Now by having one you're risking your entire career and sometimes more. This is truly the dark age of the information era.
So, blacklisting: check. Excommunication: check. I'd rather not wait till it goes down further.
What has changed is that the Internet and the associated record of a person's conduct online can make the town very, very big indeed.
There's nothing new about receiving negative feedback for having and expressing unpopular opinions. That's really common in pretty much every single social group I've been in, including on HN.
The underlying mechanism has not really changed.
Nobody gives a shit when Uber classifies their drivers as independent contractors to stiff them on benefits, but everybody cares about the propriety of master/slave replication terminology. We're dealing with police violence by capitalizing Black in our style guides. Etc etc etc.
I think quite a few people gave a shit? I think you're attacking a straw man, it is perfectly possible to have opinions on small stylistic issues (like master vs main) while also thinking that there are fundamental economic things that need to change.
I'm sure that people 'care', and I suppose I'm straw-manning those people.. I'm not straw-manning the system. Time and again, challenges to monetary order aren't permitted but puritanical word-propriety is encouraged. It's an energy outlet.
I agree very much with this statement, but somehow have reached the opposite conclusion about whether "cancel culture" is a big problem that we need to spend a lot of time addressing. To me, that seems to be playing into the same issue you identified.
I was more being descriptive than prescriptive, I'm just posting here.. but it's a problem that all of the energy and outrage go into stylistic and cultural bullshit. In a perfect world we could channel that energy into community organizing, electoralism, or other forms of people getting out there and interacting with the groups they claim to speak for.
Their appeal lost in the UK just last week.
You're saying that you think that your job would be in danger if you said publicly that you thought that universities should be race-blind?
There's totally a difference, but you honestly think that this is a new thing that never used to happen?
No, but I do think it's a lot easier for someone to tweet out an inappropriate joke or get caught on video doing something obnoxious today--that have at least the potential to blow up to a greater degree than a few decades ago.
Apparently not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_comedy_television_seri...
And your claim is that this sort of thing just started happening in the last decade or two?
That's probably because you weren't listening, possibly because it was 30 years into the right whining about that under the label “political correctness” and everyone had learned to tune it out.
Now they've got a new label and marketing effort behind selling it as the boogeyman, and everything old is new again.
In response to the murder, the writer was pretty much universally condemned and the a bill was introduced in the legislature to ban writings of that sort.
The fact that so many have convinced themselves that somehow we're in some new illiberal age is comical.
Which is why that's where most of the whining that this is a new and dangerous phenomenon is coming from.
Heck, the government hyperfocus on rooting out Communism began almost immediately after the suggestion of turning the same apparatus against the KKK was rebuffed because of that organizations loyalty and patriotism.
In the states, just off the top of my head: the McCarthy era, the reaction to the 1968 Olympic raised fist incident
Aren't those examples of the kinds of things we want to stop doing?
So you are agreeing Cancel Culture is bad and we should find better ways to peacefully disagree with each other?
It's a pretty big deal when that company is your employer. We need better protections around speech in this country. Firing someone for something they said cannot be a one-sided decision. At the minimum, the worker deserves the chance to go to court/arbitration
Probably also worth noting that one does have the right to go to court if one believes one was wrongfully terminated. When Google fired James Damore, he sued. But the National Labor Relations Board ruled the firing was justified because he had made not-legally-protected statements that risked creating a hostile work environment.
There is no starting over, because there is no anonymity or way to become obscure/forgotten.
I suppose it depends how fine grain you can be when considering eras, but there were periods even within my own lifetime that were much more tolerant. In the 90s, there was a period where the influence of religious prigs had waned, and the secular prigs had yet to be taken seriously. The internet in particular was pretty wide open to ideas of all sorts, and no one would seek to ruin your life over disagreements.
If you coursen the grain to wider epochs, then yes I think you're correct.
