>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.
> But the editorial section is about 3% of the magazine
You do realize that this is exactly what woke cancel culture does right? It cherry picks something offensive that someone said and then cancels the entire person.
> I genuinely have no idea what you're getting at.
I mentioned articles that declared would only mention her by initials to avoid calling her name, you followed that pattern. If it was not deliberate, it was an interesting coincidence.
> It feels weird that to talk about cancel culture you pick someone who's at no risk of being cancelled.
No one can deny the fact that JK Rowling and Martina Navratilova were more than "criticized" for their "opinions". They were misrepresented in their views to create attrition with some minority group, then coerced into getting some kind of apology for saying something that in no way entices animosity towards said minority and still after that get their work and professional relationships harassed to try to get them ostracized.
This by itself is already is cancel culture, not the fact that people actually get canceled.
It feels even weirder that you are trying to minimize the harm caused by cancel culture by pointing out the fact that someone survived it.
> so the non-asshole thing to do is to just use their preferred pronoun.
I agree. I completely agree. I myself call the transgender people in my life by their preferred pronoun.
I also find compelling someone's speech by threat of banning them to be disgusting. Especially when there's a block button available. If you don't like what someone's saying, you can literally ignore everything they say.
Herein lies the conundrum for me - for, what seems to be, an increasingly large group of people, its not enough to simply stop interaction with people they don't like, those people have to be removed from the landscape altogether. I just do not see this ending in any positive way.
On the contrary. It’s the very context you wrote about is often missing in online conversations. Your anecdote beautifully illustrates the absurdity trap too much well-meaning tolerance eventually trips.
I’m reminded of a Red Dwarf episode (Timewave, S12E03). A crew of a space ship decided to outlaw all criticism on board, going so far as too construct a machine extracting “the inner critic” from
everybody. The Red Dwarf crew encounters them and wants to leave immediately after, because, quote: “nothing works here, especially the people.”
It’s quite straight-forward that the posts’ author struggles with mental health issues. By their own public admission (and accounting for preferred pronouns) it is transgender, hates its body and is rather inconsistent and confrontational. All fine by me. I don’t care how you find happiness or whatever else. But it should be entirely possible to remark upon those facts without experiencing retribution.
Yet somehow any remark regarding their mental health state gets self-censored by the first mention of insensitivity, no doubt fearing said retribution.
>Fall wanted the story to be titled “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” and when she eventually retitled it “Helicopter Story” as a vague gesture of goodwill, many people assumed she had been pressured into doing so. Fall wanted the story taken off the internet, and when it was, many assumed she had been “canceled.” Both narratives framed Fall as an unwitting puppet of forces beyond her control.
How are the above not examples of Fall being coerced into doing things she did not want to? No one thinks that when an Internet mob causes someone to pull a blog post that that mob actually logged into the author's account and pushed "Delete". It doesn't change the fact that Fall was forced/coerced/strongly encouraged to do something the author would not have done otherwise.
(Reading further) Ah, I see. Fall isn't against cancel mobs in general, and believes that one just happened to accidentally throw a glancing blow at one Isabel Fall, powerless (and thus someone undeserving of any Internet mob's wrath, unlike those with actual power) author in this case.
>“The story was withdrawn to avoid my death,” she says. “It was not withdrawn as a concession that it was transphobic or secretly fascist or too problematic for publication. When people approve of its withdrawal they are approving, even if unwittingly, of the use of gender dysphoria to silence writers.”
>if you don't see things a specific way you might get canceled for life.
Every time I ask for examples people get angry, or if they're mask-off they reply with a very obviously drug-addicted hyper-racist, hyper-sexist, men's rights advocate who is pretending to be a doctor or guru or alpha male and who is, as part of their "cancellation", raking in millions from basement dwelling losers who like being told that they are special and the world is against them and so it's obvious that the cancellation controversy surrounding them is a grift.
> The term is pointless. What happened in this case sounds bad, at a glance. Let's not generalize it to other things. It'll get nowhere. Whether or not one believes something is a part of cancel culture has no bearing on whether a particular idea to squash something is good or not.
Yeah, that's how I feel. Arguing or getting outraged about ill-defined things that can't be attributed to specific people doesn't seem productive because there's no way to resolve it or learn anything.
Some people exist that get offended by some things other people aren't offended by. So what?
> If, however, we are still talking about the case of censoring out profanity, you know my opinion. The people who are filtered out (or constitute the "less diversity") are the sort of people who get offended by me making use of a basic freedom (the one of speech). I am not interested in meeting people like that - frankly I hope they stay as far away from me as fucking possible.
This is interesting. My instinctive reaction to someone trying to censor me is pretty damn negative, and I can swear like a sailor. On the other hand, what you wrote reminded me of a super sweet, gentle guy that I worked with once who was just genuinely freaked out by my profane manner. From a different country, deeply religious, etc. etc. I found out from a third party that the guy was weirded out by the way some of us carried ourselves, since the guy was a gentleman and wouldn't/couldn't say anything.
