Politically-correct witch-hunt is killing free speech
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Telling people which causes they must publicly support or else be assumed an enemy? Does that ring any bells? I swear there's another regime in human history that made you hang flags outside your house to show your clear support. This comparison is made to death so I won't name it, but the similarities - despite accusations flying in the other direction constantly - are constantly increasing.
Removing TV shows from Netflix because somebody covered their face in black paint, with no regard for context or what was being made fun of it? (hint: it wasn't black people).
"Cancelling" somebody's career because their daughter said something that might be deemed racist? "Cancelling" somebody because they said something 10 years ago that might be racist? Absurd.
I honestly think our society is getting soft. You cannot disagree with somebody without them immediately deciding whether or not they can publicly shame you or if you broke any laws in the process of hurting them. Comedy is getting less and less funny, debate is increasingly meaningless because you have to tip-toe around everything. We are making society blander and less diverse in the name of diversity.
Diversity at all costs: except diversity of opinion.
Are you talking about Kapernick being cancelled from the NFL by conservative cancel culture and the Vice President's staged NFL walkout to support conservative cancel culture?
it may detract from your central point, but it also explanis why one side of the spectrum won't be willing to contribute to an armistice
(Though I am not sure that the right wing dominates societal discourse like you say.)
[0]: https://nypost.com/2020/07/02/harvard-grad-claira-janover-fi...
Her anger is the problem.
She was going to work with Deloitte, where she will represent her organization in front of clients that regularly sign off on invoices that resemble less a major purchase and more the GDP of a small country.
Imagine that you have a business.
Would you hire such an angry, callous, and impulsive person to represent you in front of clients?
Unless the name of your business starts with "B" and ends with "ank of America", the answer is probably "no".
Folks on the right are saying that she called for stabbing conservatives.
I don't think that's true.
She was using metaphor -- comparing being stabbed to having a paper cut -- and just did it exceedingly poorly.
The metaphor doesn't become clear unless you watch until the end of the video, and I don't know a lot of people, conservative or liberal, that are all that interested in watching the entirety of a video where they are being offered a complementary stabbing, just so that they can get the punchline.
If you post a video of you start off by repeating, over and over, "I am going to $VERB you", then don't be surprised when people interpret your message as, "I am going to $VERB you".
Finally: imagine that we flip her political orientation, and that she recored an angry video where she used a metaphor in which she talks about shooting BLM supporters.
She would likely be in jail.
There is a political difference in how both threats and actual violence are treated in the United States, and it favors the Left.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism seem like the obvious counterexamples.
I do not support what happened to Kapernick, I don't think cancel culture is any better when disguised as something else. But the scale at which things are happening now is insane.
I think the progression is:
1. Make a political statement against an injustice (hashtags, kneeling, etc)
2. Making a lack of support a form of complicity with injustice.
3. Narrowly define what support looks like.
Exact quote from #ShutDownStem website: >> Unless you engage directly with eliminating racism, you are perpetuating it. [0]
Fantastic point. And I would hope those in favor of democracy can accept it. If you choose to support a political party publicly, you can reasonably expect people to engage with you about it. But nobody should be able to coerce you to support any particular party or candidate.
What we are seeing now, is not the freedom to choose a particular stance or cause. We are seeing the mob react with force to a lack of opinion.
You must have an opinion. And it must be the right one.
well, nobody is able to coerce you for not doing anything, but people can still judge you for it, and that may be perfectly reasonable.
Inaction can be as devastating as action. Withdrawing in the face of some injustice is as much of a choice as participating on either front.
It's an overused quote but really all that is necessary for evil to triumph is good people doing nothing. Of course today sometimes the causes are hyperbolic, but nothing is wrong with the principle. If someone is the victim of racism say, and people look away rather than stepping up, that's a failure.
It can be but rarely is.
In the case racism, it isn't. Sitting in my house doing nothing isn't as bad as attacking blacklivesmatter protesters.
The call against inaction is an exaggeration to shame people into action for their side. It's the "if you aren't with us, you're against us" repackaged for the woke.
Just one example:
"I wore these socks, in the past, because the rogue cops that are allowed to hold positions in police departments, not only put the community in danger, but also put the cops that have the right intentions in danger by creating an environment of tension and mistrust. I have two uncles and friends who are police officers and work to protect and serve ALL people. So before these socks, which were worn before I took my public stance, are used to distract from the real issues, I wanted to address this immediately."
Kapernick made a political statement as his place of work
He ruined that 2010-14 dynasty and got his coaching staff and front office sacked. And then he goes for petty provocational crap like representing police as pigs on his socks. This is a guy who grew up in the lap of upper middle class luxury and wanted for nothing.
You can be a reprehensible human being and still have NFL success if you are top-level talent, but not if you are reprehensible and you suck.
He does not deserve to be fired for making a political statement. Full stop.
At the same time, he did leverage his employer's platform (the NFL) to make a political statement.
Some sort of disciplinary action in response to that behavior is a legitimate course of action for an employer.
Imagine Kapernick as an engineer working for, say, Instagram.
Imagine that he Tweeted a bunch of pro-Biden memes on his personal Twitter. That seems fine to me.
Now imagine that he wrote, without consulting management, a feature which put a Biden banner at the top of the Instagram website.
That'd be a huge problem, and would merit disciplinary action. Not because he supported Biden, but because he leveraged the company brand and resources to do so, without the support of management.
I think this is where we draw the line, but am also open to other ideas.
As an individual, you should always have that right.
Both the New York Times and Breitbart are purveyors of propaganda for their respective political parties. They literally do nothing but make massively biased political statements, all day long.
Imagine you work there, and you disagree.
You can totally try to change that from within. Fight the system.
Work your way up. And once you have sufficient stature within the organization, you can run, say, an article praising George Washington on the front of the NYT, or a piece condemning him on Breitbart.
But, you, as a journalist, are a public face for your respective brand, and as such, you will likely face disciplinary action for going against the brand image.
It doesn't mean you can't make a statement.
But when you leverage your employer's platform to do so, there are going to be consequences.
Now, if you use your own megaphone, you absolutely deserve protection from being fired!
Build your Twitter/Instagram/Facebook following, and preach as much as you'd like. You built it. It's yours.
That's the reality of being a public figure. You are paid to be part of a brand image.
Tell me where I'm wrong on this. Or where you think we should draw the line. I'm happy to hear other opinions.
Every player standing and holding heart over hand during the anthem is doing the same.
There are no major fights for real progress... there's an enduring status-quo and the battlegrounds are empty and occasionally we entertain ourselves with token crisis or token fights that fizzle out as quickly as they appear - the duration of a tiktok video.
I think by 'softness' the OP was leaning more toward the idea of 'fragile' as opposed to 'weakness'.
As in: "prone to outrage" and/or "reactionary" .
FFS my roommate’s company banned custom emoji in Slack because some committee got trolled by 4chan into thinking :pepe: constitutes hate speech. I’m not making this up...
If you have an issue with your employer, find a new job.
> If you have an issue with your employer, find a new job.
I used to say that too. But there's a catch. Our government sets economic policy. Economic policy governs citizens' ability to find and obtain work, ultimately their ability to prosper. If the economic policy is "anything goes" then we will see and have seen rise of economic machines that suppress freedom of expression in the service of increasing shareholder value. The questions I think we should be asking is "does this make sense?" and, "have the goals outlined in the constitution been effectively achieved?". If government has enacted policy that yields an environment where people are not actually free to express themselves, is this not a failure of government to secure those basic freedoms?
I'd be a lot more comfortable telling people not to bother with oppressive employers if, for example, we had a concept of UBI so that people could feasibly sustain themselves in absence of a private economic machine writing their paycheck.
Here is some reading on this topic: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...
In short, I am aware of the status quo but I think interpretation is ripe for a modern revamp given trends over the last decade.
Amen! Peter Thiel used to talk a lot on this subject. We’ve built a country upon the illusion of freedom. We are getting towards the War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength stage in society.
The scariest part is that the nation who will take the reigns next has no desire for free speech or diversity of opinion. Just as Rome crumbled from within we are doing the exact same.
I implore you all: when you vote this fall, vote them out. Put some fresh faces in offices. (1)Regardless of party. Send a message that the status quo is unacceptable.
Not only that: stand in the way of cancel culture.
Commit to being an anger dampener.
Don't share outrage porn on social media, and flag it when you see it -- from either side.
Do like Monty Python. Whenever somebody you know starts chanting "Burn the witch!", don't outright disagree, and don't try to argue with facts and figures. Instead, ask them how they know she's a witch. Add nuance. Ask them to imagine how they would want to be treated if they were accused of witchcraft. And so on.
Reach out, in-person, to others, and encourage them to do the same.
Talk to people, in-person, with strong political views, and present counter-arguments to help them moderate.
Yes, this carries reputational risk.
Not doing so carries existential risk.
Free speech? Free thought isn't PC any more.
I think it always has been. :)
You are offering the other person a chance to convince you that they are right.
Maybe they even have a good argument! And you'd never hear it if you don't open yourself up to that possibility.
Just as importantly: you can't expect somebody else to be open to changing their mind, if you aren't open to changing yours.
I don't always succeed in this, and sometimes end up chasing rabbits -- did so elsewhere here, in fact. Other than getting in a bit of writing practice, it was wholly unproductive.
> People are so wrapped up in their echo chambers that _anything_ not in line with those "norms" is considered unacceptable.
True, but like Clausewitz said, war is politics continued by alternate means.
It's worth offending people and taking risks to avoid those alternate means.
I didn't see the questions are offensive patrern by keeping my mouth shut :)
This seems to be a strawman argument but even if this is unfair, I still have to wonder: "how do you regulate opinion?"
Opinion is not automatically speech, but it seems that even under the current 1st amendment notions if one expresses this opinion that it is "ok to kill people" then they are running afoul of the 'harm to others' condition.
I have never been to find a true absolutist on the matter of free speech -- I do not think they exist.
Wasn't that the main reason people voted last time? The status quo = the swamp.
