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A vocal minority is enough to dox you, to bother your workplace, your school/college, to get you fired/expelled, and alltogether, to make you "too hot" to hire, especially by large tech companies, who have whole departments of "vocal minority" people dealing with tiny stuff like that.

Cancel culture has to stop.

What do you concretely think should be done though?

Aren't there already laws about harassing people?

I think the news should be more responsible by not reporting that someone was offended by something unless it has serious objective merit because it just gets everyone riled up on non-issues for no good reason.

Aside from that, "cancel culture" feels quite a vague topic that would be hard to police in any way because you aren't talking about specific people or specific ideas.

> Aside from that, "cancel culture" feels quite a vague topic

A good, frustrating point. A large proportion of complaints of cancel culture are coupled with implications of frustration that they feel they can't say unpleasant things that they would have gotten away with previously. Or people complaining about direct efforts to change social norms that they don't agree with, claiming that due to a status quo bias, change is cancellation and therefore baseless.

As with most ideologies, discussing the definition is a fairly pointless task because its subjective and ill-defined, especially by those who feel passionately about it. The term is pointless. What happened in this case sounds bad, at a glance. Let's not generalize it to other things. It'll get nowhere. Whether or not one believes something is a part of cancel culture has no bearing on whether a particular idea to squash something is good or not.

> The term is pointless. What happened in this case sounds bad, at a glance. Let's not generalize it to other things. It'll get nowhere. Whether or not one believes something is a part of cancel culture has no bearing on whether a particular idea to squash something is good or not.

Yeah, that's how I feel. Arguing or getting outraged about ill-defined things that can't be attributed to specific people doesn't seem productive because there's no way to resolve it or learn anything.

Some people exist that get offended by some things other people aren't offended by. So what?

It's just noise.

Who's in charge of "unpleasant things"? Are these things that a vast majority of the anglosphere, including POC, women, etc, wouldn't take offense to?

Maybe people are objecting to a tiny % of critical theorists trying to seize control of acceptable language with no mandate.

> Maybe people are objecting to a tiny % of critical theorists trying to seize control of acceptable language from the top down.

The problem with that tiny % is, that they are loud, and that we give them attention. And by we, i include everyone, from a reddit upvter to mainstream media.

It's 2020, milk is racist, rice is racist, syrup is racist,... and all that because of a few loud people powered by the media, grabbing views from the offended few and utraged many.

Society is complicated and messy. Social change is uncomfortable. And yet for all the complaining of any given generation, they'd probably disagree with the ethics of three generations prior.

The thing is, you're not exactly ending segregation here.

What I see is an ever-shifting goalpost of harmless aphorisms that are newly considered 'offensive' by a bunch of upper-class people. What does that do for George Floyd's family, exactly? Did it prevent Jacob Blake from being shot in the back a few months later?

If you want to embrace critical theory, you should include the critical theorists in the analysis -- what's their power incentive? What do they stand to gain? Let's not just assume they're saints but everyone else needs an inquisition.

There's a good chance, I would think, that the black lives matter movement and changing social dialogue improves race relations in the future.

It's not that simple.

You have your usual bucket of nutcases, who get offended by everything, and everything is sexist (airconditioning), racist (milk) or *-phobic.

But then you have cases, where a mere accusation of anything even without proof) can destroy peoples lives, eg:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case

You also have (somewhat) mainstream media spreading such fake news:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus

You also have individuals, eg. Johnny Depp getting acused by Amber Heard, losing his upcoming acting roles, and after a time (and 87 cctv videos), she's found to be the crazy/violent one.

You have people like Pewdiepie getting accused of being a racist many times:

https://www.vox.com/2018/12/13/18136253/pewdiepie-vs-tseries...

Pewdiepie has a special 'power', that he gets more views than Vox does, so he can atleast present his side of the story ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjCsOmDmjEU ).

Some people don't have that media presence, but the media atleast scewed up enough, so they're no settling multimillion dollar lawsuits (Nick Sandmann, the 'smirking guy').

Now imagine, you're not a famous person, and you're not in a position of being able to sue CNN. Just one mere accusation (whout proof, without anything), can totally destroy your life, and you have no way to fight back. No police report, no judge, no jury, just one "he said, she said", one complaint, and there's nothing you can do... you lose your job, maybe even your carreer, you might get thrown out of your college, or worse. The accuser can lie to the media, say you said something -ist, or -phobic, and there's literally nothing you can do.

Now combine the "nutcases" with accusations, and your code using master/slave terminology is racist (as a slav, i have no idea why 'slave' is considered racist), boy/girl in character selection screen and never after is transphobic, and i have no idea what "not implementing all the pronouns" is.

Now, we have two options... either we become sensitive to everytihing, and destroy normal human relations and comedy (although, we've gone most of the way there, because of so many protected groups and actions, not allowed to be joked about, the only group you can target your jokes at are white men (with movies like 40 days and 40 nights, where a rape of a man is a comedic high point, and many other examples)), or we can just grow up, not get offended by something someone somewhere said or did (especially if it was a joke), and not "cancel" people because of that.

My point is that its neither simple, nor one sided, nor well defined.

In addition to all of the things you're pointing out, there's also people genuinely trying to change things for the better with good reasoning.

> Now, we have two options... either we become sensitive to everytihing, and destroy normal human relations and comedy (although, we've gone most of the way there, because of so many protected groups and actions, not allowed to be joked about, the only group you can target your jokes at are white men (with movies like 40 days and 40 nights, where a rape of a man is a comedic high point, and many other examples)), or we can just grow up, not get offended by something someone somewhere said or did (especially if it was a joke), and not "cancel" people because of that.