I grew up in the Midwest and outside of the city. When I visit home, I pretend to believe in God, lie-by-omission about my bisexuality, stay silent about politics, pretend to say grace at dinner, and go to Church on Sunday mornings. If I didn't, then in many ways I'd not longer be welcome in that social group. Finding a iving-wage job in the local community would certainly be impossible. There are only a few tech firms and all the owners are members of the same bible study.
Want to see real cancel culture? Live in any of America's many culturally homogeneous rural communities for a month. Put up a Biden sign in panhandle.
None of this is a defense of cancel culture, but it's worth keeping in perspective that way more "cancelling" goes on in deeply conservative communities than in extremely liberal communities. We just call it "keeping American a Christian nation" instead of "cancel culture".
Can you point to a single example of a hiring or T&P policy that overtly discriminates on the basis of religion?
I certainly can. Wheaton College, Cedarville University, and Liberty University come to mind. None of those places will hire non-Christians, and a Statement of Faith is a required component of every faculty application.
The standard isn't "can't include God", but "must fit the facts". God is unprovable and untestable; making a theory depend on a God makes the theory unprovable and untestable. Most scientists who also have religious beliefs don't see the two conflicting; their religion gives the why, their profession the how.
Or more succinctly, no one is blackballing scientists for saying "I believe God caused the Big Bang". But claims of, for instance, "I believe the world was created 6000 years ago over a period of 7 literal days" requires some evidence beyond "My understanding of the Bible tells me so", and doesn't jibe with your initial statement of empirical scientific study.
The bible, esp. genesis, is taken metaphorically, or else a lot of problematic interpretations will arise.
Also, even scholars of the Abrahamic faiths do not readily disclose their intimate religious faith, lest their work be discredited — such as a professor who studies Christianity, but holds Islamic faith.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQhMllQ-ODw&feature=emb_logo
I'm on the autism spectrum, as are many others around here. Social rules are hard in the best of times. Now they are impossible to follow, and breaking them is outright dangerous.
But I can keep to myself, I guess I'll be fine.
My point here is not to defend cancel culture, but rather to point out that something like it has always existed and still exists on the right. IMO the only solution is everyone realizing this fact and explicitly agreeing to some form of detente.
I'm not holding my breath, but step zero is both sides realizing that the their side also does the thing they're complaining about.
I'm sorry that you've had to go through those experiences, but not everyone rural or Christian is like that, and it's very harmful to characterize them that way. It's not accurate to stereotype Christians as hateful any more than it's accurate to stereotype Muslims as supporting terrorism. They are extremely diverse groups with some truly bad subgroups, but also some good ones, and most subgroups are in-between. The extremes aren't representative of the group as a whole.
The age of Enlightement and the idea of liberalism have been so powerful because they programmatically went against any kind of censorship. Their ideas helped to see how humans are truly all equal, that we all share what it means to be human.
Identity politics set out to destroy these ideas. It is the enemy of liberalism, of a free flow of ideas, of a will to see us all as equals. It divides us into groups, based on biological features like the color of our skin, our age and our genitals.
This insanity will not end well.
And Donald Trump and Fox News have a heck of a lot of cultural and institutional power.
[1] https://uproxx.com/movies/pedro-pascal-sister-trans-lux-gina...
The problem isn't that ideologues are new, it is that ideology has seeped into the highest levels of education and culture. You have people across the spectrum of disciplines and stances afraid to contradict the received knowledge of the masses (or one of usually two sects).
This hasn't been the case for a LONG TIME.
I can't recall another era were young authors were afraid of being marginalized by other young people for being young and having radical (and sometimes plain stupid) ideas.
I remember old, conservative people doing it to youngsters, but not to themselves, despite being the ones with bad - sometimes very bad - thoughts.
Sometimes I miss the lulz of the sheep being taken to slaughter by tubgirl and goatse.
It isn't something you would want to boast about running and would have people thinking ill of you but it doesn't really trigger outrage.
Lest you think this only happens to the Alex Jones of the world, look at what's happening in the young adults world: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/01/young-adult-au...