We've always had local forms of cancel culture. But we've never had the digital weaponized mob mentality like we do with twitter/facebook/instagram/etc.
Now we have the ability to point to one incident which was recorded forever and can't be removed. Some things really should die out over time. The comments "most" people make should just, fade away after a while only being recalled in memory and allowing people to grow and get better over time.
Instead we have quotes from a 16 year old derailing their efforts to be a better human being as an adult.
We even get a similar kind of force here on HN, when a website gets blasted by being featured here. Website owners talk about being able to see that traffic.
Humans love seeing Karma in action and this seems to be evolution of that.
So not all politicians get cancelled for blackface.
[1]https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/01/politics/northam-blackface-ph...
Heck, we've already forgotten the certain prime minister of a Northern American country who escaped that fate, for similar reasons!
I would imagine it's relatively affordable and easy for someone to scrape social media and store it all, forever.
No one reasonable is going to run for office knowing there's a great chance their dirty laundry will be used to fuel the news cycle. It's not worth the risk; the possible damage to their family; and so on.
This is why so many of today's elected officials are as inspiring as the colour beige. No offense to beige of course ;)
Yes, Trump is an exception. But I said reasonable people ;)
It’s sad that you don’t see the difference between PC culture and opinions themselves. Being literally racist is not the same thing as being « cancelled » for being unjustly called one because of some social media witch hunt.
Also a lot of corporate choices in contexts like this are marketing choices to a certain demographic.
Being literally racist is indeed not an opinion and not allowed (like in our constitution in France since more than 200 years), but this has nothing to do with PC culture (an American thing unfortunately getting traction here too).
Do they get out of hand? Of course.
Are we there now in the US? Compared to things like the French Revolution or the English Civil Wars; oh heck no. Compared to a gossipy Mennonite sewing circle; it's getting there.
Obviously we all want the crazy to go away and to get back to the business of living. How to do that though?
Don't feed the cycle.
Let the falling bobbin roll, do not try to catch the string and pull it out further.
Calm down.
I know that's hard. I know that the 'wrong' people keep on saying 'wrong' things. Easy for you to say 'calm down', Mr. Comfortable, your life wasn't just ruined. They destroy livelihoods and lives with their words. They deserve what they have coming for them, damnit! Justice!
There may be time for that in the future, but for now, we need to not inflame things. Shouting back is a whole lot better than shooting back, of course. But shouting tends to turn the cortex off and turn the brainstem on, so to speak.
If you want to be 'right', that's fine. But if you want to fix things and try to make things better, I would suggest listening more than writing screeds on people's FB walls. We know by now that does not work.
The interesting thing is that all those people in Twitter mobs that she's so upset about are also in an outrage cycle, hooked on Twitter.
The real hidden enemy here isn't political correctness, it's social media. It's the massive social experiment that no one signed up for, and it's driving us all insane.
That said, their effect on society hasn't been limited to raging twitter tirades. Companies, governments, and other institutions seem to be bending the knee to their outrage, which has led to not only our cancel culture, but to things like the CHOP situation which went on for far too long. Leaders are scared of making the mob angry.
Social media is the contemporary tool of spreading information, yes, but you don't have to use it to see everyone else around you lose their mind. Also, there are good things coming from social media too, and literally everyone in it signed up for it.
Sounds like you hold political correctness very dearly, but here's an interesting thought experiment for you. Try to imagine that just maybe, she may be right, and see if you can actually disprove it.
Writer of linked article claims to be a lawyer, but strangely seems unaware that the First Amendment protects speech and the press from the government.
No examples of government restricting free expression were given.
Private companies should not be able to moderate speech and claim to be a platform.
You're either a publisher or your not. If you're a public platform, your users should be protected by public laws.
For rhe most part the current state of affairs has worked so far but i would suggest it hasnt for some and is starting to show its weaknesses in a more polarized environment.
For the downvoters, this isnt some new opinion of mine because of the talking points from trump, ive had this view since the torrent debates of the early 2000s and other similar situations with people like snowden.
If you disagree because with what i have to say, please explain.
Where's the line (aka "Sorites paradox")? And who is making the decision?
You are allowed to moderare harmful illegal content, you are allowed to moderate spam, and other service breaking content. But kicking someone off because you dont like what they say is censorship.
Are you saying it is not censorship somehow?
Note, im perfectly fine with you moderating a private forum, e.g. behind a login wall.
But if you use the term "public" for visibility there is probably something wrong with censoring speech.
And yes, if you want to curate you are a publisher and are liable for the content.
If the laws around what liable means are a problem for the tech world maybe they need cleaning up a bit but i think some form of liability should be placed there anyway.
You dont get to shape modern discourse and then get to get off scotfree when everything goes pearshaped.
Moderation is absolutely censorship, and I should have every right to censor on a physical or digital platform that I own. If people behave in a manner I don't like in my physical business or on my private property, then I should have the right to remove them. If people behave in a way I don't like on my digital asset, I should have the right to remove them. Their use of my asset is predicated on my consent baring any other contractual details. If they don't like it, they are free to set up their own private enterprises with their own rules of conduct. Saying I am somehow liable for the content that remains is not reasonable. I shouldn't be liable for someone talking shit in my physical business, for a friend saying inflammatory things while in my private residence, for inflammatory conduct on a forum, or any other speech that is not my own unless I myself explicitly endorse that speech (with the exception of illegality that I know about). Me booting off person X while leaving person Y doesn't mean I inherently endorse person Y or agree with them.
I think potentially we need a third classification to indemnify private spaces of liability.
I still believe that public spaces should remain open, nuetral and unmoderated.
The world is a scary place, the laws dont line up between countries and weird scary shit will be posted online.
Im ok with this. Im ok with the internet being a place to explore our human psychy in its entirety.
I dont want it to be a nanny stated corporate friendly chopshop for ideas.
That amendment did not envision state level sized companies taking control of public discourse entirely.
Im weary of claiming the constitution needs a fix but at the same time it does have some fixes so its not infallible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
In particular, this either-or positioning was potentially the law prior to 1996 (following court decisions at that time). But legislators were concerned about what I've just heard Berin Szoka call "the Moderator's Dilemma", so they wanted to remove that obligation in order to avoid creating an incentive to never moderate anything.
At the time, it seems that they felt that we could have a wide range of platforms and forums with a wide range of moderation and editorial positions. Or even a wide range of forums within a platform with different moderation and editorial positions, like Reddit and the subreddits. It doesn't seem like that's held up super-duper well in various ways, but it doesn't seem like an unreasonable expectation or aspiration to me.
I would particularly like to push back on the idea that it's somehow obvious that everyone should once again experience this Moderator's Dilemma and have to choose between absolute neutrality and content liability, or that recreating this dilemma in its pre-1996 form is a good way to deal with editorial bias or with the impact of activist pressures on popular platforms.
I dont think its obvious.
Reverting back to the Moderators dilemma would put the onus of liability back on police and the law where these things csn be dealt with properly and fairly (so far as the legal system is our definition of fair.)
Since we can both submit to the fact that neither the moderators dilemma nor what we have today is very ideal, what would you suggest?
Fwiw my contention is likely that I simply think that falling back on the extreme that is the dilemma is the only option that actually has some consistency to it. I do not however ignore the fact that it comes at great cost. I guess im just willing to bear those costs more than the next guy.
Further disclosure, i think information wants to be free and that anything that prevents me from sharing 1's and 0's (whatever they form) along the pipes i pay for is problematic.
That's a great question, and I'm not sure I have a good answer to it.
> Fwiw my contention is likely that I simply think that falling back on the extreme that is the dilemma is the only option that actually has some consistency to it. I do not however ignore the fact that it comes at great cost. I guess im just willing to bear those costs more than the next guy.
I can appreciate that too.
The issue seems to be generally framed as "FULL CENSORSHIP" or "FULL ANARCHY NO MODERATION", with little middle ground considered.
The US already have a sort of line as to what it as a culture generally accepts as far as content goes, usually on sexuality (largely due to children). Here, the issue is then where to draw that line.
The key here, as far as I'm concerned is to allow for effective moderation of a community such that it maintains it's identity, but prevent the silencing of ideas and concepts. As such, a whitelist of moderation criteria for platforms may serve as a viable alternative. Said (non-exhaustive) whitelist for things that can be moderated upon would include: - Spam - Tone - Illegal content - Topic
Selective moderation would remain an issue, of course, but that's a fundamental issue as long as human moderators exist. Of course you also run into the issue of deliberate mismoderation, but then you can use the bat of loss of section 230 protection to hammer them then.
> The issue seems to be generally framed as "FULL CENSORSHIP" or "FULL ANARCHY NO MODERATION", with little middle ground considered.
With just a few exceptions, most platforms already seem to be somewhere in between now -- but it seems like the most popular ones also coming under more pressure to change some of the substance of their moderation.
> Topic
From what I've seen recently, I think this would be one of the most contentious to get people to agree on (including in particular the interpretation of what is "on topic" or "off topic"). I just recently read a thread about how hard this is where people were talking about the tendency of politics to creep into forums about hobbies, which some of the people involved wanted to find a way to avoid.
But that posed a lot of thorny questions... like
* what if some people feel like a certain political or social topic is obviously very relevant to a certain hobby or interest, but other people don't?
* what if some people want to make a critique of the hobby or interest or its associated community, but other people think the critique is mistaken or off topic, or don't agree with its premises?
* what if some people want to coordinate a defense of the hobby or interest or its associated community against a political or cultural attack? (e.g. we should fight this legislation that would be bad for our community, or we should coordinate a response to so-and-so who is badmouthing our community)
* what if some people feel that something is so important that it's inherently always on topic everywhere?
* what if some people mention their other views or affiliations in passing in a way that feels genuinely innocent to them, but that upsets other people? (e.g. they use an avatar that expresses some kind of political, social, or religious identity or some negative implication toward other people's identity; or they just tell a story that's like "while I was doing off-topic thing X, I had this on-topic thought Y")
* what if people within the community get in a fight that somehow seems to tie in to a larger social conflict?