Of course I started behaving more carefully around him, and a little more carefully in general. He was always nice to me and a very, very skilled worker, someone I respected, so it would have seemed churlish to me to do otherwise.
> If you don't want to get hit on there's a plethora of ways to communicate that in a non-verbal fashion, like wearing a wedding ring or - less subtle - wearing a shirt that says "I don't want to get hit on" or something, you get the idea…
I believe the onus is entirely on the guy who is trying to be charming (if that's what we're talking about, as opposed to simple catcalling sorts of harassment) to notice when the object of his wit does not reciprocate with a smile and a kind word and to move the fuck on before his behavior gets creepy. I suppose I'm agreeing with you, as not smiling is a pretty clear form of communication - no rings or shirts or pepper spray are required.
I'm not sure what we should do with the guys who aren't clever enough to pick up on such signals but I'm open to a Soylent Green sort of option. (attending the average hacker event seems like a punishment all its own to me, so I'm useless for envisioning rules for something like that. Punish them by making them attend more hacker events?)
To normalize people being open and explicit about their gender identity so that people with non-obvious gender identities can feel less conspicuous sharing theirs.
> they/them
They and them have been neutral-gender pronouns forever.
> And yet dissent and mockery of this abject stupidity is largely censored.
Because most of it is thinly veiled transphobia. You can still disagree with the censorship but to act as if it's mostly good-faith arguments being censored is just naive.
>Society changes and evolves. With it, we start recognising and understanding ever-smaller demographic groups
It is not a natural change. It is being forced on people. Words and understandings of concepts change of course, but in the past society would slowly start accepting the change. Now a days when a word changes if you don't start using the new definition that day you are a bigot. People don't do well with sudden change.
> There was a time when making jokes at the expense of women was ok, there was a time when making fun of gays was ok, there was a time when mocking trans people was ok... now it's not.
Jokes are jokes. If it is wrong to make a joke about women then it is wrong to make a joke about men. Anything else is sexist discriminatory double standards. Either you can joke about anything or nothing.
>It's just society developing empathy. Think most people understand that how we see other groups of people is not a fixed thing.
Society is losing empathy. We used to understand people could make mistakes and improve themselves. Now the first time you make an innocent mistake you are canceled. You are thrown out of polite society and defamed on social media. That is the opposite of empathy.
>People are getting "called out" and "cancelled" more than ever, for sure. But I don't think it's necessarily victimhood. Given the original topic, it's interesting that this is how you're attributing intent.
The person you were responding to was not saying that a person being canceled is a victim (though they possibly believe that). They were saying that people cancel other people so the person doing the canceling can play the victim regardless if they actually took offense.
>Do you feel that there might be genuine reasons for acting the way they do? Could the grievances be genuine?
I don't think anybody would deny some people are offended about things. I just don't think that matters. If I say hello to somebody and they are offended by that should I be canceled for it?
> I'd love to get over beating this dead horse, here and all over the tech industry
Among the people I know closely enough, I see almost no one who has changed their minds ever since these discussions started circa 2015. And I have been in the tech industry for a long time. So keep beating that dead horse, or beat it in a different way.
> Not to mention that no one is getting "cancelled" here.
Some people are trying very hard. NYT article seems like a smear campaign as part of that overall effort.
> cancel culture doesn't exist as you describe even.
In my experience, it does. I personally know many other people for whom it does. Maybe your bubble is very thick? Maybe people are not honest and open with you because you are highly opinionated and based on this comment, not open to an open dialog?
> I'm simply tired of this.
If you keep communicating the same way as in this comment, you will keep getting tired. I don't think cancel culture, SJWs or suppression of uncomfortable viewpoints are going to stop anytime soon, nor the secret revulsion of these trends.
> This smells like underlying bias to me, I'm afraid. Crying wolf in many of these areas has frequent negative impact -- hell, speaking out with good cause has negative impact.
It said in a mocking sense, but given the benefit of a doubt - it's difficult to read intention.
> Who wants to volunteer to be at the centre of the next ethics in game journalism storm?
Lot's of people. Not everybody of course. There's lot of sociopaths/psychopaths that exist undiagnosed amongst us. I don't think that has any value in the argument as we really don't know this person.
> But this specific action -- choosing to no longer use the services of a company -- does have few repercussions, which does make it a good way to protest.
Ha! PR is one of the most important aspects to a company. Why do you think Google is so successful? Perception often outweighs truth.
> This could have been worded more felicitously, sure. Substitute "those negatively affect by the oppression and those sympathetic to them" and the point stands.
It was just a throwaway point about your default stance. We all have unconscious bias, I'm not holding it against you. My point was that we should all be aware of it.
