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While I agree with all this, I think a lot of the frustration around "cancel culture" is a general frustration about the politicization of everything. Without denying the reality that much of this is just privileged people living in blissful ignorance of an underlying unjust world, we live in a time of unprecedented change, where the rules of society are different on a weekly basis, and there is an emotional / mental health toll to people undergoing rapid change at speed and accidentally making political stands before breakfast.

And there seems to be nobody around to help society navigate these transitions. Quite the contrary, many leaders claim a mandate to sew division, basically. Worse, they may be right: outrage seems like a winning strategy to gather and keep power in a human society. And even those seeking justice have no choice but to seize the customary tools of modern politics in order to accomplish their goals, because their opponents will not bring knives to a gun fight.

I think "cancel culture" cannot be separated from the broader context of the rise of outrage as an efficient source of political capital, both as it relates to the outrage at some person for doing X, and then the outrage against the first outrage for X having some consequences. The details of "what it means" to have consequences (or as you say, "should we be forced to buy things") are I fear a kind of nuance that may be out of date in our political discourse.

You are missing the external and unhinged nature of 'cancel culture'.-

What if I decide to buy Goya black beans, and someone takes a picture of me at the grocery store, and brands me as a affiliate of some certain political mindset of Twitter because of it... When in reality, I bought these beans because I just wanted to eat beans?

It's perfectly reasonable for an employer to fire someone for something they said. But what if they fired them solely due to public outcry; the pressure from people who aren't affiliated with their company at all, never bought any of their products before, etc.

Public outcry is speech. It’s as simple as that.

Of course its speech. And my criticism of unhinged public outcry is speech as well! It's as simple as that.

>> But what if they fired them solely due to public outcry...

It's interesting to me that this is always put on the outcrier and not the company itself.

I personally put blame on all parties involved

Why not make it unreasonable for employers to fire except for cause?

(I'm told that won't work in the sister post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23802578 )

Just because it is speech, doesn't mean it is right. As people like to say, our speech does have consequences. We should be aware of what those consequences are. Take for example, the young man who was fired because he was cracking his knuckles. No one did anything illegal, and yet an injustice was performed. The person who took the photo claimed they didn't want the guy did, yet what did they expect? what was the point of posting the photo? Even if the young man was flashing the WP sign, so what? If he hasn't done anything else that was heinous, there is no need to speak up. We should be encouraging speech, not discoyraging it. "I may dislike what you have to say, but I will fight for your right to say it." Not "I dislike what you have to say, so I will do everything in my power to shut you up "

It goes both ways. People have just as much right to post "cancel" posts as they do to post the kinds of posts that get "cancelled".

Society chooses how to react. No one is losing their job because they got caught calling someone out for being racist or sexist. If people actually go too far, or lie about their allegations, they're at just as much risk of having the tide turn against them. This is already built into the system.

> No one is losing their job because they got caught calling someone out for being racist or sexist.

A bit on the side:

Maybe it would help a good deal if people started losing their jobs for clearly false allegations and for not protecting people they are responsible for?

Like:

- if we conservatives got together to pressure whoever employees that person who posted the picture of the Mexican truck driver with his hand out the window and made that persons life a mess: after all it was clearly wrong as admitted by that person him/herself.

- next up: shaming the company who fired him over cracking his knuckles until they fire whoever was responsible for this.

After all we white males are the powerful privileged ones arent we?

Obviously (hopefully) I don't want this, I only want to get people on both sides thinking.

> Maybe it would help a good deal if people started losing their jobs for clearly false allegations and for not protecting people they are responsible for?

I totally agree (with at least this part) and mentioned that in my post.

If someone sent my boss a picture of me buying Chik-Fil-A and he asked if I was supporting anti-gay companies I'd say no I just like the taste of Chik-Fil-A. If people are actually getting fired for things like that, or buying Goya beans, or having something untrue claimed, I would certainly hope most bosses would ask the person about it before indiscriminately firing them. In some cases that may not be happening, but I would argue that anywhere firing people for such small things was probably looking to fire that person anyway (to say nothing about the "not small" things like the guy screaming obscenities at the asian family a few days ago, or all of these people going crazy about having to wear masks). That's why you don't see most people getting fired.

The flaw in the "Firing" argument is that the speech is a call to action, namely to fire someone. At that point, it becomes something like a threat, which is not protected speech. While the threat is not directly aimed at the individual, law does recognize that interference in the business relationship between two parties can be a wrong, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference

Nope, calling on a company to fire someone is just as protected as any other speech.

It is toxic.

Well so is a lot of stuff being said by the folks being “cancelled”! I don’t really understand the anti-cancellers perspective, to be honest. They want people to listen silently to their “free speech” and not be able to speak in return? It’s so blatantly hypocritical that it’s kind of funny

Conversation ends with disrespect.

It's kind of self-sabotage in the end, ruining potential for good arguments to flourish.

Diluting free speech to stop cancel culture isn't worth it.

It's called self-restraint. Just because someone gave me a stick ("social" media), doesn't justify beating people up with it before trying better approaches first.

I agree! High-profile transphobes and “scientific” racists should absolutely exercise self-restraint and avoid using their social media presence as a stick with which to beat minorities.

Yes to that too!

> I don’t really understand the anti cancellers perspective, to be honest.

It's about mobbing onto someone online to shame him or her. Large numbers of people pile on top of someone causing great psychological harm. Shaming doesn't work, and especially not at this level. It might work when used in limited fashion to educate children, but public shaming has been abandoned by history as a bad practice.

Pretty insightful, I hadn’t thought of it that way but you’re right. I guess the counter would be that cancel culture restricts others speech.

> 1. Boycotts - OK we should be forced to purchase things (like Goya, or ads on Tucker Carlson's show) that don't share our values? No, that's crazy...

No you should not be forced to purchase anything, but you should not use your economic power to punish speech.

> 2. Organizational politics - The Pinker thing[1], and the issue with the Poetry society, has more to do with the internals of some organization. Should we restrict those advocating for changes to organizations they belong to?

Organizations should serve their purpose, rather then being used to punish dissenting voices.

> 3. Firing - Either organizations are able to have 'speech' or they're not... And without cultural norms, we're not going to from on high create top-down standards around which values are 'correct' or not.

Firing people is speech now? There are substantial restrictions on firing people, most importantly civil rights law. I guess this is also an attack on freedom of speech in your view?