"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.
Shaming and shunning can easily be considered harassment in the right context, though actually proving it in a court of law gets much trickier.
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