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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. Saying you agree with free speech, such as the Harper's Letter which is about as milquetoast and generic as it gets, is viciously attacked on the left for being racist, anti-trans, the authors are scum, anyone who signs it should be fired, and on and on.

As a testament to the existence of cancel culture and the stifling of any opinion against the party line in the progressive media, I can't think of a more obvious example.

I remember when people used to proudly say, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". This is not the norm for progressive thinking in 2020.

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First, I think you're lumping "the left" together and assuming "the left" believes whatever the most extreme "left" tweets say.

Second, Bari Weiss can write whatever she wants. Totally her right. She's got a website there in the link! She can continue to reach a global audience. Does the NYTimes need to promote her? No, that's not a right I'm willing to die for.

Third, why on earth is Bari Weiss' opinion more sacrosanct than mine? If she says something I consider offensive, I might say I think it's offensive. If she says something dumb, I might say I think it's dumb. If she says something astute, I might say I think it's astute. She has a HUGE megaphone, so of course lots of people will respond to her. That's not "cancel culture." That's a side effect of having a huge megaphone. With great power comes great responsibility, etc.

Fourth, when I hear people complain about "going against the progressive party line" or whatever, I generally hear people wanting to be some flavor of racist, sexist, transphobic, or just asshole-ish without consequence. Oftentimes people in marginalized group react in a way that feels extra venomous to those of us not in those groups because they can feel their lives are constantly hindered and harmed by the sorts of thoughts that other people can just toss out and then walk away from. If this happens, I might suggest listening to the free speech from those people and trying to understand rather than writing screeds against "cancel culture" or whining about how you, as a very well-publicized and probably quite wealthy writer having your rights squashed. And that's why the Harper's Letter was annoying.

> Fourth, when I hear people complain about "going against the progressive party line" or whatever, I generally hear people wanting to be some flavor of racist, sexist, transphobic, or just asshole-ish without consequence.

I hear this all the time, but it seems so disingenuous. There are so many national examples that no reasonable person could consider to be any of the above:

* A hispanic man was fired for accidentally making the "ok" symbol

* A data scientist was canned for citing a prominent black academic's research about the efficacy of nonviolent protest

* A journalist was forced to issue an apology for interviewing a black man who was happy about BLM but wished there was more attention on issues of violence in his community

Frothing racists indeed.

In light of cases like this, I don't know how anyone can think that cancel culture is just "punching up" or "criticizing people" or "going for people who want to use hate speech".

Those are three anecdotes, and at least two of them are not as stark as described. The data scientist's timing was bad and his prior relationship with several stakeholders was already on the rocks. There are rumors that the worker who had no idea what the connotations of the ok symbol are has been re-hired. This is hardly anything compared to the armies of celebrities who signed the Harper's letter and are mostly complaining that they can no longer express their opinions without being criticized.

The difficulty here is that several things are happening at once. There is a problem with groupthink at some institutions, but there are also people who are trying to suppress legitimate criticism.

They are indeed anecdotes, as are the Harper’s letter signatories and many, many others. Anyway, the issue for the Nth time is not about “criticism” but “harassment”. It’s not a good faith argument to conflate these things when it has been stated over and over that this is about people targeting individuals’ employment status. This isn’t “criticism”.

The fact that it hasn’t stifled prominent, powerful people such as the Harper’s signatories is not evidence that cancel culture doesn’t exist or that it is a weak force; it means that less powerful people are effectively suppressed. You don’t hear about what you don’t hear about. Survivorship bias.

Did any of them sign that Harper's Letter?

And did I say "frothing racists?"

Also, yeah, out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made. People get things wrong sometimes. It sucks and we should use our freedom of speech to help correct those errors, not argue that freedom of speech should be shut down.

> Also, yeah, out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made. People get things wrong sometimes. It sucks and we should use our freedom of speech to help correct those errors, not argue that freedom of speech should be shut down.

There's a difference in my opinion between harassment and free speech. Notably, if you're trying to punish, threaten, or coerce someone, you fall outside of the bounds of "criticism". This may not be the legal definition, but I can't see any other definition that would be consistent with free speech ideals.

Further, because it's perhaps too difficult to legally litigate this kind of harassment, we could also approach the problem by making it more difficult for employers to terminate employees, thereby neutering the mobs (they can "speak" all they want but they can't persecute).

> If she says something I consider offensive, I might say I think it's offensive. If she says something dumb, I might say I think it's dumb.

Respectfully, I think you're missing the point. She works at a journalistic outlet that claims to be neutral and factual. When her peers demean her openly within the company for "writing about the Jews" (because she supports Israel), that shows that NYT is no longer operating like a legitimate news house. After all, their employees feel a freedom and psychological safety in openly harassing peers for their ideas and political views. The comments here are not asking to insulate Bari Weiss's ideas from intellectual critique or from public criticism. They are against biases in journalism, the censorship of ideas, and ideological bullying/discrimination in the workplace.

The problem is that words like "transphobic" have a wide range of meanings, and are purposely vague to dismiss anyone who doesn't pass an arbitrary purity test. There are very few people who wish violence (physical harm) against trans people. But there are lots of people, who very reasonably, think trans women shouldn't compete in women's sports and that trans women are not women. The attempts to censor or deplatform THOSE discussions are exactly the type of hate speech mission creep that characterizes "cancel culture".

But I don't think anybody did get fired? Who of the signees of the Harpers letter is actually being hurt? Even if they _were_ fired, why is that bad? Most of the people who signed that letter are professional writers in some form or another, and their job is to write stuff that people want to read. If people don't want to read it anymore because they write dumb stuff or sign their name to stupid letters, how is that anymore an issue of free speech than if I got fired for writing buggy code or insistently arguing that we should be coding everything in Perl 4?

You can say all kinds of dumb shit and sign your name to stupid letters and other people get to call for you to be fired, and maybe you will be! Even after that, you can continue saying dumb shit and signing your name to stupid letters, and I can go write buggy Perl 4 code, and nobody can stop us! Your dumb letters might not get published in national magazines and I probably won't get paid much for my code but in neither case is this a violation of our free speech rights.

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