* what if people want to have a meta-conversation about the best way of handling these issues?
* what if people feel frustrated because some off-topic posts (that are less controversial in some way) get treated more gently or indulgently than others (that are more controversial)? (e.g. Bob doesn't get in trouble for writing a 100-word anecdote on the cat fancy forum about his cooking, but Sarah does get in trouble for her 100-word anecdote about her political organizing)
* what if people disagree about whether historical or philosophical aspects of a primarily practical subject matter are on-topic or not? (what if some people feel that some of the historical or philosophical commentary is "really" thinly-disguised political commentary, because it implies that probably someone was awesome or terrible in some way connection with the practical topic?)
I don't mean to say that all ways of handling these issues are just as good as all other ways, but more that it's not always clear whether there's a meaningful way to define topicality -- or at least not that people would be able to agree on them easily.
I once had a personal experience of this that doesn't really relate to current events. :-) When Dmitry Sklyarov (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.) was arrested in August 2001, I ran an e-mail discussion list for people who were trying to free him. So far so good -- it seems like all of the subscribers were there because they wanted to free Dmitry and just wanted to talk about the best way of doing that.
But just a few weeks later, the September 11 attack happened, and immediately people on the mailing list wanted to talk about it, because it was such an intense and raw thing, and almost immediately they got into a fight about their views about the U.S. government! I was very anguished to have to be in the position of trying to force them to stop in order to get back to talking about the core concern of freeing Dmitry.
But of course the attacks were also on everyone's mind, and in principle they did have a lot of practical consequences for our goals, e.g. because it would be drastically harder to get press coverage, because relations between the U.S. and Russia might change as a result of the war in Afghanistan, because Dmitry himself might be alarmed to suddenly be surrounded by so much upheaval, because people's availability to protest about the DMCA might be reduced by their desire to deal with consequences of the attacks, because officials like Robert Mueller whom we were trying to influence might become preoccupied with a whole new set of concerns, etc.
I'm really not sure exactly what would have been either most fair or most useful in terms of what aspects of the September 11 attacks I should or should not have let people talk about on the mailing list.
Also right now there is a thread about LAEDA and EARN IT on another mailing list that I'm on, where people started talking about the legality of buying body armor, and about gun politics, and some other stuff. The moderator got annoyed and tried to get people to stop, but on the other hand these analogies aren't entirely irrelevant -- for example, some of the politicians who are going to vote on legislation about encryption might be influenced by lobbying and advocacy that tries to draw analogies or distinctions between encryption and body armor. Even though the list members may not be very good at discussing it constructively, it's not like there is no relevance at all of U.S. gun politics for U.S. encryption policy.
I was also in a thread just a few weeks ago here on Hacker News about "what topics are within the purview of public health?", and we found it very hard to agree about that. If Hacker News were about public health, we might have a huge ballooning disagreement about that scope question -- breaking out into public view pretty regularly.
The easiest one to handle first would be the topic-agnostic platforms. Those also tend to be the biggest ones. Facebook and Reddit as the bigger examples. For these, the answer is simple: Let users create whatever they want and apply rules however they want, but allow the rise of new communities. Perhaps a community forking system can serve as a countermeasure to network effects.
However, the key thing here for these platforms is that the platforms themselves are barred from impeding speech. The individual subcommunities and their respective leaders are not. As such, there's a clear line between the platform and it's community and subsequently the roles and responsibilities of each. After all, the key difference here is that between publisher and platform.
This type of innovation is exactly why i dont buy into the idea that some reasonable middle ground can be had by industry self moderation and that that is the best we can do.
Its not. There is a better way to do this, weve been lazy. Force facebook to allow free speech, they will figure out a new way to keep people happy. Forking communities along issues is a great idea, not without bubbling problems but it solves the "i dont want loke seeing this" problem.
Its still could be construed as censorship but only if its not optoutable for the consumers.
Laws are almost as arbitrary as moderation guidelines. And while they are democratically legitimised in principle, they are rather static by nature and absurdly unchanging due to current political dysfunction. The chaotic system of the current "court of public opinion" probably leads to an outcome that is far closer to the actual desires of a plurality of people.
The law also tend to divide content into sharp legal/illegal categories, whereas the more chaotic practice of differing moderation policies allows for a gray area. And that area is where some meaningful discourse could possibly happen.
Logically, moderational discretion happens only within the space of legal content. It is therefore, indeed, smaller than the maximum allowed by law.
But that is no different from any other group we participate in offline. At work, Thanksgiving with the family, or in some random store, we do not insist on being allowed to use the full spectrum of what's legal. If someone starts screaming obscenities in the theatre row behind you, they'll hopefully be escorted out.
Social media is what i would consider a public space.
Your analogy would be analogous to police locking up lawful protestors.
This is where the true disagreement is. We can both believe in the constitution, in the first amendment, and in section 230, but I don't believe social media is a public space, because the person paying for the server is not the government. To me, these are very explicitly private organizations running web applications. For it to be a public space, it would necessarily not be limited in existence to the ability of a private organization to keep it running profitably.
Madison Square Garden is a private space, because someone owns it; it cost money to build, it costs money to maintain, there are finite seats, etc. The organization paying for the thing to exist has authority over the thing. If you want a public space, you can either create one explicitly, or petition the government to create a social media platform bound by the first amendment. It isn't Reddit or Twitter. Those are someone else's property.
Again, I have the opposite interpretation. If the government gives a private organization property rights, the government is the holder of power over society. The organization has authority over what the government gave it the rights to, and the government gave them the right (with section 230) to moderate their property in the way they are now.
I think we're in agreement.
Laws are not immutable which is what I'm getting at. We're past the "public" vs "private" debate, we're now debating whether to change laws and adjust which rights private organizations have - whether to adjust or repeal 230 entirely.
This was a point I tried to make when censoring extreme views / hate speech first started being a thing. While I’m vehemently opposed to said content, it’s a slippery slope once you start censoring. Everyone has their own opinions on what’s “bad content”, and while there is a lot of overlap in society, it doesn’t stay constant over time. I wish instead we’d form together as an industry and appropriately tag so you can then filter the web to your preferences. Sadly doubtful that approach would work in reality though.
You can't however, walk into say a Burger King and not expect to get thrown out if you start making extreme statements.
The problem you've identified is social media platforms having power over public discourse. However I disagree that forcing website owners to host whatever their users want to say is a way to solve that. The real solution in my mind is for people to turn away from social media.
In other words, social media itself is the problem. Not the fact that social media inhibits free speech.
Publishers are liable. Platforms are not.
I simply want social media to get off the fence.
Because right now they sre misleading the public, telling them they can post whatever they want, and then flipping on them when it suits.
Nobody will turn away from social media until this is clear and understood.
If you defined facebook as a publisher, you will see a replacement valuing openness rise up within days.
Which would win is hard to say. Maybe people like being sheep. But at least this way they know what they are.
Everyone is liable for first party content, but not for third party content.
If I help an accident victim once, am I responsible for helping every accident victim? Why?
There is more discussion about the moderators dillema above.
Facebook doesn't claim to be neither "platform" or "neutral ground" or "publisher", anywhere. There is no law making that distinction. It's entirely in your head!
It's a website. You may post. They may delete. You may leave.
If just one of their billions of users writes something bad about billionaire <y>, who then sues in a UK court and gets a Gawker-like verdict, Facebook suddenly owes them a a few million of whatever the local currency is.
Repeat for every single mistake of their team of moderators, and they are done for within 20 minutes. And so are Youtube, HN, and Google.
No moderation would lead to 4chan. Or, really, worse. Because even the chans all moderate to some degree, as far as I can tell. This would also be the end of any platform as we know it, obviously.
Therefore, you either don't even understand what you are arguing for. Or you somehow enjoy the idea of every single online community degrading to a constant stream of snuff videos and swastikas.
Basically any site with user generated content exists because the sites have been able to moderate their own content without having to assume liability for the content they do allow.
Several places have tried the full unmoderated thing and it seems to always devolve into shit as 'trolls' and edgy humor degrades into plain bigotry as People who don't like the edgy/extreme content leave and the remaining group becomes more and more extreme.
There's no way real to do forums, social media, or sites like medium or blogs without companies being able to host content without being liable for the content they're hosting that doesn't break the law.
Maybe they shouldnt be allowed to operate?
Maybe this is why we cant have nice things.
Maybe, we need to come up with some other platform type where moderation is by the people for the people.
Regarding what we have now, its a dictatorship.
You're not going to see me there, though. Because "by the people" is always a complete shitshow.
Ironically you'd likely need a more dictatorial platform to avoid censorship. You'd need a strong dictator to resist the censorship demands of the people. What we have now is a tyranny of the majority.
That doesn't seem true or tragic at all. By your own admission it works it just fine in the literal sense, you just don't seem to like that it would cut into platforms you want to indulge in.
What becomes undesirable is things like front page recommendation systems and popularity lists that might now include inflammatory bubbles. I say boohoo, Medium won't get to actively leverage its sea of garbage authors as easily and reddit will have to let the sub-reddits market themselves, nothing of societal value is lost here. Discord style insulated communities become the norm and things move on. And the only casualties end up being shills for left leaning ideology like twitter and tech sector pets like forums that have little relevance to the mainstream.
The only reason the tech sector cares about handling this issue with finesse is because no one wants to admit that the industry actually does pander to one side of America's polarized system. That's a feature we as a community built for ourselves It's not a mystery why tech products and beliefs have ended up so homogenous, the industry increasingly homogenized as it congregated in a heavily political region. But if anyone calls that it they get labeled a bigot because that's SF and California culture in a nutshell and most professionals don't have time to deal with that shit so the dissenters just toss the line and collect they're pay.
It's no less evident when you notice that enthusiasm and support for whistle blowers only gained broad support in tech once they started targeting the American right. We as an industry are the problem but we've already allowed ourselves to become so polarized that no one is pushing back anymore because at best you get fired but manage to still find work. Most heavy criticism, such as whenever Google gets called out again and again, comes from outside the industry at this point. We built the rails while pretending to be cyber anarchists with no affiliations and then took our chance to ban the trains we didn't like because society couldn't see the implications of what was happening yet, we're the techno-authoritarians and we're no longer the ones qualified to talk about solutions for precisely that reason.
