job, harassment or extra-legal violence.
Opponents of cancel culture absolutely considered Donald Trump to be a victim of it. They still hold him up as an example of cancel culture being more powerful than the sovereignty of states, arbitrarily able to remove the political power of even a sitting President at a whim, because they also argue that social media companies hold monopoly control over the majority of human communication, so being banned from them is equivalent to being erased from modern society.
>Opponents of cancel culture absolutely considered Donald Trump to be a victim of it.
I have no doubt you can find some opponents of cancel culture who believe that to be true, the point is whether this is a meaningful or influential subset next to the vast majority that believes that it's the material harm of mob action that makes the practice barbaric and harmful.
>they also argue that social media companies hold monopoly control over the majority of human communication
This is an objective fact by all reasonable measures of the words "monopoly" and "majority". Are you saying this to support their argument or to contradict it?
>being banned from them is equivalent to being erased from modern society.
"Erased" is a bit of a strong word, being banned from social media is probably for the better interests of the banned person's mental health and IQ. But it does amount to silencing, the oft-repeated example here is how telephony companies and mobile providers can't censor or degrade the service according to the content that users share across their networks. I have never seen a convincing argument for why social media is any different than mobile phones such that this doesn't hold.
Thank you for either 1. being humor-deficient or 2. intentionally misinterpreting what I stated for your own self-righteous indignation performance opportunity.
Even if you removed my snark, if one looks at his prosecution as a byproduct of the change in the cultural climate, a powerful entity being actually sent to prison for behavior they historically got away with is in a way, a 'cancellation' of their impunity, which is fundamentally a good thing, and (hopefully) precedent-setting.
> I think it's also significant that 73% of the US population agrees with Abbot
I think that's an essential part of the problem: the fact that the views being penalized are (generally) widely held. From a purely practical standpoint it seems foolish. It's possible to ostracize a group of people for their beliefs when the group is small, but completely impractical if that belief gains any sort of traction.
I mean, early in our history America ostracized the Mormons, but could you imagine doing it now? And they're not even close to a majority.
>The fact is that there are certain occasions where "canceling" seems fine, and others, where it does not.
To me, this hints that the concept is a convenient tool to own people over social media or use in political attacks for rallying a voter base. There isn’t anything new here except people being shitty to each other. Anything else from it is what you normally get with reputation damage (justified or not).
Once we get rid of the annoying exercise of trying to define cancel culture, there’s some real action items we can talk about regarding reputation/livelihood damage for dumb things being said. Any reason to revisit that is because of technology’s reach now and how seemingly easily it can happen, not that cancel culture is a new thing.
Sure people can 'cancel' people if they like. I guess decorum and common human decency take a backseat to the right to call everyone who doesn't agree with your point 99% an idiotic mouth breathing alt-right pig. The NYT got it right. People are forgettting to debate and the possibility they might be overreacting on some factoid or area of life. They equate loudness and shouting down as just fine ways to go through life. If you want to have a civil war in the next 20 years or so, keep it up.
> Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all,
May on the right refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture has always existed (and that they historically used it to their advantage). It seems their outrage has more to do with the loss of social influence.
It wasn't that long ago when knowing a Communist was enough to be blacklisted from jobs. Lots of famous, intelligent, and influential people were cancelled by McCarthyism.
Criticizing your opponent for using your own tactics against you is a time honored tradition.
The comments on this thread seem to be quite wildly missing White's point. Many of the arguments taking place here seem premised on the idea that Ken White has attempted to solve, once and for all, the "cancel culture" problem --- or somehow write a dispositive argument that "cancel culture" isn't real.
He's not doing any of these things. He's responding to a specific NYT staff editorial.
White agrees with many of you that disproportionate responses to speech happen, are harmful, and are occurring regularly. He cites several instances, from both sides of the American political spectrum. You don't have to come up with an elaborate argument about how White is wrong about how harmful "cancel culture" is; White almost certainly agrees with you (at least in a general sense; maybe not in your particulars).
His point is that you have to discuss something more particular than "the right to speak your mind without fear of shame or shunning". You've never had that right. You can't have it. To be free of shame or shunning is to be free of other people's speech. If you're saying something provocative, you are almost certainly responding in a sense to something someone else said; if you think you have the right to speak without shame or shunning, so does the person you're effectively responding to. At best, you're arguing for what White has in the past mockingly referred to as a "replevin of feels"; at worst, what you're asking for is totally incoherent.
This Substack post would be bigger news if Ken White had, Solomonically, worked out the whole problem of disproportionate responses to speech. He has not, and I think he's probably much too smart to try. He's just critiquing someone else's bad argument. That's all you really have to engage with here; you don't have to let cortisol trick you into believing this is an amassing of the forces of "cancel culture isn't real" that you must mobilize against.
I don't think we should lose sight of just how batshit insane the NYT editorial was.
We can continue to talk about Cancel Culture, but the opening assertion of the editorial was that we have a right to, "...speak [our] minds and voice [our] opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned." That's gobsmackingly wrong.
It's the kind of sentence that, to me at least, grinds my mental gears to a halt. I just... I have a very hard time thinking generously about the author of that sentence.
I'm glad people like Ken exist, to put into words something more coherent than what I'd ever be able to create.
"In the right context" is doing a lot of work there! I think we can all agree that:
* If you say that vanilla ice cream is boring, and I respond by getting 10,000 Twitter users to email your CEO saying they'll boycott your company until you're fired, that's at least colloquially harassment and completely unacceptable behavior.
* If you go on a 10 minute rant about how much my political and religious views suck, and I respond by uninviting you from my birthday party, that's a reasonable response and not harassment at all.
So to meaningfully address the issue of "cancel culture", which the NYT and Popehat both agree is real, we really have to talk about what is and isn't the right context or we won't be able to get anywhere.
Shaming and shunning is not harassment, harassment is harassment which requires additional components beyond just shaming and shunning; you have to take it to an excess or compound it with other behavior for shaming and/or shunning to reach anything even remotely resembling harassment.
So decidedly no; you are not granted a freedom from shaming and shunning for your opinion, not in American culture, not in Western or Eastern culture, not historically, not in any religion, nowhere has this concept been held up as a societal more. The concept literally does not exist, and yet here the NYT cites it as some cultural artifact like it's been a cornerstone of American society from the beginning.
And what's provable in a court of law is completely immaterial to this discussion, not sure why you'd bring that up. The NYT was not citing the First Amendment, and in fact directly says so later on in the editorial.
> Shaming and shunning can easily be considered harassment in the right context
Shunning is never harassment. Shaming could be, but not on its own -- it would probably have to be either extraordinarily sustained/egregious and/or paired with credible threats to person or property.
Even emergent behavior that has the same effect as blatant harassment isn't harassment. I.e., sending one person 10K letters, some of which contain (even unspecific) threats, is CERTAINLY harassment. But if 10K people each send one letter, there are probably zero instances of harassment unless one of the letters is seriously egregious (e.g., contains specific and credible threats). And even then, the other 99,999 letters aren't instances of harassment.
Organized behavior might be. It depends on the amount of coordination. But probably the case is too difficult to take on.
It's the kind of sentence that, to me at least, grinds my mental gears to a halt.
This is the cortisone rush that tptacek was referring to. You need to let it go through you (or past you) until you feel your mental gears loosen up again. Then step back and look at the bigger picture.
What the editorial author meant was not some kind of absolute freedom from the threat of being shamed or shunned. But that, once upon a time, and it wasn't too long ago, there was a thing known as "civil discourse" in this country. In which (and granted the boundaries are fuzzy hear) -- in itself the mere fact of having an unpopular (or difficult) opinion on the state of the world ... did not run such an alarmingly and dysfunctional risk of getting you shut down in form or another as it does today.
Note that this don't mean "unpopular or difficult" in the anything-goes sense. Spouting sheer idiocy can (and should) get you shunned and shamed, along with threats of implications of violence, and a whole lot of other things I don't need to mention.
But taking unpopular / difficult (or even simply naïve) stances within the boundaries of plausibility and reason, by themselves, should not merit such a reaction. And yet increasingly they do. That is what is meant by a breakdown in the standards of civil discourse. And it this breakdown of standards -- and the creeping climate of "better hold your tongue" that has taken over this country -- that is the main concern of the editorial piece. Not absolutist notions of freedom or freedom-from.
This is such an outstanding term. Sometimes I’ll see a comment of someone arguing with me or insulting me and I’ll get a spike of anger and literally feel my eyes twitch for a split second and I’ve never really thought about it but that’s exactly what it is.
>But that, once upon a time, and it wasn't too long ago, there was a thing known as "civil discourse" in this country. In which (and granted the boundaries are fuzzy hear) -- in itself the mere fact of having an unpopular (or difficult) opinion on the state of the world ... did not run such an alarmingly and dysfunctional risk of getting you shut down in form or another as it does today.
But doesn't this cut both ways? Once upon a time it wasn't possible to spout whatever's in one's head to countless people at once. The surface area is much larger today, and so are the consequences.
This is a consequence of the Internet. In the old days if you said something stupid people would laugh at you and that would be the end of it. Now if you say something stupid and it ends up online people will dig it out of your past to use against you. This is an especially big problem for people who were edgy in their youth but are older now. Societal standards shifted out from under them and you aren't grandfathered in the court of public opinion.
The surface area isn't always all that big. The student's essay, cited in the article, had to do with comments she made within the walls of a college classroom. And I think that essay (if I didn't mix it up with another one) talked about students getting lambasted on social media for their comments in class.
I think among the action items that TFA suggests for discussion, another could be: "What happens in class stays in class." If a student needs to be called out for egregious behavior, that can be handled by the teacher.
Also, things like electronically submitted essays and papers need to be deleted from any kind of server or database once the class is finished.
> Spouting sheer idiocy can (and should) get you shunned and shamed
This is where the modern world has an issue. The window of what is considered beyond the pale has grown quite a big larger than it was in the past. In the old days you would never hear the President of the US repeating obviously fabricated insane conspiracy theories.
> The window of what is considered beyond the pale has grown quite a big larger than it was in the past.
Nonsense. I was born into a world where being gay was beyond the pale. My parents were born into a world where interracial marriage was beyond the pale, and advocating for integration in some states could get you shot. For most of my grandparents lives it was literally a crime to be a socialist, or to hand out leaflets opposing WW1. When my parents were children the state was busy arresting people for distributing information about birth control, and beating up anti-war protesters. There was a government agency that controlled “decency” in media. When I was growing up people lost careers over protesting the Iraq War. Jon Stewart lost his first hosting job after Marilyn Manson burned a bible on set, and Sinead O’Connor got death threats for (correctly) accusing the pope of covering up child sexual abuse on SNL.
We are not a perfect country, there is always room for improvement. But the idea that the range of “cancelable” acts is wider than it used to be is absolute nonsense. We have way more free speech now than we’ve ever had in our past, its not even close.
Scale matters. And in terms of sheer magnitude of insanity and frequency of its emission -- no one who has held that office can hold a candle to number 45.
> The window of what is considered beyond the pale has grown quite a big larger than it was in the past.
I'd say it's worse than that. Our information diets are so heterogeneous, that with respect to certain topics, it's plausible that two people might have non-overlapping windows of what they consider reasonable/plausible, and of what they consider totally bat-shit insane. e.g., your uncle's views on climate change fall into your bat-shit insane window, and your views on climate change fall into your uncle's bat-shit insane window.
When was that once upon a time of civil discourse? What groups of people were included, and what groups were excluded? Were Black people, women, LGBTQ+ folks, Native American Groups, Communists, Muslims, Jews, Atheists, teenagers, senior citizens, those who have mental health issues, the disabled, and the poor equally permitted to engage in civil discourse?
Because to me the idea that there was some time in the past when everyone was equally civil to each other isn't reflective of what I know of history.
> But that, once upon a time, and it wasn't too long ago, there was a thing known as "civil discourse" in this country. In which (and granted the boundaries are fuzzy hear) -- in itself the mere fact of having an unpopular (or difficult) opinion on the state of the world ... did not run such an alarmingly and dysfunctional risk of getting you shut down in form or another as it does today.
This is so disconnected with history its almost delusional. Go read about how civil rights advocates were treated in the south, or gay rights advocates a mere 30 years ago. Go read about how distributing information on birth control was a crime, or how being a socialist brought the state down on you. Go read about the labor movement before WW2, and how many workers and would be reformers were shot for their words.
For a decent chunk of the 20th century, straying outside the bounds of “civil discourse” wouldn’t get you “shut down”, it might get you killed or jailed.
Which proves my point. Your bullying tone would have been right at home in the dark ages you're referring to. Yet for some reason, it's the only tool you seem to have for expressing yourself.
The fact that you need to dial as far back as 1930s to find a climate worse than what we have now (just so you can say "I betcha you didn't know about that stuff!") would seem to indicate... that there's not a lot substance to this argument.
Are we in a worse place than the darkest decades of the 20th century? Or even half as bad of place? Of course not. That doesn't that the current climate hasn't deteriorated substantially over the last 15 years or so. Or that some aspects of it aren't reminiscent of the darker times that you are referencing.