> As others have said, it seems you didn't look at the facts here.
I've now read a lot of articles regarding this topic (it's interesting isn't it?).
> the original point is not about the author, it's rejecting the idea that people are only able to delete their Uber accounts to protest the patriarchy because the very patriarchy they're protesting doesn't exist.
> This is exactly the behaviour you'd expect under a really oppressive system: given a low-risk way to protest the oppression, people take it. Women and those sympathetic to the cause of equality can easily delete their accounts and take alternatives, so they do.
But this isn't by definition evidence of that structure existing. Simply agreeing or disagreeing with a point of view can lead to the same outcome. And with "a really oppressive system", I would expect to see a much more solid foundation to the accusations.
Signs this may be false:
- No evidence of communications
- No witnesses to the events have come forward
- No names of the people involved
- No pursuit for legal rights
- Disabled comments on blog
- Uber directly addressing the blog (if they knew they were in the wrong, they would want this to go away)
- HR woman didn't sympathize with her accusations
Signs this may be true:
- Uber had an internal meeting regarding the accusations
- Uber are conducting an internal investigation
- Uber's history of being a tough working environment
> are claiming for some positive freedoms (I want to play with the women's team)
Rowling wasn't arguing about sports teams. That argument is a canard and you know it. Trans folks want to be treated as the people they are, and that's as far as it goes.
And please forgive me for uncontrollable laughter that in a discussion of cancel culture where you clearly are being engaged constructively, you're choosing to disengage anyway... because downvotes. I can't imagine a better illustration of the kind of fake outrage that powers the current conservative freakout. You guys aren't worried about being "canceled", you just don't like being Wrong on the Internet[1].
> This is exactly the practice of arguing the arguer, rather than the argument, and it's a bad faith tactic.
Her claim is that she, herself, is being exceptionally victimized and silenced; it’s literally impossible rebut this without arguing against her, specifically.
Harper’s’ unpaid internships was a more general example. Had I been speaking about Bari Weiss specifically, I might have mentioned her support for deplatforming a Jewish speaker from Stanford [1], her attempts to get Arab professors fired [2] or her reports to other employees’ bosses in response to minor slights [3].
And even if my argument were to hinge on an orthogonal claim, you think that’s tantamount to “embodying cancel culture”? I haven’t called for any personal or professional consequences; literally all I’m doing is disagreeing with her.
This is why so many roll their eyes when people start waxing on about cancel culture. What they really mean is that they don’t want to hear criticism of their opinions.
Ah yes, censorship is good when it is an opinion you do not share, right? That I was flagged is wrong on the part of hacker news, and whoever got that ball rolling.
>All moral codes have a "coercive" element to them
Coercion is good too. Are you sure you're not the baddie here? Are you really sure?
>as a thoroughgoing nerd, I spent a lot of my childhood getting shit on for being different, so I'm happy to help make space for different kinds of difference.
Another popular strawman. I stated explicitly "live how you want" and yet you assert that I'm against difference or outcasts. You lied.
>trans folks have a pretty hard role in life
I'm speaking specifically of custom pronouns. If you cut off your junk and wear a dress, I think its rude not to call you "she". It is a shitty kind of idea that encourages people to introduce new error modes into their relationships, and the bitter irony is you think you're doing people a favor by doing that.
1) Trans person is qualified for job
2) Hiring a trans person is now risky because of a perception of a potential "shitstorm" should "something" happen
3) Admission that this perceived risk exists regardless of the trans person's experience, aptitude, or temperament.
Is this not a textbook example of discrimination?
Edit: used "risk exists" instead of awkward phrasing "risk is true"
It’s a private organisation. The person “let go” was a volunteer. It sucks, but both parties acted within their rights, legally and I’d argue morally.
Lots of places have weird norms—dress codes, for instance. This group has a different view of pronouns. They want to enforce that as a cultural value. Apparently, their leadership either agrees or doesn’t find the topic worth burning political capital over. The author did find it worth burning political capital over, which caused him [EDIT: oops, them] to be ejected.
The cost of vilifying norms we disagree with is a reduced cultural space private organisations can explore. That loss of dynamism may reduce the frequency of seemingly-silly subcultures, but it also hits our broader culture’s flexibility.
>You’re not punching down when the near entirety of all cultural institutions, journalists, and technology platforms have mobilized to protect your target from all question and criticism.
Unfortunately that isn't really true. Trans folks, especially trans women face discrimination and violence on a daily basis in society. You see, they actually exist in the real world and somehow Twitter mods can't keep people from saying and doing terrible things in real life.
>When you can be censured, deplatformed, and even lose your job for stating an objective truth like “men cannot get pregnant”, your words, by any possible definition, are punching up.
Spare me and your culture war nonsense. I'm sure you believe that white men are under attack and marginalized.
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.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_At...
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