Granted, but what's the logic here? We ought to content ourselves with regression so long as no one is being imprisoned or killed? We want to progress, not regress. We don't want a conformist society, we want a tolerant society[^1]. We want free speech[^2], not compelled/coerced speech. We want ideas to compete freely so the best rise to the top; we don't want a prescribed set of beliefs to be forced on everyone.
[^1]: (yes, I know all about the Paradox of Tolerance and how some use it to give themselves moral license to persecute anyone they deep intolerant).
[^2]: No, I'm not talking about the strict 1st Amendment legal definition, but the broader principle.
I think for it to imply "it's okay to backslide" we have to have actually broached a time we've backslid -from-. Pursuant to the article, I don't really consider it backsliding if authors are now having second thoughts about writing from cultural perspectives other than their own. They have to be selective, of course, but we don't need, for instance, a white author writing about noble savages. That's not to say a white author can't write a western; it does mean they need to be very careful with the tone of it, or, yes, risk offending people. And recognize that some people will be offended no matter what, so they also need to recognize that some people aren't worth listening to.
It's called sensitivity, not censorship. Yes, sensitivity might lead to self-censorship, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. And you may miss the mark, and there will be consequences, and you might hit the mark but still have angry people, but angry people have yelled about every piece of literature we have. It's a balancing act, and it always has been; and I would contend consequences now are the weakest they have ever been.
I wasn't assuming or presuming, I was asking.
> What/when are we backsliding from? There was never some 'golden age' where comments anathema to the culture at large wouldn't have consequences.
We're not just talking about comments that are "anathema to the culture at large", we're often talking about comments that offend only about 10% of the population. Things like "citing a celebrated academic's work on the efficacy of nonviolent protest" or "quoting a black man who wished more attention was paid to other issues in his community [besides police violence]" or "accidentally making the 'ok' gesture". With that out of the way, to answer your question more broadly, it has been rare in my life for people to be terminated even for quite controversial speech, and certainly not due to explicit pressure from large, often coordinated groups of strangers. If you were the public face of a company you were expected to steer clear of controversy, but ordinary people didn't need to fear a loss of income or access to healthcare.
The worst of it was during the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars when it was controversial to be seen as unpatriotic, but even then I think ordinary people were mostly insulated from the effects (i.e., it was "punching up"), the effects weren't especially chilling, and society quickly rallied around shared free-speech values and righted itself. For what it's worth, I don't think conservatives 15 years ago were morally better than today's woke progressives; rather, I think the difference is social media (notably, conservatives canceled Colin Kaepernick almost immediately after social media cancelation came into existence).
> It's called sensitivity, not censorship.
I didn't call it censorship?
> Pursuant to the article, I don't really consider it backsliding if authors are now having second thoughts about writing from cultural perspectives other than their own.
I've never found "ends justify the means" arguments to be very compelling, personally.
> And you may miss the mark, and there will be consequences
One problem with cancel culture is that there are consequences even if your speech is perfectly correct and moral, e.g., advocating for nonviolent protest. It turns out people with few scruples about canceling also tend to lack scruples about whom they target. And to be clear, "consequences" aren't "you've offended someone and now they won't speak with you"; rather, they're "you've offended someone and now they've rounded up a hundred people to harass your employer into firing you with the express purposes of making an example out of you for other would-be non-conformists".
> I would contend consequences now are the weakest they have ever been.
I strongly disagree. Worse by far than any time in my memory.
> I strongly disagree. Worse by far than any time in my memory.
And yet we have literal nazis posting on social media for the world to see, with the occasional one losing their job, and that's it. Hardly a chilling effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Olympics_Black_Power_salu...
Is it just social media, or is it media? When somebody does a thing visibly enough to rile up a crowd... the crowd gets riled. What's new here? The words "cancel culture".
The argument exists as a cover for constant relitigating of ideas that by all rational measures have lost in the "marketplace of ideas" time and time again.