Some will choose to be publishers, increase moderation, and also increase censorship and bias. If we introduce liability, they will be forced to remove even more content. Platforms would gain even more control over the content that users see.
Some will choose not to be publishers. We all know how bad the internet can get without moderation. I don't see how this would even be feasible with spam and illegal files/content.
Neither of these distinctions address the true source of power and influence for these platforms: the visibility algorithm. This is what has the power to decide elections. A platform might agree to never delete a Biden or Trump tweet/post, but what really matters is the number of users that actually see it, the relative placement in the almighty feed. And that is 100% up to the platform.
I see this response on HN almost daily now. For the millionth time: PC culture goes beyond the constitution's definition of freedom of speech. This is a cultural discussion. This is a discussion about how much power we have given to private companies (like social media giants and media production companies) over our lives.
I don't care that the first amendment protects me from government censorship, if my livelihood, the reputation of me and my family, and my future job prospects, can all be destroyed in an instant because of some outrage mob on Twitter. Why are people apologising because a few people on Twitter told them to? Why are people being fired because they made a tweet that wasn't supportive enough (or supportive in the right way) of the "correct" social causes?
Call it freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom to have an opinion. Whatever. But don't try and avoid the problem by pointing to the constitution as if that suddenly makes this all okay because "at least it's not the government".
They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want private property, but they don't want businesses to decide how they do business?
I might not like how, say, Reddit moderates their platform, and openly express it, and even call for action on building better|decentralized|whatever platforms, yet I might also be ultimately in favor of protecting Reddit's legal right to do with their platform as they please. It's a nuance, not a contradiction.
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
Note the "receive and impart"; it implies that people who want to receive speech of a particular worldview are entitled access to it even if a well-meaning majority think that it's bad for them.
[EDIT] Also note "freedom to hold opinions without interference" which stands in stark opposition to the commonly repeated bad idea that "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences".
And sharing an opinion is distinct from holding an opinion, and isn't protected.
>any media
Even then however, the UDHR doesn't imply that a particular newspaper must publish your view, only that you have the right to publish a newspaper.
Similarly, twitter need not publish you. You're free to create a twitter competitor though (and people have)!
Her central thesis is not that the first amendment should prevent the issues she is addressing from happening. The debate around what the first amendment does and does not protect is usually a diversion people use to avoid discussing the power that private companies have over our ability to express ourselves, and over which information is widely distributed and which is not.
It's not only the people on the other side of her argument who use the debate around what the first amendment does and does not protect as a diversion.
I honestly rarely have seen this happen. There's almost always some other context to the story or the people who feel that they've been unjustly fired actually vastly underestimate what the impact of their statement was.
The reality is when you post on twitter with your name attached to it you are making a public statement that can reach thousands of people. Doesn't matter if you tweet from your toilet, you're reaching an audience that is larger than most people 20 years ago could ever dream of.
If that actually for some reason causes a PR shitstorm for your employer, you've damaged their business. This has always let to people being fired, this is not new.
Do you know how many local politicians or celebrities or public figures have lost their careers over a single sentence? A ton, there's nothing novel about it. Twitter gives you the opportunity as a complete nobody to reach hundreds of thousands within minutes. It's time people recognise they're not nobody's any more when that happens.
I honestly rarely have seen this happen.
Well, I honestly have never seen actual witch burning happen. Yet I know it's wrong and it should not happen.
> If that actually for some reason causes a PR shitstorm for your employer, you've damaged their business.
Really? You know, I have huge doubts about this. What happens is that people are afraid of making an implicit statement by not taking an action, not of their business to be damaged. Huge companies are still made of people, and those people are afraid of being seen as making a statement that might damage them personally. But the actual risk of a business impact is almost zero.
Now that I think of it, kudos to Zuckerberg for having the balls to put a stop to this and calling out the bluff.
If your rebuttal to someone is to ignore widely-known idiom to focus on a particular detail that does nothing to undermine their actual point, please reconsider whether that was really a contribution worth making.
Free speech is an ethic, an ideology, a deep part of our culture as Americans and essential to western enlightenment. It's a human right.
You don't have to agree with someone to think it's wrong to censor them. Corollary, you don't take away someone's human rights because they have an opinion you think is reprehensible.
History has a pretty damning record of what happens when societies allow silencing of undesirable voices.
One could say that social media has definitely accelerated this nonsense to new heights, taking everyone who disagrees with the PC-crowd underground.
The fault really lies in the companies, politicians, and media outlets who have given credence to what "the mob" on social media has to say.
Example: a comedian/author makes a tweet that is mildly offensive to some small minority, but they didn't mean anything by it, or it was just a joke. Somebody sees the potential to kick up a stink, and retweet it with "can't believe they just said this. apologise now". It gets maybe 10% the "likes" of the original tweet. A media outlet sees this tweet (some intern is browsing "latest tweets") and writes an article saying "Internet in an outrage: is x a racist?". Author immediately issues an apology, resigns from their job, and goes into hiding, their career destroyed forever.
What could have been done differently? The company they worked for could've stood by them. The author/whoever could have just ignored it. The media outlet could have had higher quality standards of publication. And almost nobody would even know what was said in the first place! Our society thrives on conflict, and any small hint of a conflict is blown up beyond all proportion.
Let me tell you about Usenet, especially pre-Eternal September …
Similarly, "why blame social media when we haven't shed the desire to witch hunt?"
The red scare (and other witch hunts throughout history) worked pretty well without social media.
Hard to compare and say that this time is worse. The other witch hunts though history seem pretty bad too.
> But despite his killer getting fired and arrested, the protests became more violent, more destructive, and more divisive.
A lot of rioting and violence came in the early days, even before the arrest and murder charges. The vast majority of protests were peaceful. And this seems to insinuate that the protesters and rioters were the same people, which I don't think is a widely held belief.
And maybe the protests are about more than just the murder of George Floyd... If this was an isolated incident, maybe expectations of a quick return to civility would make sense, but it's almost like people (including white people) are tired of this happening.
> If you aren't posting #BLM, you’re racist. If you ARE posting #BLM but you say it in the wrong way, you're racist. If you're white and you're silent, that's violence. If you're white and you're speaking up, you're talking over black voices and only they should be heard.
Maybe this is several folks trying to take the culture wheel. The debate is messy right now and that's OK. It's a messy topic and people are tossing out their ideas.
If you want to post #BLM great. If you don't that's fine too. I'm glad we're having a conversation about it even if it's just to simply say we're all confused.
Props to the author for sharing her views. If folks take issue with what you've said, don't sweat it. And if you're looking for other folks on direction on how to "do it right", you're looking in the wrong direction.
Anecdata: in a company all-hands 2 weeks ago, an employee asked the CEO why the company hadn't yet made a public statement about BLM. The CEO looked visibly agitated, almost fearful, and stumbled through some response that equated to "will we do that by the end of the week".
Whether or not the pressure actually exists, people are scared of what will happen if they don't conform. People have been fired over tweets, roasted in the media over not speaking out "when they should", and for things they said 10 years ago. Nobody wants to be on the front page of buzzfeed for being outed "as a racist". There is a collective societal fear that is driving us faster and faster off the PC cliff.
I sometimes worry about anything I may have said years ago or anything I say now that could be construed as offensive by ... almost anyone at this point.
Early on (day after the riots started) I posted an article about a POC business owner’s business being destroyed due to protests (rioting) - I had someone call me gross and “where was your outrage when a Black man was killed by a cop? I didn’t see you post anything then”
After that I started having to make a risk analysis before doing anything.
At this point you HAVE to say something about everything and cover your bases, or you’re complicit; oddly enough you can say something AGAINST the movement, be called out, and apologize, and that’s acceptable. But trying to stay out of the shitstorm? No, you’re complicit. Say something positive, or say something negative and then retract it. But say something...
You're just realising that, though a much more extreme case than usual.
But things have reached epic levels of mob mentality. I could post something about someone raping someone else, completely bogus, and it would spread like wildfire, with people making memes of it who have zero knowledge or context.
I hear this complaint a lot and don't quite understand it. I don't think the goal in life is to not offend anyone. Just live your life as best you can and if others get offended that's OK. Learn from it if you want to, if it's nonsense ignore it. If someone injures you, sue them. If someone threatens you call the police. If someone stops being your friend get new friends. People are free to get as offended as they want and you're free to not let it bother you.
When there are laws passed that create penalties for offending someone then we have a problem. Until then the outrage about the outrage is just like the outrage itself.
It's the exact opposite of the norms that the United States had been built on for it's history. And there's little to no legal recourse for victims of the mob who have been fired from their jobs and labeled as a racist online.
Unfortunately, something within us seems to want to blame, shame, control and punish other people.
Sounds rude. Does not sound like a huge tragedy? You wanted to post some random news article and get some +1s, and then somebody had to ruin your day? Now you "have to make a risk analysis"? Is that a complicated way of saying you have to think before you post?
Just in case you're of the opinion that the PC left is all-powerful, maybe check out how people were treated who dared to say that the untouchable Kobe Bryant should just maybe be remembered for some really nasty sexual assault -- they got pilloried left right and center how DARE you criticize Kobe! Or, observe how the Biden scandal has been handled. Plenty of non-PC stuff getting over, every day.
If I was the CEO I'd say that I personally support and strive for equality and mutual respect. And as CEO I'm focused on changing the world though [our product].
I'm sure that wouldn't satisfy some folks but that's OK. There's only a Catch 22 if you're trying to make everyone happy. If you're OK with some folks bring upset then there shouldn't be fear in questions like the ones you mentioned.
Businesses making statements about BLM is frankly the height of kneeling-Jamie-Dimon hypocrisy, if their business has no view or angle on it. Amazon immediately slapped up "Amazon believes Black Lives Matter" because ... it cost them $0.0 to do so. Even money contributions to [pick the charity you saw on TV last night] aren't much if 99.99% of your effort concerns ... your business.
