> I feel like a lot of 'privilege' talk sort of leaked out of good / valid ideas and areas of academic study and now are sort of used as a magic wand (or sometimes a baseball bat) that really don't solve anything
Yes, unfortunately.
I'm going to quote Paul Graham's Twitter here:
"Many fans of cancel culture have mentioned that it's mostly powerful people publishing opinions about it, as if that were some kind of contradiction.
Of course it's mostly powerful people who are speaking openly about a phenomenon that gets less powerful people fired."
1. Folks who shout they are being silenced, to some extent obviously aren't and usually follow that up with some direction to ... their ideas they're being silenced.
2. Anyone who is really silenced, who do we hear about it from? Group 1.
Outside of say a government straight up banning speech or outright removing it... I have real trouble weeding out who / what is truly being silenced and what the issue really is.
And I'm highly skeptical about Group 1's ability to tell me honestly about Group 2.
- not initiated by the person themselves but by someone else
- and working for the benefit of the person who was attempted silenced.
Many aren't arguing that they themselves are being silenced. They are arguing that others are being silenced either out of sympathy for those being silenced or recognition that the force silencing the less powerful may one they have the power to silence the person speaking out.
Those of us that still have a voice should be pro-active in speaking out for those that don't lest we one day find ourselves without a voice as well.
"They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up." – Martin Niemöller
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-so...
As far as 'they came first for the communists'... I just don't see that as a situation ... at least not generally in the geography or areas I'm thinking of outside big state sponsored acts. Not at scale, and not anything more than people disagreeing or wanting to host someone else's content ... and frankly when you dive into it, it's often not just some banal content, or just someone with a new idea. It just never pans out that way...
I'm not sure I buy into any friction anywhere being 'orthodox privilege' or persecution.
It’s a fairly bad counter-argument in the case of specific celebrities claiming loudly on national TV or in the national press that they personally are being silenced.
My position is not at all settled. I pity, rather than envy, the famous; their adoring audiences can turn on them in an instant if their preferences are not socially acceptable, which prevents them from being true to themselves.
But the question of orthodoxy is, which things can you say without optimizing your life for them? If you have an average job and average friend groups, which opinions can you express without a risk of losing them? The answer will vary depending on exactly what's "average" in your area, but in most places it's going to be a much smaller set than the opinions you could in principle say.
He points out that, for a very long time, people speaking/writing about sexuality have tended to make some sort of gesture at the fact that we can't or aren't supposed to talk about these things.
You can find a gloss of this "repressive hypothesis" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Sexuality#Volum...
In both these cases, individuals are talking about broader societal trends. It's not a contradiction if they aren't talking about their own specific experience (i.e. "I'm silenced, therefore I can't talk, listen to me talk about how silenced I am"). An 18th-century writer discussing sex may contribute to the counter-argument that by virtue of their writing about sex, it isn't as taboo a subject as they imply. But in and of itself, it isn't proof that such a trend does not exist.
Caveats: 1) I read this over a year ago, 2) found it enough of a slog that my understanding feels pretty fuzzy, and 3) am still undecided/chewing on the main argument
My impression is that Foucault wasn't trying to deny a trend, but to highlight a number of other trends (including the explosion of discourse around sexuality) to open the reader up to challenging or re-framing their received knowledge about sexuality at the time. His focus is very much on all of the power and control dynamics at this nexus. It's a little hard to distill what I mean by that--because it includes actual sex and sexuality, the science/study of it, who is speaking, whose sex is being spoken about, what kind of sex it is, social/class dynamics, etc.
So many people are a victim of being silenced now.
As evidenced by how many people you hear about constantly telling you about it...
Until they're deplatformed.
Individual 1: "I'm being silenced." Group: "What would you like to say that you think you're being silenced about?" Individual 1: "I cannot say for fear..."
We did hear from victims of silencing back in the day just as well (and not just in the sense of state censorship, which many Americans have this bizarro notion that only it matters).
From Lenny Bruce and Charlie Chaplin, to rap groups, from the Hayes code to book authors (including of masterpieces like "Junky"), from Hoover and McCarthy, to Jello Biafra, and from records getting thrown out of record store chains because they angered some group, all the way back to Galileo being silenced, black leaders (despite having large followings otherwise), etc.
People do lose gigs, have talks cancelled, have book contracts dropped, shows demonetised, and so on because of mob reaction, or because of some angry special interest group, or because of some vocal bloggers, or whatever.
Is the argument that they aren't completely stomped, so they should be thankful?
Or that how someone be a victim of silencing and still be able to talk about their silencing and have it know?
Does it matter whether the reason for the "cancellation" came from a mob, or only what the reason actually is?
If a group of crazy incoherent people get a Nazi cancelled by shouting "they're a Nazi!", and the person really is a Nazi, does it matter that they're a bit crazy and incoherent?
On principle, for me, it does.
For one, I don't want "groups of crazy incoherent people" dictating their terms.
Second, I want all voices able to being heard, and adult audiences judging for themselves if they like to hear them. This includes access to book deals, speaking halls, conference spaces, etc. This includes Nazis or people in favor of the extinction of all mankind, fans of royal government against democracy, fans of Bieber, the KKK AND black panthers, and so on. As long as they don't act illegally/violently.
Third, the tricky part is not agreeing with silencing a Nazi (which many will agree, some will disagree because they favour free exchange of ideas, whatever they are, but in any case it would be popular to do so).
The tricky part is determining who is the "Nazi" (that is, the person to be silenced). And on that front, the tide turns very easily. Under Hoover a open leftist could lose their job. In the 50s a black rights supporter in the South could loose business deals, concert and writing gigs, get cancelled, etc. You think that this can happen from now on only on the "bad" side? Doesn't history taught you how fast the tides can turn? There was Obama just 4 years ago, and now it's Trump, for example...
The venn diagram circle of those who believe that people with power deserve to have the right to reach the most people with their speech almost completely overlaps the circle of those who are currently whining about being demonetized because they're saying stupid, harmful, and reprehensible things.
This is literally the world they championed. They just thought that they would be the ones making the decisions.
This Twitter thread (oh lord, how did I end up citing Twitter multiple times in this conversation?), by the founder of an online magazine that seems to specialize in stories of this sort, has a long list of examples. https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1282215876553400321
Do you really think this is the first time anyone has pushed back against Noam Chomsky? Salman Rushdie had a fatwa declared on his life over a book he wrote. I think these people are very well accustomed to being pushed back upon publicly.
Which I interpreted as: “the only people who complain about cancel culture are unaccustomed to pushback” and disproved by counterexample.
It occurs to me now that perhaps you didn’t mean “all”. You meant “some”. That’s called nutpicking and it means your original claim wasn’t substantial enough to discuss in the first place.
Someone saying "hey, look there are a lot of instances of people being censored over there, we should be concerned about it because it could affect us" cannot be refuted on the basis that the speaker isn't being censored.
It's like refuting someone saying that a bunch of people are ill on the basis that the speaker isn't ill themselves. Illness is something that occurs to individuals, not to society. Same with censorship. It isn't some absolute where people are totally censored or totally free to speak their mind. It's distributed unevenly across society. When understood as a distribution rather than something binary, it becomes obvious that instances of free speech about censorship doesn't disprove the existence of censorship, nor does it say anything about whether or not we are becoming a more censorious society.