If every single astronomy journal ever released contained a segment arguing about the merits of geocentrism because a few wackos continue to demand their right to "free speech and open debate" (which in reality means: unlimited speaking time on somebody else's platform), there would be no room for new science amid all the repetitive debunking.
Some debates are settled. Geocentrism is wrong. Racism is wrong. The holocaust happened. Authoritarianism is bad. Facts exist.
Moreover, "marketplace of ideas" is a metaphor for what happens in a society that has a high degree of free speech: the best most valid ideas rise to the top. You argue that the marketplace metaphor doesn't work because bias exists and because ideas vary in validity, but that doesn't make sense--these facts are the very mechanism by which the marketplace metaphor works: in speech-tolerant societies, a diversity of ideas compete and the best, most valid ideas rise to the top irrespective of bias.
This is a myth perpetuated by selective cultural memory. The Nazis were all about "free speech" before they were in power. They frequently complained about "Free speech" when papers published editorials criticizing them, or when their public appearances were protested, or when opinion pages didn't present "both sides".
One widely used Nazi propaganda poster from 1928 even showed Hitler with a big "CENSORED" block over his mouth, captioned "Only One of the 2000 million people in the world is not allowed to speak in Germany"[1]
> in speech-tolerant societies, a diversity of ideas compete and the best, most valid ideas rise to the top irrespective of bias.
I'm not sure that you understand what "bias" means. Bias is that which leads people to believe in ideas that are false for various sometimes difficult to quantify reasons. The fact that evidence opposing flat-eartherism is available has not prevented that idea from gaining popularity, in fact it is more popular today in 2021 than it ever has been.
The "marketplace" metaphor itself exposes that the argument comes from a utopian perspective, the argument only works if you pre-suppose that a free and unregulated economic market produces best results, but we know from experience that it produces monopolies, child labor, and bread doped with sawdust.
Public discourse is like a market in some ways, namely that people with more money are able to advance their ideas further by buying media outlets and marketing broadly and engaging in deceptive communication that exploits cognitive bias to acquire more believers, in just the same way as people with more money are able to buy out and undercut competition and exploit addictions and consumer psychology to get more sales than their products deserve.
1. https://twitter.com/_amroali/status/1190809322315534336?s=20
The first thing nazis did was to revoke free speech rights. That's an example of authoritarianism and free speech being opposites.
> Indeed, authoritarianism in general and Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc in particular always starts with speech restrictions
Authoritarianism virtually requires restrictions on speech to come into its own.
Regardless - "some companies won't work with you" is effectively a blacklist for those who don't have traditional backgrounds. Another point is that the online social circles acts as a support network for some disenfranchised folks (queers like myself), and when that gets turned against them, it gets ugly.
I don't think I'm exaggerating that we're in a satanic panic against certain kind of art and works.
(Not providing public links out of real concern for safety, but happy to if individuals DM me here.)
The only way to stop this is enforcement with teeth.
Ethically, this is why we have organizations like the ACLU, ADA, and many, many others to be the enforcement with teeth. It's an uphill battle. I would disagree in the sense that pushing back against censorship - particularly of minorities - has many battlegrounds, not just enforcement with teeth. Greater social awareness/acceptance, education (history of blacklisting of sexual minorities for example), grassroots activism of simply supporting authors at risk of being deplatformed ... no sense in ignoring a tool that's available.
"cancel culture" has always existed. The only thing that is changing is that who is "cancelled" is no longer chosen by TV producers and news editors (ie, white men), but democratically by self-directed popular discourse.
In 2003 the Dixie Chicks said at a show in london, "We don't want this war, we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas". Immediately their recording contracts were cancelled, venues would no longer book their shows, radio stations would no longer play them, MTV stopped showing their music videos, they lost all of their sponsorships, and their colleagues in the genre ostracized them and started including segments in their shows about how the Dixie Chicks are terrorists.