No, it's really fine for us to say that certain things are not acceptable. It's ok to make fun of something. It's generally not ok to joke that, say, a race is intrinsically inferior to another, or that women are sexual objects, or that white dudes are just there to earn money or whatever antagonism floats your boat. It's shouldn't be illegal to make such jokes, but it should be shamed out of the mainstream.

You being triggered by other people being triggered is the height of irony.

So, should we make rape jokes (as is the main point of 40 days and 40 night movies)? Or are they ok, only when their targeted against men?

I support all jokes, if they're funny (if not, nobody is going to watch that comedian, and the market will regulate itself). You say that we should shame the jokes you personally don't like out of the mainstream, but leave the ones you don't mind. "you slav you lose" is a joke.... slavs are also always shown as stereotypical people in tracksuits, drunk and killing people... mostly eachother... and yes, i know it's a stereotype, but as a slav, it's not far from truth (we're looking at caricatures here), and videos on youtube joking out of that are well.. funny (to me personally, and the like/dislike ratio shows that others find them funny too). Should we shame those jokes? Should we shame people laughing at those jokes? Should we shame slavs laughing at funny stereotipical representatives of our own people? Now replace slavs with some other group of people, and you get called a bunch of "-ist"s, "anti-"s, etc.

So, we either kill comedy for all ( https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/70390/a_politically... ), or we let people joke out of everything and not be sensitive about it (this is the option i prefer... especially since we live in a time, where just showing a picture of a religious figure can get you beheaded in france).

News is totally fucked. Look at how most media reported on James Damore being fired from Google, and what they quoted him as having saying, vs what he actually said (1).

According to the media, Damore called women "neurotic" and said they were "biologically unfit to be software engineers". Nothing close whatsoever to what was actually said (1).

Meanwhile there are university professors willing to defend the memo (2). For example, "For what it’s worth, I think that almost all of the Google memo’s empirical claims are scientifically accurate. Moreover, they are stated quite carefully and dispassionately. Its key claims about sex differences are especially well-supported by large volumes of research across species, cultures, and history." (Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychology professor at University of New Mexico)

(1) https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...

(2) https://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists...

Can someone give me specifics on who's affected by "cancel culture"? It's a meaningless label to me.

I mean, I think Bill Cosby has been cancelled. Colin Kaepernick was for kneeling. And the lady who called the police on the black man in central park. Some of those may be unjustified. Is this really the biggest problem in society?

I had a teacher in high school (black). He was an absolute favorite of students of all backgrounds. Extremely strict, very buttoned up. In the arts department. I think he literally was the advisor for like the multi-cultural club (that did somewhat lame lunch multi-cultural stuff).

He put on a performance that turned out was racist or sexist or something. Think les miserable - we were always doing stuff like that, so the stories were very varied.

Bam, he was gone. Even the students in the group that should have been offended were like, he's great. But there was a very very vocal very small set of more activist parents (white BTW!) with one or two students who were after him. Reminds me of the (white again) liberals in Portland or Seattle going after the police chief to cut her pay etc (black women).

I was like, who cares what two parents and their kids think. But they got in the paper talking about the racist (I think?) environment he created / messages being sent / cultural appropriation etc. This is theatre - people dress up as different characters so no question an identity politics issue was there most likely.

And yes - he was gone the next year after something like 12 years of building up this amazing program. His performances were sold out for multiple showings (literally everyone in school, every parent, every relative, randos went). The shows were major. All the context was overlooked (this guy was so formal he was never crude / rude or insulting). He'd spent all these extra hours doing all these things to bring different groups together - through music and more (he was an immigrant).

Two to three people, a scared / sensitive admin team, and boom, thousands of folks the worse for his going.

Everyone is worse for this. A lot of the categories of offense are extremely broad or very subtle and penalties are very severe.

USC professor under fire after using Chinese expression students allege sounds like English slur

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/us/usc-chinese-professor-raci...

SDG&E Worker Fired Over Alleged Racist Gesture Says He Was Cracking Knuckles

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...

Professors mobbed, stripped of teaching positions and residential life functions after suggesting students should establish their own social norms rather than having them enforced by administration

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-per...

USC business communications professor Greg Patton was replaced after he used Chinese as an example for pause words that are used in many languages. Phonetically written, the Chinese "Um, um" is "ne ga ne ga", and The Black MBA Candidates Class of 2022 complained to the school, which then removed the professor. Despite counter-protest letters signed by many other students, including many Chinese alumni, who state that the normal usage of the Chinese language should not be viewed as a pejorative, the professor was not reinstated.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/08/professor-sus...

According to the linked article, it took only 2 reports to lead to an investigation and to the decision that the CoC was violated. So a vocal minority, when not ignored, can sometimes have a big impact.

> According to the 1% rule, about 1% of Internet users are responsible for creating content [...]

I wonder how true this is now? Even if we don't count social media as "content" (and some of it certainly is) most web content is participatory in some way and I'd wager a decent percentage of web users (if not internet users) are now contributing.

I'm guessing this is the same with everyone else, but if you check Twitter and Facebook, most of the people I follow never post anything and a tiny minority post all the time.

I wonder if it isn't even more lopsided today, since sharing content is the main activity in most popular social networks today, unlike when this "rule" was coined...