> The fact that you need to dial as far back as 1930s to find a climate worse than what we have now (just so you can say "I betcha you didn't know about that stuff!") would seem to indicate... that there's not a lot substance to this argument.
I listed examples from the 1990s though, not just the 1930s. The moral panics of the 1980s and 1990s provides a ripe set of examples, if you’re interested in more.
There is also the radical change that social media and the internet has brought since the 1990s. And one of the great advents that things like Twitter has brought is the ability to get an audience and to speak anonymously if one so wishes. This has been an incredible boon to free speech, and it’s kind of frustrating that people aren’t treating it like the miracle that it is.
> Are we in a worse place than the darkest decades of the 20th century? Or even half as bad of place? Of course not. That doesn't that the current climate hasn't deteriorated substantially over the last 15 years or so. Or that some aspects of it aren't reminiscent of the darker times that you are referencing.
How, precisely are we worse off than the 1990s? Be specific, please. All these arguments break down to hand waving over how free speech has broken down, and yet nobody ever provides any evidence, only vague assertions and feelings.
Mean while I personally see the alt right out chanting things that were unthinkable in the 1990s. It is very hard for me to square the idea that free speech is worse off with the alt right openly saying racist and bigoted things.
The best answer I can give you is: "Go read a book or two about it."
Unfortunately you weren't very civil in your initial response, a few levels above. And it takes time to provide even a cursory list of examples you are asking for. Meanwhile there is an active genocide operation happening in a part of the world I have some close connections to. And a day job that I theoretically need to tend to, as well.
This doesn't prove that we haven't taken steps backwards in terms of what is allowed as civil discourse in recent years. You're correct that many things were once completely unallowed by virtue of repercussions, which we now see as within the overton window. We've worked towards getting better though and we shouldn't throw that away. What people today are reacting to is that it feels like we are less free to speak our minds, at least on some topics, than we were just a few decades ago. Just because it used to be worse long before that doesn't mean it isn't a problem worth dealing with now. Racism also used to be much worse than it is today, but that's not an excuse for the amount of racism that still exists either.
> What people today are reacting to is that it feels like we are less free to speak our minds, at least on some topics, than we were just a few decades ago.
And yet nobody ever produces any evidence that that’s actually true. This is particularly troubling when people are asserting that something ought to be done culturally or legislatively, when all they’ve got is a vague feeling that things are getting worse.
Such observations seem to be completely disjoint from the rapid widening of the overton window that’s happened since the advent of the “alt-right” and to the lesser extent the dirtbag left. I cannot square the evidence free assertion that people feel less free to speak their minds with nazi marches in major cities chanting about jews, and tucker carlson talking about white replacement theory on prime time television. These two things are fundamentally incompatible.
> Americans don’t have, and have never had, any right to be free of shaming or shunning. The First Amendment protects our right to speak free of government interference. It does not protect us from other people saying mean things in response to our speech.
First, the term "free speech" is overloaded-- it means a legal right to speak free of government interference, and it also means a cultural environment of pluralism where opposing views are welcomed and debate is encouraged. Here Ken conflates the two meanings.
Second, unlike legal norms, cultural norms are continuous rather than discrete. There are maybe 3-5 definitions of murder (premeditated, involuntary, etc.), but saying mean things is a continuum. You can live in a society like Soviet Union c 1930 where your coworker who wants your position calls for "the people's court" because of a joke you made-- a completely informal struggle session that doesn't involve the government. Or you can live in a society where you can express anything whatsoever and not get fired. Or at a million points in between.
Third, legal norms follow cultural norms. See gay marriage.
When people talk about cancel culture they talk about cultural norms shifting toward struggle sessions (the word "culture" is in the term!), and concerns that some day legal norms may follow this cultural shift. In this context the word "right" is used colloquially. Obviously nobody has a legal right to speak without fear of shaming.
We want to live in a culture where a joke on the internet doesn't lead to a struggle session at work. It isn't batshit insane, it isn't gobsmackingly wrong, and it isn't that difficult to understand.
> We want to live in a culture where a joke on the internet doesn't lead to a struggle session at work.
Everyone wants to do that, until they find themselves the target of a joke while struggling to have a good career, live in a nice place, and raise a family as a member of an unprivileged group with a lot of adverse baggage to overcome. Not everyone thinks such jokes are funny, and they have just as much a right to be pissed off about them as you think you have to make them. Getting along with your peers is an essential duty at most jobs, and that includes refraining from unnecessarily upsetting them.
These things start out attempting to correct an injustice and then take on a life of their own. Unscrupulous people see it as a career opportunity under the pretense of moral righteousness. This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union in 1930s. All the evils were done in the name of correcting injustice and helping the oppressed.
I'm in favor of correcting injustices, obviously. The problem is with that second part.
> Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness.
In 30+ years of being a "brown guy" in the U.S., the only thing that's ever really gotten under my skin is the self-righteous paternalism of white liberals when it comes to the social norms related to race and identity. It really gives me an understanding of what working class people (another target of liberal paternalism) must have felt like all these decades...
I'm sure you meant this out of genuine curiosity, but it comes across as a bit "prove it." The fact is that people have a broad range of experiences. Speaking of "brown people," 10% of e.g. Indian Americans say that racism is a "major problem" in America: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/16/miss-americ....
But 48% think it's a "minor problem" and 38% who think it's "not a problem at all." At the end of the day our social norms around race have to be broadly workable. Gearing our social norms around the 10% are not cost-free. The folks directly affected those norms may well be more worried about stifling friendships and interactions than about racism. It's like having your immune system--too sensitive isn't good either.
I’m using the poll of Indian Americans to specifically to contextualize my experience with that of enraged_camel. See my post further up about 87% of Hispanics and 82% of Asians saying that “political correctness is a problem in the country.” That’s not consistent with large numbers of people in those groups feeling so burdened by the things other people say that it impairs their daily life.
As to action items, have some perspective! Don’t feed the fear/outrage machine by writing overwrought stuff like this:
> Everyone wants to do that, until they find themselves the target of a joke while struggling to have a good career, live in a nice place, and raise a family as a member of an unprivileged group with a lot of adverse baggage to overcome.
This sort of attitude is othering and doesn’t reflect how most minorities actually experience and are affected by insensitive comments. As a corollary, be skeptical of activists—don’t let a minority of loud voices dictate how your approach to whole groups. And don’t overlook that social stability and harmony with others are also things that minorities want. Resist the urge to provoke an all-out race war through your rhetoric, writings, political support, etc.
> "My comments are not advocating a race war. I’m saying, maybe don’t be a dick; and don’t be surprised if people react negatively if you act like one."
Ironically, the progressives are getting increasing pushback precisely because they're failing to heed your advice, in the eyes of the general public. The NY Times has had an increasingly alarmed stream of editorials (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/opinion/politics/latinos-...) saying that minorities are drifting away from the Democrats to the GOP largely because the latter has been able to portray progressive overreach as a problem.
I don't understand why you're so fixated on the partisan angle here. Both right-wing and left-wing Twitter engages, viciously, in "cancellation" behavior. How is it helping us understand the phenomenon to digress into whether liberals are paternalistic towards working class people? The thread you're writing on is rooted in a comment saying that Ken White doesn't purport to have figured out the whole "cancel culture" problem, but rather simply rebuts an NYT editorial that you yourself think is sloppy and poorly written. Nevertheless, here you are, proposing what seems to be a unified field theory of toxic political behavior: it's "paternalism", apparently.
This is weak. You have stuff to say. Say it, don't just barb people.
Cancellation is primarily a radical leftist domain. For example, pro-abortion speakers don't normally need police escorts to speak at a university. It's not true that both wings engage in the behavior equally. There are many problems with radical right, but canceling people isn't one of them.
> Cancellation is primarily a radical leftist domain.
No it isn’t. Not even close. There are countless examples of the right engaging in the same behaviors, including the recent massive wave of passing laws attempting to silence people.
>Cancellation is primarily a radical leftist domain.
Wait, what?
* Kaepernick/the NFL
* “Freedom Fries”
* Dungeons & Dragons
* Heavy metal and rap.
* Starbucks (happy holidays)
I mean you can easily pick out all sorts of attempts at “cancelling” by conservatives from the last 30 years without even having to think too hard about it. It’s an American tradition to virtue signal and cancel, it’s not relegated to the left.
Actually, can you list some successful conservative cancellings from last decade?
In my experience, the successful ones are many decades old, and the more recent ones are unsuccessful. I mean, I don’t think heavy metal or dungeons and dragons have been meaningfully cancelled in any sense, and last time conservatives seriously tried to do so was two decades ago.
I agree that conservatives also attempt to cancel, it just doesn’t work when they do.
> Actually, can you list some successful conservative cancellings from last decade?
What would be the point? You're just going to move the goalposts again once we do.
In any case, yes, the post you replied to already mentioned one recent example. The Kaepernick kneeling scandal happened just 4 years ago. And it's an especially egregious example because President Trump even threatened to use the power of his office and take away NFL's non-profit status if he didn't get Kaepernick fired.
Also, cancelling happens every day in America. Is your son gay? Cancel him. Is one of your classmates gay? Bully him. Is your white daughter dating a black kid? Cancel her. Did a family member stop being a Mormon/Jehovah's witness/Muslim/Scientologist/Baptist/fundamentalist Christian, cancel them. Teaching black history? Cancel the teacher. Cancel the principal.
And yes, if your teenager becomes homeless, or ends up killing him/herself. I'd say that's a pretty "successful" cancellation. It's just so common, it's just considered normal.
And the abortion clinics, it's not like the threats have stopped these past 10 years. It's just old news. That kind of shunning has never stopped. If it had stopped, we'd have abortion clinics everywhere in America.
And again, we're not saying that cancelling does not happen on the left, but claiming that cancelling is a tool predominantly used by the left is just nonsense. It's not just the left doing it. If you think it is, you've been watching too much Fox News.
Honestly it sounds like every description of conservatives is coming from not only 10 years ago but 20 years ago. Keapernick is a terrible example because he had shoulder surgery and then lost nearly every game of the following season before he was cut by the most liberal team in the league, the San Francisco 49ers, and also to mention he had very key interceptions in playoff games that were all but won. The claim that anything bad that happens based on sex, race, religion are conservatives is patently false. These are every democrats talking points only used to demonize their opposition. Abortions are not under threat at all, unless you count those claiming that you can’t have an abortion after 8 months pregnant when the baby can be born instead. However, this is not cancel culture. It would be cancel culture if someone had an abortion and because of it they were fired from their job. When we talk about cancel culture it is very specific to overreaction, typically losing revenue from millions of views per the direction of big tech censors and even banks and credit card companies these days. I have no doubt both sides are attempting cancel culture and I have no doubt the only ones who can quantify this would be the big tech companies themselves, but the rules posted themselves by big tech align with left leaning ideas it is all but obvious who would be breaking those rules. Reddit for example specifically allows in its written rules hateful speech against whites but disallows it against all the groups you would expect.
Kaepernick [edit: almost] had a ring. You think the Browns couldn’t have used him? The Lions? The Bengals?
Your point is also moot when a former NFL exec confirms he was blackballed for his protest.
>Colin Kaepernick was not bounced by NFL team owners because of his skill. He was not bounced because of salary demands. And he was not bounced because he wanted a starting job. No, he was rejected by NFL team owners because he became a financial liability, kneeling for social justice and igniting a telling firestorm with President Donald Trump.
You can sit here and argue all day about whether or not they’re within their rights to do it, and frankly I would probably agree with you. They are a business, they have to make business decisions. But to pretend it’s about his skill as a player is blatantly dishonest.
I’m not sure if you are just lying on purpose or what? He does not have a ring. Period. He got to the super bowl once and lost and only started half the games that season. He was choke artist that lost every time he came under pressure. Overall he has a losing record. His last season he was 1-10. He had shoulder surgery. I’m not sure what you are trying to prove by stating plain out lies. On a political matter you will always find one person that takes a side either out of ignorance, pressure, or bias. Your football knowledge about his skill is what is blatantly dishonest.
I was referring to the bias ignorance and pressure that causes there to always be someone on the opposing side of a political topic as per his claim that one executives statement on Kaepernick was true. If you will also note he called me blatantly dishonest when he in fact has provable lies in his statement which he admits.
NFL teams have continued to let plenty of players who have suffered injuries and had less-than-stellar records continue to play. If you can demonstrate that there's a clear pattern of players with Kaepernick's on-the-field record being treated similarly, then your argument holds some water; but otherwise, it's just a convenient pretext.
Comparisons to other players are just silly, yes it has happened before but that doesn’t mean anything when it comes down to an individual. I’m not sure what else is needed to explain what makes a poor QB other than losing records in both recent and lifetime stats, injuries, and failure under pressure? If that isn’t a pattern showing lack of skill I don’t know what is. He is also aging as a scrambling QB, everyone knows speed diminishes rapidly with age and when this weapon is only getting worse, and your other weapon, your arm, was injured, then there isn’t much left. He has been scouted by tens and none decided to pick him up, this in itself should be primary evidence that he was give a chance and failed.