Here's a tip for CEOs: it's really simple. Either you (a) take a political stand for personal/culture reasons that are very clear to you, or (b) resist the urge to say anything at all. If it makes people unhappy, then listen to their complaints and suggestions. If they make sense, act on them! Or don't. Here's what you shouldn't do: cower and worry that some employees might be upset. Hell, maybe they'll quit: people are angry as fuck. But, yeah, they probably won't, if your business isn't a total shitshow otherwise.
Also I have to point out: being "roasted in the media" as you say implies that people are paying attention. Most startups are simply not newsworthy.
I mean WTF am I missing here? Do people really think Twitter is a nice place to be? Did people forget GamerGate? Somehow we survived that.
The far-left radical progressive movement is different and has greater power and momentum than anything we've seen in the past two decades. Aside from destroying the reputations of a few truly bad people, we've seen them attack rational speech, deny biological realities, ingrain the perception of racism into innocuous encounters, unironically apply blatantly racist viewpoints towards white people, denounce any form of logic or reasoning as racism or sexism, and so much more.
Your tepid response tells me you're not aware of the scope of this movement. It co-opts the good will of normal people and redirects normal liberal and progressive tendencies into something truly destructive.
If you're tuned in to what's happening in universities, companies, workplaces; the pattern is hard to miss.
The movement works on forced compliance, humiliation, denouncing logic, attacking perceived racism with actual racism.
None of this is right and so many people and companies are going along with it. Most people are taking these movements at face value and want to do the right thing. Companies are pre-emptively capitulating to future demands because it's good for business.
If you express nuance you're instantly and overwhelming branded as a racist or sexist. There is no room for thought or reason in this movement unless it points to a narrative that white men are evil oppressors.
This isn't really about one man being murdered by a cop anymore, or even about racism in general. It's about a cult of victimization leveraging offense and outrage to oppress anyone who gains a modicum of public success in society, and the justifications by which they're acting defy the bounds of reality.
The movement represents a greater risk than racism or sexism, it destroys the individual, eliminates free speech and thought, and coerces normal, kind people to say and do things which go against our most basic intuitions.
The irony of this juxtaposition - bemoaning lack of nuance, then immediately following it with an utterly un-nuanced broad-brush statement - is quite impressive.
This is a movement that operates on fear, paranoia, and coercion under the guise of equality. Without fear and coercion, it has no legs whatsoever.
A bunch of people have died under police brutality.
And the list of grievances goes on..
People are sensitive to different things. But there is some irony in all the outrage about outrage culture.
I'd be more upset at the folks in power that make the decisions than the folks on Twitter pressuring them.
How are ideologies like systemic racism which inform its followers to view all encounters in the lens of racism, and that we should all act in accordance to the idea that racism is inherent in all of us, going to bring about net good change in society?
These ideas are absolutely backwards and will drive us backwards from the hard-fought progress of the past.
Racism is an issue, but it's improved drastically from the past. Entrenching the idea of racism into all encounters can only deepen the issue of racism. It erodes the idea of the individual, the American, and places racial identity foremost as to the quality of your personhood. If you only read some of what's been written as the foundational teachings of this movement - the origins of systemic racism, writings like White Fragility, the bare insanity is there to see - it has zero contact with reality. And these ideas are coming to life by humanities students and activists.
The value of the Evergreen story is that the pattern has emerged across the country and spread like a virus into higher education and soon into private corporations. Evergreen is a dying college now. No parent wants to send their child to an institution which places merit far below sexual or racial identity. Yet the administrators cling on, doubling-down on decisions representing an inverted ideology. The same thing, if the ideas of this movement are taken to their logical conclusion, will happen all across America in its knowledge centers.
Huh. So let me get this straight, the relentless war on drugs started by Nixon 50 years ago that has incarcerated the most people on the planet, is now being eclipsed by cancel culture in terms of overall destruction of human lives?
The massive wealth transfer via securitization of loans, junk bonds, sovereign debt, CDOs, and QE2, resulting in the worst economic inequality arguably in history, doesn't make you lose sleep, but an economically insignificant amount of cancel-culture firings is going to REALLY fuck things up?
It's possible to make your substantive points without that, so please do. I realize that stresses, emotions, and important causes are at top of mind right now.
I'm confused by the phrase "ideological flamewar" though and would like to clarify: flamewar is the issue right? E.g., flamewar over GPL would be equally undesirable. Tone and constructiveness, etc.
Asking because the topic at hand is inescapably ideological, based as it is on an opinion piece and not "news", and the comments are equally so. (Enragingly so, which is what gets me into a tizzy).
Yes, it's a tricky line to draw because there is inevitably some overlap between politics/ideology and the stories that are on topic here. I've written about this quite a bit: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902396. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869, which shows how far back political discussion goes on HN, as well as the argument about politics on HN.
If you take a look at those explanations and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd like to know what it is.
I’ve noticed how this “You take away my free speech when I get backlash when I speak some idea that is now interpreted as X-phobic or harmful” argument seems to pop up among during movements that cause painful resistant power shifts.
also this....
“Personally, I think adding trans performers would breathe life into Drag Race. But I’m a viewer, and I don’t get to decide that. The point is that RuPaul’s Drag Race is RuPaul’s show, and we don’t get to scream and cry and throw tantrums until he changes his own show.“
.... but what about free speech you were just arguing for?
why don’t people get to scream and cry?
This appears to be conservative grief masked as liberally tolerant protection of free speech.
[citation needed]. Social media platforms are not 1st-amendment platforms.
What's hilarious about the author of this article is her admiration for South Park. And yet, they did the satire of anyone with the ashen-faced fear of being "kicked off Twitter" as a fate worse than death.
I fail to see how the PC left is changing any of the things that really run society. If you don't like the noise, maybe take a break from Twitter? Because being kicked off twitter is NOT a threat to free speech.
I know that legally free speech protects you from the government and not everyone else, but personally I agree that 'free speech' is more than just the legal definition.
why don’t people get to scream and cry?"
The article says - we don’t get to scream and cry and "throw tantrums until he changes his own show."
The point is you can cry and Express your free speech, but not not expect someone to change their creation.
If you think your point is valid, create something of your own. Why should a creator cater to every person who takes offense.
I am also free to respond however I'd like, and in some cases there may be many more people that share my opinion rather than yours!
I also think there is genuine psychological harm being done by mobs online. This is not so hard to see in other contexts, where it would be called bullying or harassment. Consider the cases of high school students publicly informing on their peers and denouncing them. Unfortunately, for political reasons people are trivializing that right now and acting like it's no problem at all, just everyday communication and no one has a right to expect different. That's ironic since I assume most of these people would say that they believe in a politics of empathy.
I also think that, contrary to a common objection, there is a genuine free speech issue with denying access to the social media platforms which have grown so large as to become de facto standards for public communication. It's popular right now to say "it's not a free speech issue because they're not the government". But Facebook, Twitter, etc. are the public squares of our time. Private institutions that become that large and monopolistic begin to encroach on the public sector in importance, and it's too legalistic an argument to say that doesn't count because e.g. the first amendment only applies to the government.
Those are three areas that go beyond just expressing disagreement with someone, and have elements of actual harm in them. Also, all three are escalating and the logical next steps are worse.
Personally, I think this is a phase because people will quickly learn that they're just alienating people further. Real, open discussion promotes better understanding for everyone.
There is never a case where the actions of an individual warrant an angry mob.
Never.
That is the test of morality. Not how well you treat your friends, but how you behave towards the most vile and despicable people in existence. Unquestionable evil.
Stalin. Hitler. Mao. The worst and most horrible criminals.
All of them deserve a fair trial for their crimes, and equal treatment under the law.
Not because we are being "soft" on them.
But because we are better than them.
GP was using "angry mob" in the twitter sense. An angry twitter "mob" isn't going to murder you. That doesn't mean people never deserve to be deplatformed or fired. And those things (rightfully) don't require a trial.
Sometimes they do. SWATting is a thing, and the targets of Twitter mobs are ripe targets for domestic terrorists looking to make a statement.
But that's besides the point.
There are many flavors of violence other than outright murder.
> That doesn't mean people never deserve to be deplatformed or fired.
"Deplatformed" is one of those words that Orwell wrote about in "Politics and the English Language" -- a euphemism that hides the real meaning.
The word you are looking for is "silenced".
Being silenced or fired is violence.
You are being deprived of the human right to free speech, or of the means to feed yourself and provide for your loved ones, by an anonymous mob.
The only way to avoid the cycle of escalating violence is to not get on it in the first place.
Because if not, the US is on the fast track to turn into Venezuela, or Maoist China, or late-1930s Germany, and none of those is a place you want to live, even if you support the regime.
I'm speaking up more about this because I'm seeing smoke, and would rather avoid a full-on fire.
Except that it's not. Someone who has been deplatformed can still say whatever they want, it's just that fewer people choose to listen to them or to help amplify them. Much as your right to move your fist ends at my face, your right to say whatever you want ends at my megaphone. I'm under no obligation to amplify your message.
You are still welcome to say whatever the hell you want. I'm just not obligated to help.
Imagine an Old West town. There's a street running through the middle, and right in the middle, a public square, with a saloon where everybody goes to drink and gossip, and a soapbox right out front.
Anybody can stand on the soapbox, and speak to the people in the square. Of course, the folks in the saloon are going to hear them.
Now, one day, the saloon owner gets fed up. She's tired of all those abolitionists arguing that we have a moral duty to end slavery. And she's the wealthiest person in the town -- most of the profits from the local mine end up being spent at her saloon.
So, one day, she buys up the town square, and tells the townspeople that they can only use the soapbox if you say things that she support. And she's got money, so the local police will enforce those laws.
The square is where people gather. Regardless of ownership, it is not just a public spaces, but the public space where discourse, is held and it is in the public interest to ensure that, in that space, the human right to free speech is not trampled by a politically motivated oligarch.