If that's not cancel culture, what is? Why is it okay and normal for white male venue owners, disc jockeys, and record label CEOs to destroy somebody's career for a single sentence of political speech, but "political correctness run amok" when marginalized people on twitter decide that they aren't going to buy tickets to a show with a comedian who's known for assaulting female stagehands?
To the second point: I would disagree in the sense that (a) it is dangerous to conflate 'people in a position of power actively using their established power to censor others' and 'mere disagreement'. Censorship becomes censorship when there is active harassment. (b) The latter example of marginalized people on twitter disagreeing isn't such - until the threats are stated. And there is a lot of horizontal violence that exists on that platform.
The way I'd personally reframe this issue of (self)-censorship is that we're in a moral panic wave - certain platforms have made it incredibly easy for creators to be mobbed if they step out of acceptable discourse, regardless of their politics.
"Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant — society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it — its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself."
Surely if you think that majoritarian tyranny is bad, you must also believe that minoritarian tyranny is far worse, right? Such as when a select few individuals of a particular racial, gender, and social class, have complete control over popular media, with the sole power to decide who is successful and what damaging information about powerful people can becomes public knowledge and which is kept secret?
Also, quoting Mill while claiming that an individual consumer freely choosing to not buy a product is "tyranny" is laughable to the highest degree.
These are two different things, though. You can disempower the majority without empowering the minority. Power is not a zero-sum game - you can disclaim it without handing it over to someone else.
More broadly, just because some power can be exercised by somebody, doesn't mean that it has to be exercised by anybody. To the extent that it may be necessary for a functioning society, it's generally best to decentralize power to the extent possible - think council democracy and similar arrangements, where decisions are made at the lowest applicable levels, and delegation of power flows upwards, not downwards. Some real-world approximations of these can be seen with the Zapatistas, and more recently in Rojava. In both cases, there are local governments that can democratically ban certain things as you've described - but, being local, their power is inherently limited in scope. Thus, it's tyranny of the local majority, and dissenters are free to move away and organize their own communities that do not implement such bans (but still federate with others that do).
Yes, congratulations, you found the point.
The current media landscape is nothing like that, because the current media landscape is only about 10 years old. For all of modern history until the introduction of social media sites like youtube, twitter, and facebook, the only way to spread information or opinion was to get the editors of for-profit media companies to agree to publish you.
It is beside the point but also worth pointing out that also until very recently, like the last decade, the editors of those institutions have been of a very particular gender and racial demographic.
The new media, with all of it's "discourse" is democratic editorialism. Welcome to the freest market of ideas the world has ever seen. You can't call up your buddies Ailes, Rosenthal, Jordan, Sorenson, and Klose to tell the public what to think about you anymore.
> Lastly, again your third paragraph is a straw man.
We're talking about "cancel culture" here, aren't we? The phenomenon where members of the public decide based on new information to stop buying products because of the beliefs and actions of their creators? What is that if not the democratic free-market action that Mill so often advocated as the optimal way to organize society?
Oh wait, is that anti-Semitic to say? Then was it anti-white of you to say?
Also being cancelled for opposing a war that was engineered by globalist neocons is not proof that the interests of white males used to be the basis for cancelling people lol.
And there's nothing "democratic" about this lol, the cancelling is still done to suit the interests of those "white" people who run these organisations. No one cares if some people don't want to buy some tickets to a show, they care when Mastercard and Visa have secret blacklists of anyone to the right of Mitt Romney that they don't allow to transact on their monopoly global financial network.
When 1 person decides to make a new law, that's autocracy, and it's a bad thing. When a supermajority of voters decide to make a new law, that's democracy, and it's a good thing.
When a couple dozen editors, CEOs, and DJs decided to end the Dixie Chicks' careers by banning them from access to all channels of outreach to the public, that was a bad thing and also censorship.
When tens of millions of people decided they don't want to go to Louis CK's shows anymore and he's finding it hard to find an audience as a result, there's nothing wrong with that. Lots of people independently deciding that they don't like you is not censorship.