> He has been scouted by tens and none decided to pick him up
If you're on the margin performance-wise, and you are also carrying this controversial political baggage, then that baggage is likely going to be the tipping factor. The argument you have to convincingly make is that even without the baggage, Kaepernick would not be playing. That is why comparisons to players with similar performance records are relevant, not "silly."
I think that I am still making a compelling argument on his performance even without the PR issues. I mean the browns just signed a QB with 22 active sexual assault cases, it’s a reach to believe that they would not sign Kaepernick because one time he upset some cops and overzealous fans by kneeling. He takes too much blame for starting that but it was a very popular trend among players afterwards and many players kneel without issue.
Again, as I said that is one persons opinion who through either ignorance, pressure, or bias will choose a political side. We have former military generals claiming there were aliens found but one person’s claim while it makes a story for an article does not represent evidence.
To compare a former exec listing a very possible situation to the ravings about aliens is, once against, blatantly dishonest.
To get back to the original point, I don't know what to tell you. If you think cancelling is a tactic only implemented by the left, then there is a very thick layer of irony in your "one persons opinion who through either ignorance, pressure, or bias will choose a political side" line.
This is just common sense in my eyes that you should scrutinize a source when especially if it comes from a very small group or one person with motivations to pick a political side and you will find one person to pick an opposite side in every case. I already stated that cancel culture comes from both sides and we don’t have data to prove this definitively but when the cancellation is an overreaction it is typically coming from one side and in particular on claims of sex, race, and religion. I’m not going to pretend there’s a clear cut line what makes someone right or left but when it comes to specific topics big tech will always lean to one side of the line.
>I’m not going to pretend there’s a clear cut line what makes someone right or left but when it comes to specific topics big tech will always lean to one side of the line.
> you will find one person to pick an opposite side in every case
Of course there will be someone with a contrary opinion in almost every controversial issue. The key is to closely scrutinize the competing arguments based on the strength of the argument, the available data, and your moral compass, and make your judgment based on those. Personally, I am biased towards the positions that are based on the most intellectually-rigorous arguments supported by voluminous data; and I'd hope the type of people who frequent HN do the same, regardless of their political affiliation.
> Abortions are not under threat at all, unless you count those claiming that you can’t have an abortion after 8 months pregnant when the baby can be born instead.
The Texas law was not supported by mainstream conservatives, it was done by Christians and the federal law is not under threat, this yet another thing meant rile people up to earn votes for a specific party. There is a zero percentage chance the Supreme Court re-hears the case on abortion.
> The Texas law was not supported by mainstream conservatives
This is a classic No True Scotsman argument: that law was enacted by Texas Republicans and has been protected by the Republicans at various levels of federal court up to the Supreme Court, and copies of that law are being enacted by Republicans in other states. If you want us to believe that’s not aligned with mainstream conservatism, show that the larger conservative movement is fighting it.
Yeah, it's insane watching this degree of confirmation bias unfold real time just reading this thread.
Directly addressing what this person is saying with the facts isn't going to work, because it's obvious that nothing can convince them otherwise. I think it's better to look at why they've fixated themselves so strongly on this opinion and are so desperate to maintain it.
You are right other conservatives won’t fight against it but it is also only religious conservatives that support it, at least banning abortion per the Texas law. In my own experience in a heavily democrat area, every single democrat I’ve met also support a ban on abortion after a certain period of time and the debate is more over how long or what point after conception until it should be banned.. that point is often swayed lower and I’d argue too low with conservatives, but even as you see in the Texas, it’s still allowable for 6 weeks after, not at birth. Mainstream conservatives rarely call for banning this early barring religious conservatives. And while this may sound no true Scotsman, conservatives are much less religious than they used to be in my experience, the country itself is also much less religious and this is allowing the mainstream conservatives to move away from religion based positions.
1) The law compels people to out abortions and circumvents the law of the land - I.e. the SCOTUS ruling - by forcing it into a civil court matter. You seriously don’t see the issue there? How about democrats pass a parallel law where instead of abortions it’s because you used hate speech? How would you feel about that?
2) 6 weeks is not a long time. Plenty of people don’t find out their pregnant until 4-6 weeks, many later than that. You think it’s right that they can be forced to make that decision with only a few days to consider it? Or worse, that they have to leave the state to get one because they’re past 6 weeks? There are so many problems with this.
You are arguing against things I am not arguing for and never have. Literally I wrote I also thought 6 weeks was too soon in the post you are responding to and you continue to flame me here. Your hypocrisy is getting upset I called your post a lie, when you were completely factually incorrect, as you admitted, all the while in your first response calling me “blatantly dishonest.” I’m sorry but that is literally you calling me a liar first, and using in your explanation lies, even if by mistake. Now, after you are claiming that I am the one flaming you in your other post and saying you will no longer respond, continue to respond and flame me, do you understand why this conversation is not productive from your end?
1) Relax. I wasn’t aware you were the same person. It’s not a big deal.
2) you wrote “you still get 6 weeks,” as if that’s adequate.
I’m sorry you think your brand of conservative politics is the party line, because frankly it isn’t and even you - who I disagree with - deserve to be represented by a party that shares your values. The GOP is the anti-abortion party. They will continue claw back any and every part of a woman’s right to choose until Roe v. Wade is functionally overturned, as they have done for decades. Whether or not that is the majority opinion is irrelevant because they are doing it anyway and your denial of that reality doesn’t make it go away. Much like most Americans don’t want weed illegal anymore but neither party seems interested in making a move at the federal level despite the public mandate.
There is no Federal law governing abortion. State law governs abortions, subject to Roe v. Wade and subsequent cases that provide a Constitutional right to abortion within certain parameters that the States cannot abrogate.
The Supreme Court is already considering a Mississippi abortion law case (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, nr. 19-1392) that, depending on the outcome, could significantly curtail this right, possibly lowering the deadline to 15 weeks. The decision is expected in June.
> There is a zero percentage chance the Supreme Court re-hears the [Texas] case on abortion.
If they do, will you come back and admit you were wrong?
Federal case law is essentially law. This is all besides my original point that abortion debates are not cancel culture but a political argument. But yes absolutely I’ll admit I was wrong if it ever happens.
“Right-wing cancel culture” is a well understood, world-wide phenomenon. To use the example in your other post, people try to blockade abortion clinics because certain religious people understand those clinics to be engaged in mass murder. Or to use another example people freak out over cartoons of Mohammad because it’s a grave offense in Islam. That is what it is.
I talk about left-wing cancel culture because it’s a marked departure from certainly what’s been my experience. Unless we go down the path of calling progressivism a new religion, I think we have to posit that the cause of left-wing hostility to ideological pluralism has a different cause.
The overwrought nature of @otterley’s post suggested one possible explanation. If people genuinely believe that members of “unprivileged groups” suffer so much from an errant joke or political statement (even one made outside their presence) that it affects their ability to “have a good career, live in a nice place, and raise their family” then that might explain their hostility to any expression that may even remotely affect such “unprivileged groups.” If issues of race, gender, immigration status, etc., are literally life and death, then that justifies zealotry.
That mindset and reaction, in turn, seems to me to be a direct outgrowth of liberal paternalism. You have people preoccupied with harms to other people—harms that they are unable to experience directly and thus cannot put into perspective. Nonetheless, they’re convinced that they understand how society should be reshaped to help the people they’re concerned about. It’s a political agency problem.
Sure. But all we're establishing here is that everybody is hostile to ideological pluralism. That shouldn't surprise us. We live in a hyperpolarized society (and that's not the fault of "cancel culture", but rather preceded it by over 50 years, surviving multiple zeitgeist shifts in the interim, from the defeated cynicism of the post-Nixon 70s through the Reagan years and the post-9/11 culture of nationalism that got the Dixie Chicks and Bill Maher cancelled.) In a hyperpolarized society, countervailing ideologies are perceived as threatening. That's just human nature, isn't it?
So where does that leave us? Is your point that it's disappointing to you that the left is now as responsible for ideological hostility as the right? Because the left has always been just as hostile as the right.
(I was frustrated with your previous comment, but am not with this one; I'm just responding to it because you took the time to write it.)
> Sure. But all we're establishing here is that everybody is hostile to ideological pluralism.
But I don’t see why liberals (broadly defined) need to be so ideological or hostile. I can understand why evangelical Christians are the way they are. But liberals, especially highly educated ones, should be able to look at the facts and see what is and what isn’t.
> So where does that leave us? Is your point that it's disappointing to you that the left is now as responsible for ideological hostility as the right? Because the left has always been just as hostile as the right.
I’m disappointed that liberal elites (and I don’t mean that pejoratively—I include myself in that class) aren’t being the grownups and taking care of stability and our institutions. I’m not surprised that zealous young college students are embracing radical ideas. I’m surprised that university administrators and deans are egging them on.
I don’t think it was always like this. There was an interregnum between when conservatives controlled the institutions and the present when things were more… liberal. Even among the liberal elite there were libertarian and populist impulses, which seem to have been driven away, leaving a strident Puritanism.
I'd be very interested in your take on the powell memo.
It makes exactly the same points (young liberals from Yale undermining American society etc.) but its written 50 years ago, when American business was pumping lead into the air and painting houses with it, while other nations had already phased it out. And complains that no one listens to businessmen, and politics only cares about the environment and consumer safety.
This was written by a supreme court judge (who incidentally voted for Roe Vs Wade because his secretary nearly died from a backstreet abortion) so no dummy, yet his points seem ridiculous to us now. What leads you to think you're not making the same mistakes? Especially as you seem to acknowledge that in the past things were too much on the conservative side and it's kids today that are taking it too far.
One of the frustrating things about this discussion is the lack of a coherent definition of what "canceling" actually means. Bill Maher's cancellation quickly resulted in his own HBO show that he's hosted for almost 20 years. Or, to pick a more contemporary example, Dave Chapelle talks about being canceled from sold-out arena stages. It seems like everyone wants the "cool" factor of being a controversial figure without generating any actual controversy.
I think you're overcomplicating the issue. When you come from an underprivileged group with a lot of baggage to overcome to be as successful as others, having to tolerate mean-spirited jokes at work on top of all of that baggage is just another thing you have to deal with. It's depressing, dispiriting, and disheartening, and can interfere with one's ability to be productive.
I’m not referring to those people, and I think you know that. Nor am I saying that everyone who looks like a member of an underprivileged group is actually personally underprivileged. And I think you also know that. I’m not sure why you made the above comment.
I believe he explicitly mentioned the accused behavior. It is not a unified theory, it is a specific accusation that some people propose to speak over minorities and use their voice to mount attacks on speech and champion policies for more content control against nebulous terms like hate.
The fundamental problem is that people have become conditioned to think of themselves as a member of a group first and an individual second. In many cases, the individual identity is completely obscured by the group identity. It doesn't matter if one is black, white, gay, straight, etc. It matters who they are as an individual, how they live their lives, care for their families, and so on. If one doesn't like a joke, a tv show, a book, a statue, or so on, ignore it and find something you do like. A Robert E Lee statue, for example, is not racist. It does not glorify slavery. It's history. The media and politicians stir up controversy and conflict for their own purposes, both in the States and elsewhere. Informed, confident individuals do not allow themselves to be played. The younger one is, the more accustomed they are to accepting group think whether it's about racial identity, sexual identity, and so forth. Older guys, such as myself, who grew up in a very blue collar world, and went on to college, and worked with people from all over the world, know that so much of what the media reports is simply false. Talk to and get to know people from other parts of the world and all of this "cancel culture" and group identity BS looks stupid and petty.
I’ll bring a third perspective to this: as an immigrant from a more collectivist society, I am conditioned to see myself as a member of a group. I recognize the benefits of it, but I just don’t like individuality all that much. I’m inclined to be very deferential to what my sources of authority (parents, aunts, uncles, etc.) say to conform to group norms.
What’s driving me nuts is that “identity politics” is about fake identities. Most of these “identity groups” are fronts for the white progressives who donate to liberal causes. E.g. MacKenzie Scott donated tons of money to “AAPI causes.” https://asamnews.com/2021/06/17/mackenzie-scott-donates-2-7-.... What the heck does she know about Asians or what causes they care about? I asked my dad if he could recognize any of the organizations on the list. Of course he couldn’t. What does that tell you about the incentive structure of these identity activist groups? As a result, the “Asian identity” and the “Muslim identity” that I see in the media seems to be essentially progressivism with window dressing, and has nothing to do with what my parents or aunts and uncles think about our culture. In fact, it’s often overly hostile to our values.
“Identity politics” doesn’t actually reflect what people in these groups want, except incidentally. E.g. “Asian activists” flipped out at Andrew Yang for a taking a more pro-policing stance, but most Asian voters supported him in the primary: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang. White progressives talk incessantly about “Black and brown people” but they hated Eric Adams, who overwhelmingly won the “Black and brown” vote. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/opinion/nyc-mayor-adams.h.... It’s not groups pursing their own political interests, but the political capital of minority groups being put in service of causes championed mainly by white people.