> I'm under no obligation to amplify your message.
You, personally, are not.
But Twitter, Facebook, and Google are large enough where they dominate everything else, and regulating them to prevent human rights abuses is in the public interest. Same reason we want to impose environmental regulations on oil companies.
Honestly, I doubt I'll manage to convince you with this. But I should hope that you would not want to live in a world where what you can say is regulated by the richest person in the town.
The actual analogy would be that the most popular saloon owner bans white supremacists, and they get pissy because the white supremacy saloon isn't popular enough to stay open, so the only place they can go is the public park, but no one hangs out there because there are only white supremacists there.
And man, that sounds like a great situation!
Edit: And I'll once again stress that these differences matter. They're profoundly important. You not being able to say a particular thing on a particular website is not an existential threat to free speech. The government being able to decree that certain entities are not entitled to their own 1A protection is. And that's exactly what you're requesting: that things you define as "platforms" lose first amendment protections. That's more of a threat to free speech than anything a single platform can do.
Yeah, I can't see how that could possibly go wrong.
Like I said, I'm seeing smoke.
If you actually want to fight racism, you don't do that with violence. You do it like Daryl Davis[1]: through kindness, listening, and making them think.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/daryl_davis_what_do_you_do_when_so...
Neo-Nazis aren't dumb. They would do all of these things anyway. We know, because they did. Neo Nazis use the open, public squares as recruiting tools. They don't yell "Gas the Jews". They say much more "acceptable" things. "Wow, it's truly painful how high the interest rates are. You know why that is, don't you?" And you, intrigued, say "No, no I don't." And they give you an invitation to a private, special event where they start talking about the banks and the man and how he holds us down. And you agree. And then by the end, it's less the banks, and more the jews who control the banks, and also the immigrants who steal our jobs. And in fact, the jews encourage the immigrants to come because they can better control the immigrants than we can. You should be afraid of the immigrants and the jews who control the banks.
And a lot of people find that unsettling and leave. But a few people find it unsettling and believable. And those people, those are new recruits who now get more and more pulled into the extremism.
(In the real world, by the way, this is going to a subreddit like the now banned /r/ConsumeProduct, seeing a discord link in the sidebar which goes to a literal fascist recruitment chatroom, and eventually graduating from the recruitment chat to like actively fascist places).
They'd take advantage of the disapproval people had anyway. They sell it as a redpill truth that the people keeping you down don't want you to know, the proof is that most people will disagree with them or look at you aghast when you claim these things (victimhood, check!). It feeds on the same stuff as conspiracy theories, at first.
They keep the really extreme stuff hidden anyway (underground, check!. Ideologically isolated, check!). And use complex recruiting paths to slowly pull people in (independent comms infra, check!) and recruit them (big group, check!).
The only thing that groups choosing to kick them out does is that it makes it much, much more difficult for them to recruit, because they can't siphon people off out of the prior recruiting channels. You can't slowly radicalize someone when the chat rooms where you radicalize people are banned. You can't siphon people out of existing communities when they ban you. It's much, much easier to radicalize someone slowly over time (boiling the frog) than to try and confront them with the whole "Gas the Jews" schtick from the get-go.
So if making it more difficult for neo nazis to recruit is really what concerns you, you have weird priorities. Now if you didn't know that, then fine, congrats. You're one of today's lucky 10,000 who learned more about how neo nazi radicalization pipelines work.
And lest you think I'm making this up, this is exactly the kind of thing that self described Neo-Nazis consider to be how they ended up becoming "red-pilled"[0]. Very, very few of them go "oh, how unjustly those poor Neo-Nazis are treated, I must investigate". It starts with "edgy" things and people and slowly escalates.
But let's also remember how we got here. You were first worried about an angry mob, who might cause someone to lose their job. Now you're defending neo-nazis right to openly debate the "jewish question".
Does that mean that it's acceptable for a Neo-Nazi to call for death of a Jew, since that's free speech, but if the Jew turns around and suggests that, perhaps, the Neo-Nazi who just called for extermination should be fired from his job, that we should be upset with the Jew, because being fired is "violence", but being exterminated...isn't? I'm having trouble understanding the logic here.
[0]: https://www.splcenter.org/20180419/mcinnes-molyneux-and-4cha...
sometimes repercussions greater than disagreement is warranted, and psychic injury to usher in real, positive change is a small price to pay, smaller than during most prior evolutions.
but let's spell out clearly that the complainants are largely folks who want to assert power as privilege on minority groups and are meeting rightful resistance. it's true that sometimes the resistance goes too far, which is unfortunate, but that's a non-sequitur borne of an imbalance of perception, entitlement, and extra-sensitivity.
that's the nexus of the clash, and a key part of why it just won't be civil and orderly. this is the internet era's version of a power struggle. feet are gonna get mashed and we're not gonna like it.
you're missing some of the nuance, the asymmetry of cause and action, though. there is already historic, perpetual violence, acting to subjugate and disenfranchise, and it's quite understandable and reasonable to resist that subjugation.
the resisters weren't initiating this thread of violence but rather had it thrust upon them. the initiators activate the risk of injury on the rebound, not the resisters. no initial violence, no rebound injury risk.
asserting dominance is risky business, no two ways about it.
It's my fellow human who wants me to lose my livelihood because I disagree.
People think "calling HR" is some kind of loaded weapon, but the fact is there are harrassers and all sorts of losers who get called to HR over and over and keep their jobs. HR exists for one reason: protect the management. If you're expendable and easy to fire, then _maybe_ they'll can you, but if you're actually a decent employee they definitely won't if all we're talking about is a brush fire on Slack.
The mobs on Twitter frequently cross over into committing mass acts of criminal behavior through threats and intimidation, organizing to harm people. They don't hide it, this criminal behavior is all out in the open. Hurt this person next, no no no hurt this person. Threatening to harm people is violence (it doesn't have to be a physical threat to be violence), not freedom of speech.
Anonymity was easy for regular folks back in the 2000s.
I'm actually baffled at how some people so willingly express their personal views online these days.
"... the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
Privacy and free speech are quickly eroding and it seemed like not many people are willing to get loud about it.
A breast on TV sent America crazy. A woman breast. Sorry, a n%%%ple. Most of people had one right in front of their eyes at some point in life. Or their mouth, which is disgusting enough to have women cover their breast when breastfeeding.
I am French. Our culture is way more aligned with normality than others when it comes to fuck, fucking and breasts. But even here, when I compare to what we had as teens in the 80's,I have the impression that today we are back in the middle ages.
I resuscitated my old neglected Twitter account recently. It stressed me out and felt addictive, so I quit.
It turns out that if you're not on Twitter you don't hear that noise and it doesn't affect you.
If you avoid twitter and facebook and anyone that interacts too much with those things, you'll see a lot less of this stuff and probably be a lot happier.
Up until more recently, it seemed the majority of folks on the internets felt they were obligated to let their freak flag fly.
So color me confused.
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Or at least give Jonah Goldberg credit for Liberal Fascism, written over a decade ago.
Following the obligatory comparisons to 1984 for being cancelled out of the network-tv drag queen tv show community, comparisons to the Soviet Union followed promptly.
As someone who had family in East Germany let me tell you what Soviet cancel culture was. Being thrown into a dungeon where the light doesn't shine or someone being shot in the head by a Stasi agent.
Extremely bored people being cancelled out of some community by other extremely bored people on the noise generating machine that is social media is about as much Soviet Union as Trump fearing STDs was his Vietnam.
This reminds me of the valiant defenders of the intellectual dark web, which is so dark that it seems to occupy the permanent topspot on every podcasting service on the internet
We're not talking about factory workers being cancelled by the communist party for not spying on their neighbours, we're talking about a bunch of upper-class professionals being cast out of the intelligentsia, which annoys them a lot. As the saying goes, "the conflict is so fierce because the stakes are so low". But this is not the Soviet Union. Not even as a metaphor.
The entire cancel culture debate is in itself extremely limited to the kind of people who are overly online. Nobody who is flipping burgers or driving Uber is being cancelled, because they don't have an audience, or the time to waste and probably the good judgement to waste their time like we do
I don't think it actually matters at all, it's like the Seattle autonomous anarchists. It's all simulated outrage. Ezra Klein points out in his book on polarization that the US was much, much more violent during the 60s and 70s, when there was very little polarization or cancel culture. Just count the number of political assassinations or compare riots then to today.
Today is peaceful by comparison. Reactionaries haven't turned around acceptance of gay rights yet, cancel culture hasn't cancelled the conservative judiciary yet and ushered in the red guard. Very little has materially changed, it's almost all pure spectacle, if anything a distraction for actual change. You see how much Zucc cares about being cancelled? Anyone remember occupy Wall Street? Maybe cancelling is at an all time high because of how little it actually does.
Well, obviously the Internet wasn't a thing yet in the 1960s and 1970s, but I'm not confident about your claim that there was no political polarization back then. And fringe radical culture wasn't entirely unknown, either. The controversial cancel culture of today has its own roots in the political agitation of the 1960s and 1970s - which in turn was drawing much inspiration from the Maoist "cancel culture" of sorts in the PRC.
Perhaps not the best example. Two people have been shot and killed in the CHAZ, one of them a 16 year old boy who was killed by CHAZ 'security forces'.
On the other hand, you are minimising the problem here. Getting "cancelled" is just one possible consequence of the... let's call it Twitter PC Mob Culture. Other frequent consequence is people getting fired from their jobs -- and that can easily happen to a burger flipper or Uber driver.
Both are essentially the same thing: attacking someone's livelihood as a revenge for expressing an unorthodox opinion. It's just, if someone's sole source of income is their paycheck, you get them fired; and if they also make some extra money by giving lectures, you also get those lectures cancelled. Sure, if you only focus on the part about cancelling lectures, then yes, that part only happens to those who give lectures, of course.
How high are the stake of losing one's job? Depends; some people find a new job easier than others. If something like that happened to me now, it would be quite inconvenient. But suppose I would be lucky and find a new job overnight; would it mean that getting me fired was no big deal?
If we talk about individual victims, of course we are likely to mention the famous ones. If I tried to name a cancer victim other people know, I would probably say Steve Jobs -- not because he is a typical cancer victim, but because he is a cancer victim I expect other people to know about. Also, him being famous is precisely why I know about this fact. So, if we try to discuss victims of Twitter PC Mob Culture, of course someone like Eric Weinstein is very likely to be mentioned. But that doesn't mean that the threat is limited to people like Eric Weinstein. It just means that if the same thing happens to me tomorrow, you will probably never hear about it.
And while they're effective tools, they are rarely applied at scale, for the simple reason that if too many people are dead or imprisoned this will be both counter-productive and risky for the regime. Purges notwithstanding, of course. Instead the tools they apply at scale are fear and indoctrination, to the point that the people aren't sure any more what is sane, right, just. To the point that even if they manage to keep their sanity, their spirit is broken and wouldn't dare question the status quo even with their friends or family.
This is the great sin and corruption of tyranny, it smothers free thinking, the mind and the soul. Modern totalitarian governments have become even smarter and only use physical violence surgically, instead relying on other subtler measures.
Which brings me to my point: you're now relaxed and confident because no one's imprisoning or killing people for their opinions. They're only getting fired, having their reputations or businesses destroyed, etc.
You're focusing on the tools instead of the effects - people are being confused and unsure about what it means to be a good person and they're afraid to express their thoughts. I doubt that Americans will be facing Soviet Union conditions anytime soon, but you're on the path of having free thinking squeezed out of you and this is why many of us are alarmed.
Somehow folks have gotten the idea that it's ok to scream "Fuck You!!" at the top of their lungs in public or on social media if the victim is perceived to somehow be mildly racist for instance. And the entire cancel mob is impolite and unmannered. No charity, no nuance, no stopping to think or consider what is being said. Just rabid mouth frothing.
And really racism itself is impolite. It makes others feel bad for no good reason. It's anti social. So is sexism. It's extreme impoliteness and dis-consideration of others.
Ya, we get it, we should have the legal freedom to be impolite. But good people just shouldn't do it. For most any reason. We can always invent excuses why we should be disrespectful to others.
It seems the media really got on this trend early with a lot of right wing folks starting with Rush Limbaugh and progressing to Glenn Beck and Nancy Grace making an audience out of shouting and saying rude things in an attempt to be edgy. The current crop of protesters out screaming obscenities at police officers and the general public seem to have taken this to it's (hopefully) final conclusion. It's like a scene from "Idiocracy" really. And the current president is right in there, he's made an election platform out of impoliteness.
I've been listing to a lot of free audio books from the late 1800 and early 1900's. The amount of general politeness and manners exhibited from people was amazing. So different. It's too much for the current era, but I'd be ok if we went back to a little respect and courtesy of others in general no matter what someone thought or did or believed and this became custom once again.
But I've found one of the best sources is YouTube. Tons of readings of out of copyright books and you can usually pick a narrator you like.
I was talking with a friend who was complaining about a political party lying. She went on about her party that had to lie to combat her opponents. That she had to “play dirty“ in order to succeed.
I think this is wrong as having the moral high ground is important, especially in politics and ethics. Because if the only right is “what we think” it gets to be hard to convince people who aren’t we.
If you were the same class, race, etc., sure. Not if you were a slave, a servant, a woman, a child labourer, a poor, or any one of a huge range of "lesser" peoples.
The more toxic parts of cancel culture are a problem yes, but to blame the left for Netflix deciding to remove episodes they shouldn't have removed is just silly, especially when the vast majority of people on the left don't agree with Netflix in those cases.
I'd argue that the part complaining about "the liberal media" is even more applicable to right-wing media. What she's complaining about has been done by Fox News and Murdoch owned tabloids for ages now.
And I have a very hard time taking anyone who recommends PragerU seriously. PragerU is an awful and dishonest propaganda outlet and should be treated as such. The fact that someone who claims to be pro choice, pro LGBTQ, and pro environmental issues would even claim that PragerU is "rational" makes me seriously doubt that person's judgment.
Honestly, the idea of abandoning your social political viewpoints just because you think that some people on the left are mean is a really dumb way to go about deciding your political opinions and who to vote for. It's reactionary and inevitably leads to putting more shitty people in positions of power.
You should stand for your beliefs even if that means having to agree with some dumb-asses.
---
For a view on cancelling from someone on the left, and talk about experiences with it, I can recommend Contrapoints' video on the subject [1]. It's long but worth a watch if you want to hear someone talk about it who doesn't just suggest that people abandon the left and vote against their interests.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...
Eloquently worded.
The biggest is that they have, quite intentionally, encouraged the spread of outrage and mob mentality all across the political spectrum. These companies have installed levers for manipulating their users emotionally, and these levers are for sale. You can even fiddle around for free if you have the time, or get (un)lucky!
Oppressive PC culture, that can manifest as an almost Puritanical form of moral authority, spreads quick on social media. As someone who grew up in conservative, small-town America (and rebelled against it every chance I got), I'm not about to have my opinions dictated to me by the new boss either.
If your social sphere is mostly composed of middle & upper class, highly educated professionals, you might just feel surrounded by PCness. If you have any connection to the white poor and/or rural however, you also know that right-wing authoritarianism and racism are boiling too, with lethal results. As far as PC culture can be viewed as a defensive response to racism, I think it is clearly the lesser of the two evils, but it's probably a false dichotomy.
Instead what I see is fear of 'cancel culture', the fear of BLM being a bunch of secret marxists (ironically she should be advocating for their right to freedom of speech as well, but it seems that marxists are more scary than nazis) and a bunch of links at the end to people who have done their fair share to either stifle free speech or cancel people on their own.
She even links to Andy Ngo who is a known liar and provocateur and has even himself encouraged violence against people he disagrees with. Frankly I'm disappointing this article is even given a millisecond of anyone's time of day.
This is what someone who she links to (known nutball Scott Adams) said YESTERDAY.
But this is totally a good faith article that we should all read and absolutely belongs on top of a serious discussion forum like HN. Yep.
(By the way, I am curios as to how biological sex is treated during a transition. Like, changing your body isn't instantaneous, apart from that there's also intersex people, so is it really all-binary from a scientific POV?)
And the Rowling piece kinda read like a non-apology to me, sorry.
It recounts several examples of internet self-righteous mobs lynching people for minor and larger offences.
In particular, one conclusion of the book is that aggressively not making amends for bad behaviour, even raising the bar for offensiveness, is the optimal survival strategy. See Trump ...
https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-authors-voice/zadie-sm...
(And even if these issues are resolved, there are also the complexities of crowd mentalities that affect even very rational people. To overcome these complexities will take a mindfulness not really currently studied or practiced at scale.)
Throughout history, we've seen that change usually comes from very messy, ugly, forceful action. Polite discussion has its place, but when people are pushed to the limits, politeness is discarded and those who take action get what they fight for, polite or not. In those moments, enforcing "politeness" only works to preserve the status quo.
Politically correct mobs are a form of this - they are ugly and indiscriminate, but effective at shaping culture by stigmatizing ideas that have been used to justify harm. I'm not saying it's great - this is only a description of what is, not what ought to be. But people being mean or annoying online is as old as the internet, and is not limited to politically left-leaning people. It just happens that the mean left internet people are on the side of society's conscience, and luckily for now it's generally working for the greater good by correcting some big imbalances in American history.
Of course, the lack of accountability and balance makes this powerful hammer prone to swing wherever gravity carries it. It's dangerous, but to lash out against it is to lash out against the atmosphere for climate change - we need to address the root causes. We need to improve the livelihoods of everyone so they don't feel desperate and angry - this requires tackling hard economic and healthcare problems. We need to improve critical thinking so people can identify the truth - this requires solving difficult problems with our education system (which also tie into economics and healthcare). We need people to be more empathetic - this requires better urban planning, and all of the above. We need so many things and solve so many tough interconnected problems to get to the point where nuance and good-faith discussion rule society. Interestingly, these are all the problems that the mean left people are trying to fix. So it's possible to be on "their side" and not be in love with their techniques. It feels complicated, but isn't that what nuance is for?
Pushing back against the mob for being too uncivilized is trying to stop the swinging hammer, when it's probably best to just stay out of the way, and help finish building what the hammer is working on.
"Politically correct mobs are a form of this - they are ugly and indiscriminate, but effective at shaping culture by stigmatizing ideas that have been used to justify harm".
How do you define "harm"? It seems that the modern edition of "progress" is trying to eliminate psychological harm by controlling people's speech. Is psychological harm really something worth trying to eliminate in our society?
I'd argue no. Our society thrives on free speech and truth, and attempting to silence people for the sake of keeping the feelings of others intact is not a trade off that's worth making. A book I read that was very informative on the topic was "The Coddling of the American Mind" by Jonathan Haidt - I'd highly recommend looking into it.
Of course, the issue at hand is defining the boundaries of what needs to be stigmatized. But what's stigma is simply just what society deems stigma, not based on a fully rationalized top-down decision. We are all the mob. It's messy and there's no discrete boundaries of good and bad. It's tempting to therefore conclude that all ideas should be equal, but that's not very satisfactory to communities that have been ravaged by violent terrorism for generations due to certain bad ideas.
There's no clean solution to how things should be, so I think instead of trying to come up with the perfect ruleset that allows everyone to be happy, we should acknowledge that maybe there's no happy state of equilibrium with the given conditions, so we should work to reshape those conditions, and maybe we can reach that equilibrium in the future.
I think some here, when talking about freedom of political speech, lose sight of the actual stakes behind the politics.
This article does a good job outlining some of the craziness: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...
You can't compare a confused movement like BLM to any of the previous progressive movements that have worked in the past.
This really isn't about social progress. It's simply the textbook scenario of a society being subverted and an attempt to take power from another group. Every single goal of the BLM group fits the description.
Need proof? Go watch the movie PCU, made in 1994.