This is a straw man. I've never been talking about the people who aren't bothered by the jokes in question here because they're not personally carrying the baggage I'm referring to. I've talking about the people who are. Those people exist and are numerous, and they are seek out and appreciate the allies they have on their side.
> I've never been talking about the people who aren't bothered by the jokes in question here because they're not personally carrying the baggage I'm referring to. I've talking about the people who are. Those people exist and are numerous
It’s impossible to talk about these groups separately because our norms and policies around race have costs and benefits which must be balanced across all the minorities who will be on the receiving end. Maybe some people will be heartened by their white professors standing up and declaring themselves “gatekeepers of white supremacy” (https://freebeacon.com/campus/northwestern-law-administrator...) but a lot of other “people of color” are going to find such treatment othering and uncomfortable. At the end of the day you’re making decisions for us all.
There’s also the very real risk that all this race consciousness holds back the progress of minorities. I know progressives imagine a utopian future where they’ve vanquished racism but people of color have to live in the real world. And looking back at my own life (growing up as a brown guy in Virginia), I don’t think it would have been better if everyone had been super conscious about my skin color versus their’s. Frankly I’m perplexed why—if progressives think white people are as racist as they say—that they think it’s a good idea to constantly call half the country “white supremacists,” send them to the back of the vaccine line, etc.
> they seek out and appreciate the allies they have on their side.
White “allyship” is deeply problematic: https://musaalgharbi.com/2020/05/15/definition-racist-action... (“Rather than actually dismantling white supremacy or meaningfully empowering people of color, efforts often seem to be oriented towards consolidating social and cultural capital in the hands of the ‘good’ whites.”)
It’s an agency problem: white “allies” don’t suffer the harms they’re trying to address, and for the most part don’t bear the cost of unintended consequences. For example, as the dad of brown kids, I find that a lot of “anti-racist education” risks putting brown kids in a mindset that their success or failure depends on factors outside their control. By contrast, even if such education makes white kids feel guilty, it simultaneously tells them that they’re the ones with agency and power. Likewise, if their rhetoric and hostility to the majority of whites causes a backlash, they don’t suffer the consequences. At bottom, for the most part, white “allies” don’t have to raise non-white kids in the world they’re trying to create.
This is all academic and theoretical. I urge you to get out from behind your desk and actually talk to people who are adversely impacted by people's poor behavior on a day-to-day basis. You might be "brown" but it doesn't grant you license to make excuses for jerks.
> we can’t just adopt the most extreme standards in deference to unspecified “numerous” people carrying unspecified “baggage.”
There's nothing extreme whatsoever about adopting a professional demeanor. Again, I beg you, check your straw men at the door, and stick to the subject.
Do you have to be part of an unprivileged group to find a joke offensive and deserving of a severe reaction? And does this only apply in America? Like if I go to Germany and they make fun of Americans for being fat I can get really mad and shame them and stuff right?
———-
Though in my own personal experience of being the butt of many jokes, I find it’s easiest to just disarm them by laughing and then trying to take the person out for a beer. Then we can laugh at my expense together. I’ve never found being angry to be a long-term solution TBH. But that’s my experience.
> in my own personal experience of being the butt of many jokes, I find it’s easiest to just disarm them by laughing and then trying to take the person out for a beer. Then we can laugh at my expense together
It sounds like the jokes people are making at your expense are because of a single action that they are mocking, possibly as a callback to a trait you have. Do you see how it would be different was a joke about something intrinsic and permanent that you've been hearing your whole life? And that instead of being good natured, it was being told by someone who would never share a beer with you?
Well there are very few such people, and even KKK members can be befriended by a black person.
> It sounds like the jokes people are making at your expense are because of a single action that they are mocking, possibly as a callback to a trait you have.
Are traits ok to make fun of? And if I take an action and someone makes fun of it, is it not hurtful? I’m not trying to draw comparisons here, but I’m not sure you can generally invalidate the experiences of others either.
Comedy, and making fun of these things and each other is progress. When we let words make us fragile we give them power that they shouldn’t have. People all over the world are or can be mean because of ignorance. Why give them more power and leverage over you?
That's just the first half good advice. Don't be a jerk when you talk, don't be a jerk when you listen. Don't try to offend people unnecessarily, and don't be offended unnecessarily.
As soon as you decided that the only metric which matters is when someone is unnecessarily upset, offended, or whatever, everything was lost. In that case nobody can say anything.
That unfairly burdens the target of the joke. And if you take pains not to offend your work colleagues, then the "don't be offended unnecessarily" half is far less likely to be an issue.
> if you take pains not to offend your work colleagues, then the "don't be offended unnecessarily" half is far less likely to be an issue.
I sort of agree, but not to the point where I think you can disregard the second half of the advice. For every person in the wild who is acting in bad faith, trolling, trying to be offensive, there is someone else on a hair trigger who takes offense to everything, who reads into every statement an underlying insult.
The cut throat cancel culture group can be divided into three categories. The people who use it as a tool for control, the people who embrace it as a form of group identity, and the well-meaning folks supporting the above two.
The group identity, dominance fighting group is probably the largest group. The well-meaning folk seem to either graduate up or wash out.
It's really interesting how the "occupy" movement (which I have my own issues and disagreements with, but it did have some real world goals that would have harmed the upper class) gave way to identity policies, embraced and shepherded by the same upper class, which a) requires zero material concessions from them and b) draws a line of demarcation in which large swaths of working class people are the villains and much of the upper class coastal elite as virtuous. This is true both for individuals as well as corporations. We were no longer talking about sweatshops or collusion with authoritarian regimes engaged in human rights abuses, instead all the focus was on whether the company's official Twitter account was going to denounce someone or pull their ads from some TV show.
It is. But it isn't necessarily the in-crowd of success. On the contrary, strong indignation often arise from a position of deep insecurity. Maybe the insecurity to lose social status, sure, but there could be any other reason too.
It also was always part of the internet that people pile up on others. What is new is that there are some groups that seem to get a direct endorsement for such behavior from the media landscape.
What you are suggesting is impossible in practice. It is impossible to not accidentally upset somebody no matter what you say. Unless what you say is so meaningless and vanilla that you might as well not have said anything. We would have to ban all jokes, all political opinions, all scientific discoveries (because religious people might be upset), all expressions of art etc. That is impossible.
They accomplish it because the folks around them are normal human beings that don't completely fly off the handle when something they don't like is said by someone else. You talk about it, rib back or leave. It's not rocket science.
That's possible, but a more likely explanation is that most people know better than to make inappropriate jokes about their colleagues. In my 30-year-long career, the number of people I've observed making such jokes is far outweighed by the number of people who maintain a professional demeanor.
Let me give you an example: Let’s say (for arguments sake) that I got upset reading your comment. Following your logic it is now your fault that I am upset. So you need to change your behaviour until I am no longer upset. Can you see how impractical/impossible that is? Any opinion you have might upset somebody. So the only way to not upset anybody is to stay silent.
You're not following my logic, because it's not what I said, or what I mean. We're talking specifically about off-color jokes about work colleagues, not factual statements like "I ate an apple" or uncontroversial personal opinions like "I like cheese."
“I like cheese” will be offensive and perhaps upsetting to some vegans. So better not talk about food at work. The same with pretty much any subject you can think of. Making the work environment or any other environment non-upsetting to everybody at all time is impossible. Somebody gets promoted instead of you: now you are upset. So let’s ban promoting people. The CEO makes 1000x more money than you while golfing every day? That upsets a lot of people. So let’s ban that. Some people are better dresses than you at work. How upsetting. Let’s all wear identical clothes. I could go on. But that might upset somebody somewhere.
I get why this “could” happen but I find it hard to believe you think that’s how things shake out even 1% of the time. You’re spiking the conversation with a vaguely-slippery-slope argument rooted in niche theoretical scenarios.
Not at all. I have experienced co-workers getting upset over things like that. Leading to heated arguments and bad feelings. My point is that what you happens to think is offensive and what isn’t does not match what others find offensive. So trying to ban everything that might offend somebody somewhere will lead to everything being banned. It won’t just be your particular pet ban list.
I just don't know how you can say things like this when professional environments like Activision-Blizzard exist. You act like it's either "everything we say can be said without any social consequence" or "everyone is offended by everything all the time," when the reality is it's a sliding scale based on context.
I have a higher tolerance for things with a small group of friends than I do in the workplace. I will talk about religion, politics, get heated/passionate, etc. in a friend-context. I do NOT want that at work, and I think I am entitled to a workplace where people have to self-censor a bit in an effort to keep the peace. I do it every day around conservatives who get their feathers ruffled if I say something bad about the GOP/Trump, what makes them so special that they can talk about whatever they want whenever they want and expect NO social repercussions?
It's a one-way street with people who behave like that, we all know it. I guarantee you I can offend and get a bad reaction out of anyone who says "anything goes."
> I just don't know how you can say things like this when professional environments like Activision-Blizzard exist
You don't agree people should leave Activision-Blizzard? I'm not convinced all the drama actually improved the company, though it was probably very satisfying to see for some folks.
> I do NOT want that at work, and I think I am entitled to [...]
That's a valid feeling, but nobody else is obliged to give that to you. You find a company that works for you, or you adapt to the one that you want to work for you. You don't go to war with the culture of a company just because something you feel entitled to isn't yet there.
> I guarantee you I can offend and get a bad reaction out of anyone who says "anything goes."
Yes, and there's nothing wrong with bad reactions. I literally said "you talk about it, rib back or leave". If you are incapable of solving your issues that way and find some sort of middle ground when someone really feels you stepped over the line, I think you have some growing up to do. That said, I recognise it doesn't mesh with a lot of folks' feelings on the matter and that's fine. I can live with that. I hope you can too.
I think it's reasonable to have conversations like these at work. Just like you can have them anywhere else. If conversations about it are had and you have thoughts on whether or not they should be had, you should be heard. Then the other party is free to do with that what they want. That's how life works.
>That's a valid feeling, but nobody else is obliged to give that to you. You find a company that works for you, or you adapt to the one that you want to work for you. You don't go to war with the culture of a company just because something you feel entitled to isn't yet there.
No, I am entitled to that. I am there to do a job, not put up with someone's ravings about politics or whatever. I am forced into a space with them 40+ hours a week, my choice to remove myself from their presence has been taken way from me.
It is the company's responsibility to not foster a hostile work environment or one where people are constantly uncomfortable. If I have a colleague constantly going off on political rants and/or interacting with me in a different (unprofessional) manner at work it is the company's problem as well.
Respectfully, I think with these paragraphs you've established that in this situation it's primarily your problem. The environment was there before you came around and clearly it worked well enough to keep things afloat, so unless you are the one person on earth with the skills you have it is not the company's problem.
They don’t. What happens in practice is that people get upset but choose not to make a big deal out of it. They recognise that we are all different and have different opinions and values. Most people are anti-fragile and can handle being a bit upset. Expecting the world to conform to your values is an example of extreme narcissism.
People in practice choose who they want to be with based on shared values and behaviour. I can’t stand hypocrites, religions fanatics, Trump lovers, or fanatical left/right leaning people. So I choose not to spend time with people like that. However I am not going to insist that they change their behaviour because I get upset listening to them. That would be extremely narcissistic of me.
There are plainly people that abuse this and are offended because they want to. Maybe they just don't like you or have an unresolved problem with themselves. Being upset doesn't net you anything, but the a important thing is that you aren't allowed to shut people up in the name of an abstract unprivileged group and we see that too often when people want to police speech.
Ken White agrees with you that there are disproportionate responses to speech on the Internet and, if you follow him, isn't any more amenable to struggle sessions than you are (see: his years-long advocacy of what Lukianoff is doing at FIRE).
The problem is that the NYT here managed to articulate a different, and stupid, problem: the eroding of our supposed right to speak without shame or shunning. The NYT's arguments are in a line of similar arguments that are not in fact about free speech, but rather the opposite: they purport to defend speech, but only selectively, and in the cases they don't defend, they're an appeal to shut down speech and voluntary association.
I didn't interpret the editorial this way. I saw it as articulating a very real problem of eroding cultural norms that welcome and promote pluralism. I don't know why you say "supposed right". It's not a legal right, obviously, but in a sense people have a human right to give a talk at a university without needing a police escort.
> First, the term "free speech" is overloaded-- it means a legal right to speak free of government interference, and it also means a cultural environment of pluralism where opposing views are welcomed and debate is encouraged. Here Ken conflates the two meanings.
Wait, what? No he doesn't. "Free speech" isn't in the quote you pulled from, nor was it in the quote that Ken was responding to. The Times started by saying that there was a "fundamental right" to speak your mind without fear of reprisal. That's pure hogwash.
As I understand the history of the United States, I can't recall a single time where the cultural environment you've described existed. It might be an ideal, but we've never even been close to it. There's always been public backlash for unpopular opinions.
But again, we're getting distracted from the larger point, which is that was a _horrible_ piece by The Times.
We want to live in a culture where a joke on the internet doesn't lead to a struggle session at work. It isn't batshit insane, it isn't gobsmackingly wrong, and it isn't that difficult to understand.
I question, however, if there's been as much societal change between the internet wild west days we all miss and the current day. Sure, you could write a ten page screed on how much you hate those evil left-handed people and think they should all be put into death camps, but you weren't doing it under your own name and your next-door neighbor wasn't reading it. It's only when people insist on linking their online persona with their real-life persona that they have problems. That is what I think changed. Not the way people respond to speech but peoples' propensity for making that speech under their real name.
As the top post says, White would probably agree with you about the struggle session. But there is room for a wide gulf between a joke leading to a struggle session and "other people people saying mean things in response to your speech". The category potentially covered by "cancel culture" is too broad, and failure to dig into the details and trade offs is at best unserious. At worst, it's a dishonest way to use norms at one end of the spectrum (let's all take jokes in stride) to defend norm-breaking on the other side (Milo should get invited to university stages even though he uses them to bully individuals).
First, I think your points are well made and articulated. I particularly like your term "struggle session".
Second, I think you're missing what Ken called the "First Speaker Problem" (which IMHO is one of the most important parts of Ken's thinking)
> "We want to live in a culture where a joke on the internet doesn't lead to a struggle session at work"
The implication I'm hearing in those word is that the "first speaker" shouldn't be thrust into a struggle session at work for their speech; what I'm not hearing (although your literal words would cover this situation, so maybe I'm mishearing) is consideration into if the joke (or other statement) thrusts someone else into a struggle session at work.
IMHO, to re-use your words; it isn't batshit insane, it isn't gobsmackingly wrong, and it isn't that difficult to understand - whatever principles you want to apply to the responders to the apparent "First Speaker" should also be applied to the "First Speaker" as if they are themselves a responder. (If only because, I'd argue, they are meaningfully actually a responder themselves)
I don't understand the "first speaker" problem, or why this abstraction is necessary. You shouldn't be thrust into a struggle session at work independent of when you entered the conversation or whether you entered into it at all.
Perhaps you should spend some time thinking about the distinction he's making before trying to take the piece apart based on an abstraction he's not talking about.
I did, and I still don't understand why it's a necessary abstraction. As I said, you shouldn't be thrust into a struggle session at work independent of when you entered the conversation or whether you entered into it at all. That's the whole point of liberal order-- equal justice under the law.
Nobody is trying to get responders to shut up. They're trying to stop responders from shutting up the initiators. The distinction between the two is that the latter is usually qualitatively escalatory.
Alice makes a joke on Twitter, but rather than respond on Twitter Bob calls her employer. Alice schedules a talk at a university, but rather than scheduling a rebuttal Bob calls the university demanding to cancel the talk. Alice writes an op-ed, Bob publishes her address.
Both are speech, but a cultural norm of escalation makes the culture a pretty awful place to live.
Ken's idea of "First Speaker Problem" is that you're giving Alice additional rights/consideration/privileges when you apply the abstraction of "initiator" and "responder", rather apply the "speaker" abstraction equally to everyone, and that that different is a Problem.
FSP isn't an abstraction, it's a named bug.
Everything else you're saying is just Ken's point about proportionate response.
Ken talks about it in depth. Is there a part in there where he loses you? (by which I mean: a part where you're understanding it, and then in the next part you're not). I might be able to help you get your head around it.
White didn't conflate anything. I'm pretty sure White understand the difference between free speech and Free Speech (shoot, he even said so in the article)
White was basically saying we need to come to an agreement on a definition of Cancel Culture.
And he suggests the messaging is about the disproportionate response to speech.
Yeah that's a good point. There is not a single person complaining about cancel culture today that wouldn't immediately join the snarling mob and try to cancel someone that argued something like "we should rape 1 year olds" or something like that, for example.
If we kept the arguments to "It is wrong to hate people just for holding the same opinion as 50% of the population", or "Hating someone for making a joke is wrong", it would make a lot more sense.
You know, the more I think about it, the fact that there are a large body of people who literally hate and want to destroy the lives of half the people living in the western world, simply because of their opinions about life, really rubs in how psychotically dangerous they are. It is amazing they are allowed to get away with their behavior. The reason is that people really are instinctively terrified of a ravenous mob (and rightly so), so they keep quite, but, in the age of the internet, there is less to fear from these mobs.
I can't find the quote, but Norman Rockwell said that the inspiration for his Freedom of Speech painting was a town hall he attended where a man not much liked by the community was allowed to speak his piece, even when the people did not like what he had to say.
I'm not arguing we shouldn't be able to shame or shun (the NYT itself would be my preferred target). I think the idea is that we should aspire to resolving our differences through dialog. What we have now is a crowd of people who feel that dialog is no longer necessary, and that to even simply engage in dialog with one's political enemies is bad and might somehow taint you.
But this isn't a new thing, not even a little bit. The House Unamerican Committee, and anti-abolitionists (as in slavery) are both examples of exactly this from history. Arguably, worse and more extreme because of all, you know, death and murder.
Of course political violence is not a new thing. And given your choice of examples, I feel compelled to remind you that it is certainly not just a right-wing phenomenon.
I am simply stating the ideal, and how the present state of affairs differs from that ideal. I would also add that we are the downslope from a relatively high-water mark period of free speech, and I see no value in regressing in the manner we have.
I don't know if I have a definition of "cancel culture" but consider the time NY Times ran an entire article about a single person from Goldman Sachs that donated to the wrong political candidate in 2016, which they publicly named.
> Records show just one Goldman employee, a financial adviser in the wealth management division, has donated to Mr. Trump — $534.58, to be precise.
The Times also did some research on him and found he was selling MAGA style hats. Running a side hustle while working at GS is a big no-no and it got him fired.
Can we all agree that whatever the hell that is is wrong? One of the largest newspapers in the world combing through public donations, finding a private individual that happened to donate a small amount to a politician that would go on to win the presidency, and feel the need to name that person publicly.
Or if you're more sympathetic to the other side, how about the woman that gave Trump the middle finger? She lost her job as a government contractor, but she won political office off of the debaucle.
>[speak without fear of being shamed or shunned] That's gobsmackingly wrong.
I have a novel counter-argument. From the perspective of self-defense, you are better off knowing the beliefs of your enemies. Presumably, beliefs that are shameful or shunnable make you an enemy. So, in a way we've managed to specify the world's first rational tribe-maker, based on grouping people according to the network of each person's real beliefs, and a willingness to act in the interests of those beliefs. And we may even have a special word for such beliefs, and call them "values".
My point is, we want people to be honest about their values, even when they are abhorrent to us, so we know who to hate, so we know who our real enemy is.
Now, if this sounds ridiculous to you, too, then I've convinced you: let's just be open about our beliefs and agree not to hate each other, not even for the racist shit. Literally everyone else in the whole world is racist and bigoted; why do we have to be different? You're not going to improve the melting pot by hating others, or yourself, not even if you're a white guy. I find myself annoyed at how conversation about racism has moved from something important, like the Holocaust, to something trivial, like whether or not Walmart carries Chanukah stuff. That's the other reason I think we should be both honest and accepting is because we've never tried it before and I think it could be really cool.
It depends on the subject. I don't have the right to deny racial equality without fear of being shamed or shunned. But I certainly have the right to point out that transgender biological males aren't women in the normal sense and don't match many people's definitions of the word "woman" without fear of being shamed or shunned.
If you say repulsive things, lots of very qualified, valuable engineers are going to exercise their right to free association to avoid working with you. There is no cure for that problem that doesn't eliminate the right to free association (or worse). If you're odious, you can't make people work with you. And you don't get to decide what other people find odious.
Of course. A better way of saying what I intended is this:
We cannot control the statistical distribution of opinions within the population and hence cannot control whether we will be shunned or shamed. However, that does not mean that we throw up our hands and define "repulsive" to be whatever gets us shunned by the majority: neither truth nor morality is completely relative.
The two propositions I gave differ markedly in the degree to which they should be controversial to a kind rational mind:
(1) That ceteris paribus two humans who differ only in their ethnicity should be accorded the same rights, a kind rational mind will always agree with.
(2) That a man who decided recently to try to become a woman is not a woman in exactly the same sense as a standard biological woman is something that most kind rational minds will agree with, but some still perhaps might not.
I'm sure you're not suggesting that either of those propositions is repulsive in any absolute sense. What I am saying is that in order to maintain standards in society, rather than letting those standards drift with cultural fashions and whims, all those who write and speak with the aim of maintaining a healthy culture should state clearly that proposition (2) is not repulsive or deserving of shame.
What I find repulsive isn't the point. There certainly are people who will avoid working with you if you make public statements in support of (2). It's not up to us to define the threshold at which people will or won't shun us. Unless you want to give up on the concept of free association --- it seems clear you don't --- you're going to have to accept that it's possible to have and express opinions that will foreclose on some options in life for you. You have freedom of speech, but not freedom from social repercussions, and there is no clean divide between "social" and "workplace".
Yes of course I accept all of that — one can hardly have missed that in the last five or so years, since completely unreasonable positions have been raised to the status of dogma by educated liberals in the sorts of workplaces that you and I work in. One can and should remind the world that it shouldn’t be that way: shunning and shaming should be reserved for extreme opinions.
Who's to say what's "reasonable"? Marriage equality was considered absolutely unreasonable just 15 years ago. I think you need to learn to live with the fact that people can simply decide to find your opinions odious, and a consequence of that will be you not being able to work with them. You don't have a right to force people to associate with you.
I’ve already told you that I accept that. But odious cuts both ways: people like me find people who would shun and shame someone for holding a differing view odious, and we wouldn't want to work with them. Or hire them. I would never have shunned and/or shamed them had they not started it, but I am capable of retaliation.
In fact, this conversation has inspired me. I interview for SWE positions. It's time to stand up against these people. I will argue against hiring anyone whom I suspect would engage in shunning/shaming someone for failing to fall into line with progressive dogma; I'll find excuses for making the argument on technical grounds.
I think the point should be that society benefits greatly by giving room for a wide variety of thought and opinion without shame and judgement. Opinions, generally, shouldn’t be considered odious, rather, the actions we take that impinge on others directly.
As a teen in the 80s, I was a conservative on a debate team full of liberals, including members of the Young Communists. Guess what- we were all good friends despite being ideologically at odds.
Having room to rationally discuss our differences makes for an ability for a pluralistic society to have open debate without rancor and violence. Using well formed argument rather than vitriol and public shaming to truly convince rather than force public agreement and private grievance seems to me a better recipe for a harmonious and just society.
People in countries which had civil wars, can work together today even if they were literally fighting each other a decade ago. But disagreeing with some woke theory makes you somebody who can't be worked with?
> But I certainly have the right to point out that transgender biological males aren't
I... don't think you do, actually. I would argue that you should be able to start a conversation about the differences between trans women and cis women without that fear, but that's a) rather different than "pointing out" and b) highly dependent on how you go about that (and c), not a right, legally or morally).
It's akin to me going "your comment shows you to be an asshole" and me going "hey I'd like to talk to you about how you said that so you can say it without pissing people off."
Don’t be silly. A man who decides they want to be a woman is a human being who should absolutely be sympathized with and treated kindly, but simply isn’t a woman. That’s such an obviously reasonable opinion (even if you disagree with it) that there’s no need to tie yourself up in knots worrying about the difference between “pointing out” and “starting a conversation”. Yes, I mean “right” in an informal or moral sense, not legal.
If someone said "we have a right to food and housing," would you call them "batshit insane"? While I agree that we don't have a right "speak [our] minds and voice [our] opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned," you (and the author) are adopting a style of argument where certain positions are subjected to intense scrutiny. The first paragraph of the NYT op-ed doesn't stand up under that scrutiny but the rest of it does, more or less.
The blog just gets weird:
> It’s good that the Times is worried about speech-suppressing laws promoted by some conservatives, but it’s terrible that the Times is gullibly accepting the Right’s deeply dishonest assertion that it doesn’t engage in the sort of behavior it calls “cancel culture.” There is no serious argument that conservatives refrain from “cancel culture.”
Which part of the following quote from the op-ed claims that conservatives "refrain from cancel culture"?
> How has this happened? In large part, it’s because the political left and the right are caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture. Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech. Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.
None of it! It says that conservatives have taken cancel culture further.
The author is worried that agreeing that cancel culture is a problem will help the right. But he does agree, so he does his agreeing in a roundabout way while heaping scorn on the op-ed. The overall effect is unpleasant.
You don't in fact have a right to food and housing. But a right to food and housing would be a coherent proposition; you could design such a right (within obvious limits). You can't do that with the proposition that people have a right to speech without fear of shame or shunning; like, the logic itself literally doesn't work. You could simply shut down anyone's objectionable political speech by saying that it is shaming or shunning; they could respond in kind. Again: this is what White is saying with his "First Speaker Problem".
I don't think you've very effectively rebutted his argument here.
I didn't try to rebut the blog. And anyway, my comment doesn't hang on right to no-shunning/right to food being identical. My point was that the blog is strange because the author agrees with the spirit of the op-ed while taking pains to criticize it. I think this is clearly because he dislikes being on the same side as conservatives.