You couldn't say that you were gay or even supported same sex marriage, without effective excommunication from society 50 years ago in US.
This has noting and everything to do with Marx, Edward Said, the Frankfurt School, or critical theory. They are simply a way to justify an in group narrative. I'm not saying that these narratives aren't just, but often times they are create a black and white us vs them mentality that is there to reinforce limited self beliefs. So when we are talking to someone that has taken on this role of insecurity, we are talking to their anxiety that they've justified using sound social theory. That's why all rational thought seems to disappear and subjects often can't be changed.
I, for one, am tired of biting my tongue because I know one wrong word can turn a great night out into a three hour conversation about x, y, or z social issue without much back and forth. often times I'll be out and know that, by simply saying the word vaccine, my night can be ruined. These conversations don't live in the rational world. They live deep down in a state of anxious insecurity.
Ten years ago, I hated gay and trans people because of the way I was raised. I’ve changed significantly in those ten years.
Hell, I had a psychotic break. Should the things that I said then be forever held against me? I clearly wasn’t in my right mind. The people that have held those things against me were all from the “far left”. That’s one data point but it’s something I’ve seen over and over.
I ran a convention where I had to fire a volunteer because they said something “unacceptable” on Facebook. Defending them was not an option if the convention was going to survive. I’ve seen what happened to conventions that tried to defend people who had said similar things. It’s still ugly years later.
I say this as someone who would march in the protests here if I wasn’t at sufficient risk Of dying from COVID. I’ve been in the pride parade here despite my sensitivity to heat and poor physical condition at the time.
> I’ll end with some quality, free-thinking people and resources who aren’t afraid to post their views. I have found it immensely helpful to diversify my feeds with different opinions and people.
Which is, of course, why it's almost 100% right-leaning libertarians, mixed with a token handful of reliably leftward-shooting people like Taibbi and Tracey. There's not a legitimate progressive voice in that whole list that I can see. Not one.
This author, and this article's intended readership, isn't interested in legitimate online discussion. She just wants a different echo chamber than the ones she's being presented.
And she doesn't. She's Just Another Angry Libertarian, only protesting when "her" side is criticized. If you agree with her, she makes sense. If you don't, she seems... duplicitous.
To wit: I don't trust this woman (or most of the posters here) to preserve my speech. Or that of many others. I mean, we're literally seeing armed suppression of peaceful protestors in the news. And what's the Real Problem in her head? The protestors. Because they yelled at people on the internet.
Only if you use the word "slavery". Suggesting that "workers should be able to sell an equity stake in their future earnings“ isn't just acceptable, it's fashionable.
My issue with cancel culture, is that social media and the general "outrage culture" has magnified beyond all proportion, what constitutes an "abhorrent idea". Slavery and child labor is a very different level of abhorrent to "I prefer my sexual partners to have vaginas" (which is not abhorrent at all to any sensible person). This article is calling out the latter. This isn't about saying society should tolerate every single possible opinion there is to have. It's about bringing back some common sense to discourse, and not allowing the mob outrage of social media to dominate our society.
The obvious danger comes from who gets to decide, and why? Recent cases seem to have been arrived at not as a natural good faith progression of society, but rather as a militant assertion by certain factions. Bringing up relevant policing statistics is off the table. Bringing up relevant psychological literature on gender population preferences is off the table. In many cases the notions of individualism and universalism are off the table.
The discussion regarding transgender individuals is a perfect example of an off limits conversation that has just been asserted as having been completely resolved. Understand, I am personally sympathetic to and defend most arguments made on behalf of transgender individuals, but to most advocates the discussion begins and ends with something like "trans women are women," which is an assertion that has convinced approximately 0 people to be sympathetic to the cause. In my own attempts to bring people around to the arguments on behalf of transgender people, I have only been successful when I'm willing to do all the necessary legwork to peel back the arguments, clarify the language conflicts, acknowledge any inconsistencies, etc, and only then have I had people emerge with a different opinion. But the prevailing conversation is instead "you're denying the existence of this marginalized group and exacerbating their risk of actual violence by discussing this." This is hardly a caricature of these conversations. And in the meantime, the person who has expressed their own, in many cases, perfectly reasonable objections to some of the tripwires and double standards that arise on the path to the sympathetic conclusion, they've very likely made a pariah of themselves.
So basically, your point is still entirely contingent on how, when, and why things move into the territory of taboo. There is a lot of danger in the game you advocate on behalf of.
Now, you tweet the "N-Word" when you're 16, but raise millions of dollars for a great foundation years later. You get canceled. This just isn't cool. I was an ass hat at 16, but I also didn't have twitter, most of my mistakes aren't still out there.
We need to recognize that people aren't who they were, we need to allow people to change, grow, and move past their past. This is why I love liberals move to reduce prison sentences for non-violent offenders and conservatives push-back on cancel culture for historical stupidity.
Granted, there are some videos that surface where people should be fired. I get there's some egregious shit out there, but overall, I'd rather see courtrooms determine that than social media.
I'd rather see a courtroom or some structured independent body that is given time to review all evidence and hear both sides determine guilt than mass public opinion. What I see is mob justice not real justice.
I don't want courts to have to get involved before someone can be fired. I like that they are there to protect against illegal firings but not before hand.
-In the age of religion, being an atheist was considered an "abhorrent" idea as was tolerance of other religious beliefs. The culture of the day tried hard to cancel it and things done to silence heretics were quite terrible.
-During the US civil right's movement of the '60s, the idea that all people deserved equal treatment, regardless of skin color, was considered an "abhorrent" idea. The culture of the day tried hard to cancel it; MLK was widely disliked at the time of his death.
Your words hit the nail squarely on the head but, unfortunately, drives it straight through the argument you were trying to defend. "Culture cancels abhorrent ideas" but it was only through looking at "abhorrent" ideas that progress was made.
Perhaps. Maybe. Eventually. But when those ideas are still accepted, have fun being against them.
Eugenics was socially accepted from the late 1800s into the first half of the 20th century (with compulsory sterilization continuing even to 1980). If you were Catholic during that time period (when the encyclical Casti connubii was published), you'd be lambasted for being old fashioned. In Buck v. Bell (1927) the USSC ruled 8-1 that it was A-OK for the state to sterilize people:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell
The sole vote against was coïncidentally the sole Catholic on the bench.
As a somewhat controversial figure pointed a while ago:
> Free speech is not a value, like mercy or justice: it's the fundamental problem-solving mechanism of humanity.
* https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/80190649601547059...
What idea(s) do we accept now that will eventually be thought completely wrong in a generation? The whole point of allowing dissenting voices so to allow people to think of new ways of viewing the world, and filtering out the ones that are good and the ones that are bad: but if we don't allow people to speak, how can new ideas come to light?
Secondly, I invite you to consider this: Being gay was seen as a completely "abhorrent" idea a few decades ego [1]. So, did that fact somehow made it good and justifiable to "cancel" someone for being gay?
[1] Some people find it "abhorrent" even today, some countries even have laws against homosexuality.
It's not always right, though. Millions of people were killed in the various wars that broke out when Catholic Europe tried to "cancel" the "abhorrent" ideas of the Protestant Reformation.
Perhaps you can think of this phenomenon as a type of social immune system. It turns out that actual immune systems aren't perfect. Allergies and autoimmune disorders exist. Immune systems will sometimes overreact to a pathogen, or react to something that's harmless but resembles a pathogen, or even attack vital organs that the body needs to survive.
I think you can probably infer the relevant metaphors from here. But to provide one particular example: during the 1950's, American culture decided to "cancel" the "abhorrent" idea of communism. Actual spies working for Stalin were discovered and put to death and there was a lot of scared talk about even more spies being afoot. At one point, a bunch of screenwriters with memberships in the American Communist Party were fired and blacklisted from their professions.
Ultimately, the climate of paranoia and fear resulted in personal ruin for more and more people as anticommunist demagogues went after as many of their perceived enemies as they could. There was a broad chilling effect; not only was it considered totally abhorrent and unthinkable to actually be any stripe of Marxist, but even saying, "hey, I think this is going a little too far" was enough to be branded a communist sympathizer. The only way anyone managed to criticize it was to write vague stories about literal witch hunts and pretend that they weren't allegorical.
Clearly, this system isn't perfect. But neither do the excesses of McCarthyism actually excuse Stalin or the now-thoroughly-documented actual infiltration of Soviet spies and assets in 1950's America. It is possible to see the evil in both.
That said, isn't this logical under the moral framework of our political correctness? You're either correct or you are not, after all. It's a binary decision. If you're not correct, why do you insist staying incorrect? If you do, of course you're a bigot, a racist, a xenophobia, a fascist, or an evil person. So, all conservatives "should be jailed". All republicans "are evil". A black police is a "black Judas", as yelled by a protester. A group of protestors can trespass private property, and the property owner is public enemy no. 1 if he stands in front of his house with a rifle. Residents in Seattle CHAZ have nothing and "should not have nothing to complain" because CHAZ "is Summer of Love", and because "personal loss is nothing compared with fighting justice". Really, there's really no boundary under the current moral framework of the US progressives.
And isn't this what we really want? All the media I read or used to read, be it The Atlantic, the WAPO, the New Yorker, the NYT, the NBC, the CNN, the ABC. They all tell me that we should brace such moral framework. We should join such progressive movement. We should ditch law and order when a nation is hurt and sinned. We should examine what we believe and cancel what's evil. See, if "math is racist", what else is not?
And really, isn't this what we choose? We chose to vote Kshama Sawant, for instance. Then, it shouldn't be a surprise that she led hundreds of people to break into Seattle City Hall, and why is it a surprise that she or someone leaked the mayor's home address even though the address is classified by law?
Either we have a better moral framework, or we probably will have to accept what we have now and more in the future.
> The point is that RuPaul’s Drag Race is RuPaul’s show, and we don’t get to scream and cry and throw tantrums until he changes his own show.
Wow, this article literally doesn't understand what free speech is.
Aaaand it more horseshoe theory of politics, references the quillette, and says they're now libertarian. Nothing of value here.