If I was going to disagree with the blog, it would be over this strange idea that we should only talk about specific cancel culture incidents and never about the principle of free speech. Why not both?
He clearly doesn't agree with the spirit of the editorial (it's a staff editorial, not an op-ed). He thinks there are real free speech problems, but that the editorial (and the public sentiment it cites) terribly misconstrues them, succumbing to sloppy thinking in a way that not only works against their stated goal but actually further jeopardizes speech.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
NYT would prefer:
"I slightly disapprove, err--- I mean I very very very mildly approve of what you say, and I will defend to the death your right to say it, while also acknowledging that I must be respectful to you in all that I say regarding what you said."
(Here in British Columbia, Canada, a Jewish lawyer famously defended a holocaust denier's right to free speech (pro-bono!). I remember the lawyer telling people that he planned to be the first to piss on his client's grave, but that he also intended to defend him in the courts to the very best of his abilities.)
> I believe that “cancel culture” exists — that is, I believe that some responses to speech are disproportionate and outside norms of decency, and I think the culture sometimes encourages such responses.
He's criticizing how the editorial talks about the problem. I agree with the spirit of the blog and the op-ed. I'm criticizing how the blog talks about the op-ed.
You’re taking the use of the word “right” to literally in this instance.
The editorial is using it in the sense when someone says “i have the right to not have my house egged by teens”. It’s more the a reference to the ideal world than some right codified in the Constitution.
I don't think it was and I believe there is a obviously missing element of letting people speak with whose opinion you disagree. Especially in the US but it also has spread beyond that. It is an intellectual requirement, it is a scientific requirement. I don't think there is much dispute to that. So especially academia has a responsibility here. And yes, the principle of free speech does not allow for retaliation aside from more speech with which you can express your disagreement with what was said.
If you need a law to adhere to the principle which is often reduced to government, you are not a proponent of freedom of speech. That is an position you can take, but you should not have any further illusion about that.
> That's all you really have to engage with here; you don't have to let cortisol trick you into believing this is an amassing of the forces of "cancel culture isn't real" that you must mobilize against.
At least you are clear in what you think about the average person that is concerned about this topic.
"His point is that you have to discuss something more particular than "the right to speak your mind without fear of shame or shunning". You've never had that right"
This is a bit flawed, essentially 'straw man' argument in the grand scheme.
While there might be good reason to critique the NYT article, the response I think missed the bigger point.
Nobody is really making the argument that speech isn't going to have consequences.
The 'Cancel Culture Does not Exist' or 'This Is Not A 1st Amendment Issue' arguments are already tired, empty canards.
The awful failure of the authors argument are clearly evident in his dismissal of the Harper's Magazine moment - he argues 'nobody bothers to define cancel culture' etc. which is bullshit.
Stephen Pinker, one of the Harper's signatories, faced concerted and vicious attempt at 'cancellation' of some of his positions and credentials when he dared to voice the heretic idea along the lines that policing in America is largely much more heavy handed than eslewehere, and that this is the fundamental issues, less so race. God forbid (!).
Thankfully, Stephen Pinker has enough credentials to hold off the cancellers.
JK Rowling is another good pop culture example. People lament that 'she's a billionaire and can't be cancelled' again which is not true. The amount of front page sardonic vitriol about her by ostensibly 'respectable' publications is very directly translated into hesitancy on every popular front: movie deals, book deals, actors fear of 'being in the out club' if they appear in a film based upon her book etc. Her 'cancellation' can be literally be measured in dollars.
It's pernicious specifically because the vast majority of participants actually are probably not bothered entirely by Rowling or Pinker comments - but that the 'fear of association' created by the 'Cancel Screamers' creates a chilling effect on speech and participation.
Ergo the 'consequence' of speech is not legitimate: people are not 'running from Rowling' because of what they think of her positions, they are running from her because of what others might think of them.
I'll step back my argument an inch and admit that there are actually nutbars (of all stripes) who probably believe they can 'say whatever, whenever' - 1 minute on Twitter will remind us of that, however there's a gigantic grey are of obvious areas of public cancellation.
Steven Pinker (it's Steven, not Stephen) wrote a letter that helped obtain for Jeffrey Epstein an 18-month sentence for child sex trafficking in which his cell was kept unlocked and he was allowed to leave the prison for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, to work from his own office. My point here being: maybe Pinker isn't the example you want to call out here; maybe we can argue about somebody with perhaps fewer reasons to be "canceled". Pinker is a complicated figure; he is not, as many would have it, a perfect example of a pure academic singled out purely for his opinions on culture-war issues.
I agree with you about the potency of his credentials; lesser academics have been driven out for much smaller roles in the Epstein saga.
Alan Dershowitz wrote to Pinker asking "do you reckon this statute means X or Y?" and Pinker said "It obviously means X". So far as I can tell, (1) Pinker didn't know that this was specifically about the Epstein case, (2) Pinker gave an honest answer to the question, and (3) Pinker's answer was in fact obviously correct.
Epstein was an awful person who did awful things and should have spent the rest of his life in prison. But that doesn't mean that every specific attempt to put him in prison was legally sound, and it doesn't mean that anyone whose actions contributed to that specific attempt's failure is somehow complicit in Epstein's evils.
It seems to me that it's a positively good thing that when someone is accused of something awful, they can still get vigorous legal representation, and that the people providing that vigorous legal representation can solicit opinions from experts that they hope will back them up. Because 1. sometimes people who are accused of awful things turn out not to have done them, and 2. when they did do them we want the legal proceedings establishing that they did to be as watertight as possible.
In this particular case, the issue wasn't "did Epstein do X or not?" but "are the things Epstein did covered by this specific law or not?". It seems that they weren't. Again, I think it's a positively good thing that when someone is accused of something awful we only get to use a law against them if that law really covers what they did. Because if there isn't a general principle that you only get punished for things that are actually against the actual law then what we have isn't laws, it's excuses for the powerful to punish whoever they feel like punishing.
To be clear, it looks as fishy as all hell to me that Epstein didn't get a much harsher sentence in the 2006-2008 case. It looks, in fact, like some sort of corruption or cover-up. But in that case, I don't see how Pinker's letter had anything much to do with it. And, again, so far as I can tell what Pinker wrote was simply correct, and when he wrote it he didn't know it was for Epstein's case.
I'm not interested in rehabilitating Pinker, who appeared in Epstein's flight logs and has been photographed socializing with him. My point is simply that he tends to be a bad example when brought up in these kinds of discussions. He's treated as if he's simply a celebrity scientist caught in the limelight over political tweets. But he's not just that.
Maybe you know something about them that I don't, but to me it seems alarming that someone needs to be "rehabilitated" for those things.
"Appeared in Epstein's flight logs" = "went on his plane to a TED meeting in 2002", and "has been photographed socializing with him" = "was at a few parties where Epstein 'socialized' with everyone famous he could find", so far as I can tell. From Pinker's account -- which obviously might be self-serving -- they disliked one another. What do you think Pinker did that he could reasonably have been expected not to do, given the information available to him at the time?
Rubbish - Pinker is exactly the person that should be protected and there's no need to 'rehabilitate him' from anything.
Celebrities of various kinds interact with each other, that's how that works.
If you were invited to a conference and the CEO invited you on his plane because you had something interesting to say, and 10 years later we find he was a rapist, do we cancel you?
If you're going to tell me that Pinker was 'on rape island sleeping with teens girls' - then obviously that's another matter, cancel away, but as far as I know that's not the case.
This is exactly the kind of petty, toxic, vindictive posturing exemplary of bad cancel culture.
Funny, I can't think of that many other "celebrities" that contributed directly to Jeffrey Epstein's sweetheart sentence in 2008, which enabled him to continue trafficking and abusing minors in the ensuing decade.
I genuinely hope both of you continue this thread, even as I think it's unlikely that you'll come to common ground. I'm finding it extremely helpful to clarify my thoughts on this type of situation.
Pinker is absolutely, unconditionally a very reasonable and thoughtful person, who in absolutely no way shape or form should be contemplated for cancellation or even marginalisation.
He's a polite, thoughtful, conscientious guy with barely objectionable opinions, not only that, he's pretty smart and actually contributes to discussions.
He's maybe the last person on earth we want to cancel - but they have attempted to cancel him anyhow.
Pinker is the ultimate case of 'Cancel Culture is Insane'.
Epstein is perhaps the most obvious case of 'Legit Cancel Culture' - but we didn't need the modern form of Cancel Culture to cancel him. Child Rapists tend to be excluded from society without needing to argue about it.
That 'someone was photographed with Epstein' just isn't hugely material. People socialise, and take photos with one another. That's how that works.
My point is simply that there are issues other than Pinker's dalliances with racialist pseudoscientists that prompt objections to him; for instance, the fact that he contributed to Jeffrey Epstein's defense. That's all.
> People lament that 'she's a billionaire and can't be cancelled' again which is not true.
She has enough money that if she wants to be heard she can literally print her opinion and pay people to stuff it in everyones postbox. If she as much as posts a long form article on her blog millions will read it. Her voice is not supressed in any way. If she wants to publish a book, she rings up a publishing house and they will publish it for her. This is what people mean when they say that she “cannot be canceled”.
> The amount of front page sardonic vitriol about her by ostensibly 'respectable' publications is very directly translated into hesitancy on every popular front
That is one reading. The other reading is that she used her considerable reach to clearly, and articulately express reprehensible thoughts. People have seen and read these thoughts and decided that they don’t want to be associated with her. As it is their right.
How do you know that your reading is right and mine is wrong?
I think both you and Ken and the New York Times are getting tripped up by the phrase "free speech." What the New York Times is actually talking about is "ideological pluralism." When elderly Millennials like me were growing up, you could have--at least in educated circles--a broad range of heterodox opinions without anyone getting too upset about what you said.
And that's just not true anymore. I've got in trouble with white progressives in my social circle (which is mostly white progressives) for saying we should carefully scrutinize refugees from Syria and Iraq. Meanwhile my dad--whose grandfather was an Imam and who has worked in Afghanistan--expressed the exact same opinion after we withdrew from Afghanistan and there was the question of Afghan refugees.
Ken is absolutely correct that conservatives used to do it too. But I didn't grow up in the deep south where being in favor of same-sex marriage in the 1990s would get you socially ostracized. I am alarmed, however, that in blue America in 2022, I can't even discuss how my Muslim family members feel about marriage, divorce, etc., except to condemn their views. Saying "rural America in the 1990s was just as bad" doesn't actually score any points with me.
I think the New York Times editorial is confused and inelegant. But kudos to them for actually speaking up. Because I don't think we're all just having some collective delusion that something has changed in "liberal society" and that change isn't a good one.
Ken White doesn't think you're having a collective delusion either. See, for instance, his recent response on Twitter to the drama about unpopular speech at Occidental. So I'm not sure what you're rebutting here.
Saying we need to do so very carefully is implicitly suggesting that that's not currently the case, and that does absolutely feed into racism against MENA/South Asian people and Islamophobia.
The person you are responding to was talking about the Afghan refugees from the Afghanistan pull out. Those refugees do not appear to have been carefully scrutinized, at least not at the same level has past Middle Eastern refugees.
"I've got in trouble with white progressives in my social circle (which is mostly white progressives) for saying we should carefully scrutinize refugees from Syria and Iraq."
He was saying he got in trouble talking about Syria and Iraq.
Somehow write a dispositive argument that "cancel culture" isn't real.
With so many things defined as cancel culture, with so many qualities ascribed to cancel culture, with cancel culture having committed so many crimes and offended so many people, how indeed could it not be real? How preposterous! So many now are lying in the gutter with ruined lives, so many have ruined careers, what thing could have done this if not cancel culture? How could it not be real?
True, cancel culture might have some contradictions in it's definition. But I propose we iron those out those straight away and define cancel culture as American culture and then clearly, we can say, as Doonesbury author Garry Trudeau said, "we have me the enemy and he is us".
Edit: More seriously, the phrase "cancel culture" is poor way to way to deal with something with a raft of only semi-related explosions of anger against things that used to be OK. If someone doesn't like what's happening, they need to deal constructive with what's happening, not imagine that the genie will go back into the bottle by condemnation of this "cancel culture".
I like the thrust of your and Ken's post overall, but I think this misses the mark:
> To be free of shame or shunning is to be free of other people's speech. If you're saying something provocative, you are almost certainly responding in a sense to something someone else said; if you think you have the right to speak without shame or shunning, so does the person you're effectively responding to.
While it's true that almost anything you might say contradicts something that someone else has said before, it's not the case that anything you might say, even something provocative, encourages shaming or shunning of that previous speaker.
The concern here is not for the "right" to speak without any response, it's for the liberal norm that one can speak freely without disproportionate shaming and ostracism.
I don't think that the problem is cancel culture per se. The problem is how internet identity works. If you attach a real identity to the things you say online, you have a social credit score. Hell, even if you don't attach a real identity to these things, you will very likely not say things that you think are correct, but unpopular, even if you are prepared to defend you position ad nauseam. And you will avoid saying them out of fear of downvotes.
The problem gets much worse if your karma is a thing that you are obligated to attach to your real identity to.
Do you think the problem arises because of the formalization of the social credit score (it existed prior to this, just in a non-quantified way), and/or the accessibility of that score to people who aren't in your community?
Not the formalization, because it isn't formalized, but definitely the consolidation, and the emphasis on linking all of your accounts.
For my own part, I have deleted every reddit account that I have ever made in which I felt that I had become attached to my karma. I just rebuild from scratch when that happens. I hate being afraid of saying things. It helps a lot, but I also don't participate in any of the real identity emphasized social media outlets.
Prior to the modern era you had something analogous to non-quantified "social scores" and "credit score". By "formalized" I mean, I can see an actual, formally quantified measure by looking at Reddit Karma and/or your Experian provided credit score.
> at worst, what you're asking for is totally incoherent.
It was an eye-opening experience to realize that I was taken egalitarianism as a given. I, too, couldn't help but see people who were simultaneously demanding the right to speak while also demanding that others should be denied the right to speak out against their original speech. I dismissed these people as irrational hypocrites. But eventually I realized that they weren't hypocrites, their philosophy is entirely consistent. I was implicitly assuming that they valued egalitarianism, but this was a mistake on my part. When these people beat the drum of free speech, they're referring only to their own rights. They aren't interested in granting rights to others. With such people, any appeal to "natural rights" is not intended to be reciprocal: you should be obligated to give them rights, but they should not be obligated to give you rights. They have managed to solve the ethical dilemma of "if people have the freedom to swing their fist and the freedom to not be punched in the face, what happens when someone swings their fist into your face?"; rather than arriving at the egalitarian solution of making some freedoms subservient to other freedoms, they have arrived at the classist solution of making some people subservient to other people. It's entirely coherent. Terrible, but coherent.
I think it’s a strong point. Shunning is an effective social strategy to push out unwanted radical minority views. It’s been used all throughout history. The internet has greatly diminished its power. The guy reaction against ANY canceling is naive and a terrible path. Canceling is not novel or bad at all. That some people have taken it to extremes is a separate issue.
I think his notion of "disproportionate response to to speech" is a good start, but is too generic to help us understand why this has become an issue of discussion over the past decade.
When I think of cancel culture, my primary thought is of private individuals facing meaningful harms (mainly economic) as a result of public outcry over the individuals (perfectly legal) speech or actions that signal the individual is "on the wrong team".
It's not a simple definition, but captures both why people are afraid of it, and why it is happening now (social media made it possible to make a private individual's speech and actions public, even if that individual wasn't a user of that platform).
Public figures losing speaking engagements or whatever is bad, but the targeting of private individuals in this manner is an escalation of political conflict that is very alarming.
Lastly, I will add that while this evil is not exclusively committed by the Left, there is absolutely an asymmetry. The Left has generally been far more likely to cancel people than the reverse. There are a number of possible causes (people on the left are more politically active, will be amplified by a left -leaning media industry, etc)
> The Left has generally been far more likely to cancel people than the reverse. There are a number of possible causes (people on the left are more politically active, will be amplified by a left -leaning media industry, etc)
I think this is more neatly described by the right having more mainstream and surreptitious avenues of "cancelling" people they don't like. Gang lists, credit scores, police intimidation/brutality, selective enforcement of drug policy, the prison system, good ol' boys clubs, etc etc etc.
That grab-bag of issues suggests you have a confused notion of what constitutes "the right". For instance, how is police brutality a example of "right-wing cancel culture" when some of our most salient examples occurred in left-wing dominated cities? Not everything you disagree with is a political weapon used by your enemies.
I will concede (though you didn't make this point explicitly) that the religious right has historically had a fair bit of social power that might be described as cancel culture, but that power has arguably been gone since before cancel culture as I described it became a thing.
It's pretty common in the New Left ideology to view any power structure as the opposition to progress and therefore the enemy (this was a big theme particularity from 1960s-1970s that heavily influenced progressives today). So any strong authority system like police and big companies are immediately 'right-wing'.
This of course misses all the nuance in the spectrum of authoritarianism<->liberty found not only in right wing people but just as much among left-wing people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left (note how they used to be the leaders in pro-free speech, which makes sense if you're opposed to authority, but that value has of course been lost on social media - to the dismay of many from the old-school left who fought hard for it)
I think religious beliefs largely underly payment processors' refusal to do business with porn websites, wouldn't you agree? If it weren't for Christian beliefs, advertisers wouldn't be worried about being associated with porn and payment processors wouldn't either. That's the first example that came to my head, but I'm sure there are many, many such examples of the right having true social power to eliminate speech and expression they don't agree with.
Perhaps initially, though today any religious influence is merely the result of organizational interia, not genuine concern for the opinions of Christians.
But I don't think that's the only reason. My thought is that there would be concern over connections to actual criminal activity (human trafficking, abuse, revenge porn, etc). I'm not saying all porn is those things, but I imagine it might be harder to be sure porn isn't connected to those things.
Even left wing dominated cities have large numbers of right wing constituents. There are more registered Republicans in NYC than live in the entire state of Wyoming.
Right wing cancel culture are lynch mobs and the literal bombing of an American city and the imprisonment of an unconscionable number of black males. While I agree the power is waning, saying that it isn't on par with a few people losing their jobs due to misplaced outrage is hilarious.
> Even left wing dominated cities have large numbers of right wing constituents.
To think this is the cause of police brutality is a stretch to put it mildly.
> Right wing cancel culture are lynch mobs and the literal bombing of an American city and the imprisonment of an unconscionable number of black males.
Again with the random grab of different grievances. None of these are relevant to this conversation, but explaining why would require a separate explanation for each one.
Instead of trying to throw whatever you can against the wall to see what sticks, why not pick one or two things you think are the best example of what you are arguing, and I can just refute that?
Sure. Explain selective enforcement of drug policy and the subsequent imprisonment of a huge fraction of Americans who happen to be black on those charges. How does that not fall under "silencing people the right do not like".
> Concerned about the deadly effect of crack within their own communities, black members of Congress led the charge to pass the 1986 federal drug laws. The bill that was passed — which included the crack/powder sentencing disparity — did so with the support of the majority of black congresspersons. None at the time objected to the sentencing disparity as “racist.”
> In 2006, the feds tried 5,619 crack sellers, and 4,495 of them were black — out of the 562,000 blacks in state and federal prisons at the end of that year. Add in county and city jails, and the figure rises to 858,000. And states’ crack cocaine laws are not the culprits. Only 13 states employ differing sentencing guidelines for crack vs. powder — and their differential is much smaller than that of the feds.
I'm not able to respond to your below point. I understand why you jumped to the crack/cocaine disparity. In response if like to surface three points
1) it seems unlikely (although I don't have/know data) that a 10% population can have 80% of the convictions without intentional bias at play. Black people are not the only poor people in America.
2) I emphasized drug policy in general. I think you will find it much harder to explain the differential marijuana conviction rates
3) I also emphasized selective enforcement of policy rather than the policy itself on purpose. I know the policy itself is not a clear cut situation. Although I will remark having a few token black members of Congress behind the proposal is not a particularly strong counter argument in my opinion.
1) How unfair/biased is the policing of blacks in America?
2) To what extent is that unfairness the result of the right intentionally trying to harm their outgroup?
That second point is essential to your argument that that bias in criminal law is a form of "right-wing cancel culture". When a left-wing twitter mob joins in to get a man fired from his job for holding his fingers in the shape of the "OK" sign[1], that is their explicit intention.
Likewise, you are arguing that biased outcomes in criminal law are the intentional outcome of right-wingers targeting their political enemies (who are black people, apparently?). Even if you were completely correct about racial unfairness in the criminal justice system (which you are not) the fact that the policy was championed by black politicians and endorsed by a Democratic-majority House of Representatives makes your thesis that it was all a right-wing plot completely untenable.
As for the enforcement side, even if the police enforcing these laws were majority right-wing, this is still primarily happening in cities where the politicians, judges, district attorneys, etc. all have a left-wing bias.
With all this in mind, what you are arguing sounds more like a conspiracy theory. Again, not every outcome you don't like is the result of intentional action by your political enemies.
As for addressing the question how unfair in general the criminal justice system is towards blacks, there are several other good arguments in the link I shared. I don't have any specific stats about marijuana-related convictions, but even if there is a bias in that area, I think the arguments linked undermine the idea that in general the criminal justice system is unfair to blacks[2].
[2]Of course, the higher rates of incarceration of blacks is certainly tragic, and I would be glad for solutions to reduce that rate. There are probably many factors that cause this higher rate, but my argument is simply that biased laws and law-enforcement are not among them.
> (if you are) correct about racial unfairness in the criminal justice system (which you are not)
I think if we can't agree here, we are unlikely to agree on much of anything at all.
> you are arguing that biased outcomes in criminal law are the intentional outcome of right-wingers targeting their political enemies (who are black people, apparently?)
Yes. And closer to scapegoat/target than enemy, but sure.
> even if the police enforcing these laws were majority right-wing
They are, as I understand it. But I care little about this point and accept that there are many good police officers who are not biased.
> it was all a right-wing plot completely untenable
Its not a plot. Its a tool used by the right wing to achieve their aims. Whether that tool had good or bad motives at the start is immaterial to the discussion of how its used in practice.
> With all this in mind, what you are arguing sounds more like a conspiracy theory.
The right wing has many tools at its disposal in order to silence and oppress their targets. Of these tools, public derision via cancel culture requires specific targets and has a large chance of blow back via the Streissand effect rallying supporters to the targetted individual. In contrast, broad untargetted attacks afforded by diffuse structures like criminal law enforcement, crippling economic controls, political deactivation via gerrymandering and direct voter suppression are far more effective tools at their disposal.
Notice the fact that you are able to point to a specific event and specific supporters of the outcome of that event in your comparison of "left" cancel culture to "right" oppression. I know you have decided that is the nail in the coffin of my argument. However, consider how much more effective my arguments could be and how difficult a time you would have if that person were fired from their job after holding that ok sign up. But there wasn't a twitter mob. Just a routine dismissal from the company. And all you could do was point at how often that happens to people like that and how little it happens to people who do the same thing but have a different skin color/sex/wear glasses/whatever.
> I don't believe you are discussing in good faith, goodbye
Are you capable of discerning between bad faith and disagreement?
I actually believe what I am arguing: that cancel culture in the present moment is dominated by the Left.
Do Republicans and people on the right do bad stuff? Absolutely (even if i disagree about many of the particulars). But cancel culture is far from the only critique I have of the Left.
This is not about "which side is worse" in the broader picture. I'm trying not to simply turn this into a political mud-slinging contest. I'm trying to get at what cancel culture actually is (you know, the topic of this thread).
In response, you made a claim that certain things were examples of "cancel culture" coming from the right. A claim you have thus far still utterly failed to defend.
If all you want to do is complain about every bad thing a Republican ever did, then I agree this discussion should end.
Because you do seem genuine I will describe why I find this discussion to be in bad faith. You rarely (if ever) grant a charitable interpretation to my statements. You (almost?) always extrapolate my comments to the most extreme and weakest position. You seem to mostly be interested in "winning" and are funneling the conversation to points you find yourself most comfortable and strongest in. You regularly attack me as a person.
I find it unlikely that if I were to surface information and/or an argument to you that you did not know, that you would incorporate it into your world view. It seems you would dismiss it and focus on other aspects of the discussion and/or extrapolate the new argument to an absurd extreme thus making it irrelevant.
> In response, you made a claim that certain things were examples of "cancel culture" coming from the right. A claim you have thus far still utterly failed to defend.
I think this is the crux here. I offered a potential alternative explanation for why we might see more "cancel culture" from the "left" than the "right". Simply that the "right" often has more effective and lower risk options in "cancelling" a person.
That must be situational. In my circle of family and friends, religion is still extremely powerful. Even to the point where I demur when the topic of religion even looks like it could be discussed. I "pray" right along with everyone else at the dinner table at family gatherings.
And even on a national stage -- how many politicians will admit to being non-religious? There is still a tremendous amount of social power from the right.
> That must be situational. In my circle of family and friends, religion is still extremely powerful. Even to the point where I demur when the topic of religion even looks like it could be discussed. I "pray" right along with everyone else at the dinner table at family gatherings
You sound like me with my Woke extended family :)
Of course the influence of one's community will always be powerful. What's novel about the present situation is how much a bunch of randos on the internet can ruin your life.
> And even on a national stage -- how many politicians will admit to being non-religious? There is still a tremendous amount of social power from the right.
So perhaps not totally gone, but it's influence is greatly diminished from where it was a generation ago.
I think this is another case of defintions breaking down.
There are no left-wing dominated cities in the US. There are liberal dominated cities, and liberals tend to support the same things as "conservatives" (big scare quotes), with the difference being target (sometimes). Painting Black Lives Matter on one street when no one asked for it while still supporting policies BLM is against does not make one leftist.
Plenty of checkmarked liberals have called for my extermination because I'm in a "red" state because they think everyone here is a moustache-twirling villain (right up until cable news decreed it was "purple" and thus virtuous). Meanwhile, the self-identifying conservative editor of the local paper supports a lot of policies that would be seen as leftist: BLM, trans rights, marriage equality. Liberals were firmly against these things until popular sentiment started to shift.
> There are no left-wing dominated cities in the US.
That they are not as left-wing as you does not mean they are not left-wing. Whatever they are, these cities are certainly not dominated by right-wing politics.
> There are liberal dominated cities, and liberals tend to support the same things as "conservatives" (big scare quotes), with the difference being target (sometimes)
What is a "liberal" in this context?
> Painting Black Lives Matter on one street when no one asked for it while still supporting policies BLM is against does not make one leftist.
One can be a hypocrite and a leftist at the same time.
> Meanwhile, the self-identifying conservative editor of the local paper supports a lot of policies that would be seen as leftist: BLM, trans rights, marriage equality. Liberals were firmly against these things until popular sentiment started to shift.
As I see it, the Internet has created two problems:
(1) Everyone now has a voice -- yeah that's cool but society isn't handling it too well yet
(2) It's now easy to associate with people who think like you -- cool but absolutely terrible
What happens is that now a bulk of the things you hear come from your own circle (which is self affirming!) and then when you hear something from outside your circle, it feels so far off that it causes you to react violently (a.k.a. you want to cancel them).
The problem is: you can't get rid of that violent reaction. It's natural and human to dislike things that you're unfamiliar with. (Actually I think every living thing is like that -- being wary of unfamiliar things is essential to survival.)
So the only thing you can do is desensitize yourself by hanging out with a diverse set of people. I don't know how we can make society as a whole do that more, but the Internet is allowing some people to do it a lot less.
To make matters worse, before when it didn't matter if Jane or Frank were totally clueless, it matters now because because Jane and Frank both have a voice and can tweet about it.
In order to fully understand this subject one has to understand where our commons went or disappeared to...Under US constitution about the only free commons is the postal mail.
Let me illustrate:
Small town relocates Police department to private shopping mall. Now can I protest on the sidewalk in that private shopping mall right outside the Police Dept. door?
The short legal answer is not as its private property sidewalk
Its not cancel culture its people waking up to realize that what they thought
was public commons to apply limited free political speech is instead
a privately owned communications channel not public commons
I wonder to what extent the subject here, 'cancel culture', is a side effect of the outrage porn nature of social media (and maybe media in general), in which engagement statistics show higher engagement when it comes to inflammatory subjects/posts. Outrage porn's history goes back forever, but in the modern media context it might have been invented by Jerry Springer.
Basically the model seems to involve identifying a subject for the outrage to focus on, whipping up clicks and views by bumping the subject's statements up the social media engagement ladder - this is a lot of ad revenue, ahem - and then, finally, the ceremonial burning of the sacrificial victim for the appeasement of the flash mob. This is particularly true when the target has no political following or wealth status, certainly no means to push back (like a billionaire's PR team calling all their contacts in the media, crisis managers, social media botnets, etc.).
As far as the political-social use of this exercise, it's the kind of thing authoritarian states are known to do and was parodied by Orwell in 1984 as the "Two Minute Hate" routine. Actual debate of sensitive topics is the last thing anyone involved with this circus wants to see.
In contrast, students were once taught to argue the points of the opposition in a debate, as an exercise in thinking as well as understanding. This kind of debate training seems highly unlikely in today's world, and would probably generate lot of outrage and calls for cancellation of the program.
Does anyone notice a weird effect with this article's font where random letters of parts of letters appear bold, and it seems to shift as you move your eyes around? I'm viewing it on a 2020 M1 Macbook Air screen.
Do we need more time and space in our society for measured discussion about current events? Absolutely, but such discussion is anathema to engagement-algorithm-driven social/traditional media. If you take the time to think things through, then by the time you are ready to speak the world will have already moved along and the post you are replying to is as good as dead. Instead we reward only the hottest, most emotion-provoking takes and clap-backs. Those exchanges do nothing to foster mutual understanding, but they sure do get the views and rake in that sweet ad money, which helps meet growth projections.
We're free to blame Democrats or Republicans or Russians or whoever, but 'cancel culture' is a natural response to a system that viralizes outrage. Completely banning the speech on the specific topic that causes the outrage will always be a losing battle because the system will always find some new dumbness to amplify. If you really want change then you gotta change the system, dude.
Good points. The speed of the conversations basically ensures there is no conversation. You may attempt to add some reasonable counter points to a controversial counter point but it's all in vain.
This dramatic promotion of the most unreasonable takes is creating a massive divide between the online world and the offline world. Quite a few takes on Twitter when expressed in the real world, may make you wake up in the hospital.
No it's not. The basic point that was being quoted (from the NYT comment piece) was quite sensible actually.
The OP author then immediately falls into the semantic trap of "right to express oneself freely" == "First Amendment rights". They're not equivalent. They're overlapping and related obviously -- but nonetheless fundamentally different things.
My expectations that there might be something to this post dropped precipitously at the point, so that's where I stopped reading.
a) How it's possible, even hypothetically for citizens to simultaneously have both "the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public" and "without fear of being shamed or shunned". The two are contradictory.
b) How that superposition is "a fundamental right as citizens of a free country", which Americans once had but are losing.
As or b) - I don't see that there's some kind of grand superposition of opposites at play here like you do, so I'll largely pass. But more broadly: it seems beyond dispute that the the broader climate of public discourse has become more constrained and fear-driven in recent years. Not as bad as it's ever been, or compared to what certain groups have gone through. But compared to 20 or 30 years ago -- the mainstream climate has definitely deteriorated.
A piece of pseudo-intellectual drivel that fails to get to the point.
"just as we constantly debate norms of what speech is socially acceptable, we debate norms about what responses to speech are socially acceptable."
I consider the above section critical in his misunderstanding. The measuring stick by which people are cancelled, here referred to as socially acceptable norms, are in fact not norms at all by any stretch of the imagination. Meaning, these are the enforced norms of loud outrage-addicted unhinged characters forming mobs, not the common norms of the population at large.
Further, there's nothing to debate about these "crazy norms" or their disproportionate responses to non-compliance as they are uncontrollable. Learn how a mob works.
When people cannot express their feelings on political topics, with opinions commonly found acceptable by the public at large, then that is a big problem. It's incredibly dangerous and this is how you get extreme counter movements.
The heart of the matter is not the shouting at each other, that will always happen, it's real world consequences. When they go for your job or inflict life long reputation damage, that makes people anxious to express themselves.
We have to understand that this is a new problem. Before, in the physical world, if you would say something controversial, people might verbally counter you, which is business as usual and the free exchange of ideas, including bad ideas. That's quite a different experience from a pile-on by the mob, smearing you, calling your employer to get you fired, digging into everything you ever posted online to do maximum damage.
That dynamic is new and it has to be fought. It's cruel and sadistic.
> All of this is to say that Americans’ perception that they can’t speak without disproportionate blowback is not unimpeachable
It's strange to argue that chilled speech should be measured by something other than people's perception of the risks of speaking freely. If people say they are afraid to speak out, then they are afraid. One could argue that the press is making too big a deal out of a particular topic, but I don't think there's a strong argument that places like the NYT are talking too much about cancel culture (conservative outlets do talk about it frequently, but polling indicates that cancel culture is perceived to be a problem by non-conservatives as well).
> Vladimir Putin claims that the West is trying to “cancel” Russia merely for invading a sovereign nation
I will not go into the merits or demerits of Russia invading Ukraine, but that cancelling process of Russian culture did most certainly happen (and is still happening). Where I live (Romania) they even cancelled an Eugene Onegin [1] opera show because it was, well, Russian. Both Chaikovsky, the composer, and Pushkin (the author of Onegin) have been long dead, they most certainly don't have anything to do with the current invasion. And that was not an isolated incident, at least according to what I could read on the net.
In response to the call for actions that can be taken, I think this comes down to fostering better skills in discussing nuanced topics. By the time something has been hate shared several times, all the context has usually been removed and only the most triggering snippet retained allowing scrollers by to dehumanize the speaker because they've only been presented what has essentially become a strawman of the original thought. We need a shift in the culture that allows it even encourages second hand parties to step up and point out misunderstandings. Instead such actions are usually seen as defending the evil person and therefore that person is also evil and should be cancelled.
> employees often express fears [...] that it’s easy to win a sexual harassment case, both propaganda-driven perceptions that are demonstrably untrue.
I don't think winning or loosing the case is what [males] employees are worried about, more about getting fired and blacklisted by an entire industry at the first rumor "something" happened
This is a stupid essay. Yes, we never had such legal right, but when we say “right(s)” it rarely means in exact legal terms, unless the article is published on a legal journal.
There are problems with the NYT essay, but this is not a main problem.
In a good faith discussion, we should assume the other side’s statement can be interpreted in a common sense way, not a radically ridiculous way.
Ever heard of someone says “you have no right to talk to me like this!” Do you think this person is making a legal argument?
Because the general HN commenter crowd is apparently pretty pro- cancel culture. They’re in either the “it’s not real” or “actually, it’s good” camps. And this article gives what they feel to be rhetorical cover for their opinions.
Great article, I agree that defining Cancel Culture is important, that it's definition relates to the proportionality of response, and that some on the right misuse the term.
I have a better definition, and I also believe that the left owns cancellation.
A definition I like is: action taken to remove privileges from a person based on some qualities of that person, where those qualities do not predict harmful use of those privileges. Yes, there is room for partisan disagreement in what "predicts harmful use", but it is still a step closer to a definition that can produce more frequent agreement both population wide and in sub-populations.
1. This definition naturally encapsulates the common free speech angle of Cancel Culture- most often, expressions of political theory have no predictive power over how a person behaves in some job, role, etc.
2. This definition allows for people's privileges to be removed without it being considered Cancel Culture- ex: Weinstein, Orange Man, CRT Teachers, etc.
3. This definition allows for collectives to boycott a business without it necessarily being Cancel Culture- reasonable for gays to boycott Chick-Fil-A since they fund whatever-it-was anti-gay thing, unreasonable for gays to boycott a business who's CEO ate Chick-Fil-A that one time.
4. This definition allows for extrajudicial and mob justice in general, without it necessarily being Cancel Culture.
In my opinion the main point that most discussions on "cancel culture" are missing, is that the real issue is actually deplatforming, not cancel culture.
In most of our recent history, the agora was the place for public speech, and the town square was not on private land, access to it was regulated by public laws, not by private corporations.
White in his article makes a distinction between free speech in the sense of being free from government censorship, and free speech in the sense of being free from other people's shunning.
But there is a third category now, free speech in the sense of being free from a handful of mega corporation's censorship.
They own the agora, and as such their censorship policies should be subject to similar strict regulations as government-enacted censorship.
When you see it from this angle, I think it's a fairly bipartisan problem, it's not just some bigot complaining that they can't say racist slurs on social media.
Mobs have been around forever before computers. Throughout all of human history. Looking at it from a positive view, at least people aren’t stoned to death anymore.
In re: "Cancel Culture" I think it's important to remember the context: "cancelling" used to mean getting beaten up or even murdered, not for saying something stupid but just for existing and being, say, black or gay.
Now you get fired for saying something stupid.
What I'm getting at is, if you stand back and take a broad-minded view of things, today's "cancel culture", as bad as it is, is progress.
The question now is, can we re-assert our common, shared values in re: free speech without backsliding into queer-bashing and lynching? Framed that way it seems kind of a no-brainer, right?
It is impossible to not accidentally upset somebody no matter what you say. Unless what you say is so meaningless and vanilla that you might as well not have said anything. We would have to ban all jokes, all political opinions, all scientific discoveries (because some religious people might be upset), all religions, all expressions of art etc. That is impossible to do in practice.
Why the downvote? Are you (for example) saying that religion should be banned because there might be somebody out there who gets upset when religious people try to force society to conform to their values? Or that right leaning people should be banned from expressing their opining because left leaning people get upset listening to their arguments? Really?
This whole debate is a result of Putin's 8+ year cyberwar on the US and the West. I re-watched Icarus last night and it all clicked. We've been duped. All of us. You can continue to play along like dopes, or start figuring out how to stamp out misinformation and what we can do to encourage regime change in Russia.
I refuse to pay for either NYT or WaPo subscriptions specifically because of the OpEd pages. It's one thing to encourage provocation for the purpose of social dialog, but the abject lies and violence that both publications have allowed onto their pages are inexcusable. The NYT in particular has been given this reverent status by the left that it just doesn't deserve - it isn't your paper, they don't speak for you, their goal is no different than Fox News, IE: to attract paying eyeballs.
There's certainly a need for discussion about bad behaviors. But as some wise man advised: let he who's without sin cast the first stone.
Most young people make mistakes. When someone is 'cast out' because of something they stopped doing decades ago (in a different time), that's a violent, revengeful and counter-productive act. Without forgiveness, we live surrounded by hate.
The irony for me here is that while I'd like to comment on this topic my HN account has been throttled because I've commented on these types of threads in the past.
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