If it's a small unrepresentative number of people who dislike a person, group, or thing, why would anybody care?
Is it, really? Even if the new law is extremely oppressive to the minority?
I mean, our drug laws are a mess that caused extreme grief (prison etc) to millions of people by now. But they were supported by wide majorities of the electorate. Were they a good thing? How about the Prohibition? Sodomy laws?
It's another thing for some nobody to lose a job as a stock broker because they made a joke about the 3/5ths compromise that was funny enough to go viral on TikTok where it then pissed off some other nobodies and then all the blue checks piled on.
The Dixie chicks were playing with fire and they knew it. Some rando isn't.
In 200 BC, if you were excommunicated from a tribe, it would be horrible, but you could walk 20 miles and join another tribe that hasn't heard or bought into the ostracization.
In 2021 AD, if you are excommunicated from an industry on the internet, there's nowhere else you can physically go. The entire intellectual globe is connected online. Excommunication is now worse than it used to be -- it's global.
When has this ever happened? There's lots of claims that people have been cancelled and can never work in their field again, but actual examples never seem to materialize.
The companies don't have to believe you did anything wrong. They just have to fear that the mob might believe it and hurt their bottom line.
And is that good?
There's ample evidence that the current is the greatest opportunity for dissenting thought and opinion to have massive reach without much consequence or effort.
The idea that we're in a dark age of thought is purely rhetorical and only serves to frame a narrative that further amplifies ideas that would never had a chance to propagate before the information era.
Furthermore, we are living in a time of such absurdity that there are politicians giving internationally televised press conferences about how their speech is being suppressed and they have no power.
The only self-restriction is by people that don't have the conviction to stand by their ideas, or actually have not thought through their perspective to adequate level of introspection and evidence that can survive free and open discourse. Instead it's much easier to exclaim victimhood and censorship and not bother examining ideas beyond a gut feeling.
It's definitely an interesting time to be alive.
MAGA people can't be cancelled, and it's a badge of honor if attempted. But well-meaning unorthodox liberals really have to watch themselves.
The focus is often on censoring those on the right (which does happen too), but those on the left may be the most censored.
This guy gets it
And there is also of neoliberals that pretend to be leftist, yes, so called "Radlibs".
Then there are leftists that accuse other leftists that aren't of their same brand of being liberals, for example MLs calling anarchists liberals because they admit markets, or anarchists calling MLs capitalists/liberals because of state capitalism and the DotP, and then MLs calling DemSocs liberals because they want to operate at least partiallty within "bourgeois democracy", etc...
It's a very North America thing, though.
> And there is also of neoliberals that pretend to be leftist, yes, so called "Radlibs".
These are the people doing the canceling (both to the left and the right of them). It's worth nothing the distinction as it's this group with the power.
Or, at least, approximately nobody; you can find examples of anything, but it's not like a significant thing.
Leftism emerged as sociology critiqued the idealist liberal notions for their ignorance of real-word effects due to material reality on the actual freedom and oppressive social structures that strict classical liberalism creates.
Who has ever been fired for supporting Sanders over Biden?
> Twitter bans leftist accounts all the time as well.
Probably not because they were leftist, but rather because they violated some rule (and at that, probably only a small fraction of Tweets which violate their rules). Twitter is pretty happy to fill my timeline with the craziest left-wing stuff including a lot of things that violate their own rules.
> Take a look at every VC in our industry and they espouse staunchly establishment neo-liberal policies.
What? You're surprised that VC support capitalist policies? You know what "VC" stands for, right? Anyway, "supporting capitalist policies" is not the same thing as "canceling leftists".
This is a poorly reasoned post.
But anyway, accepting the new position of the goal posts, can you demonstrate examples of people who were passed up for promotion. Of course it's harder to prove these things causally, but if it happens often enough to have a chilling effect it should surely be trivial to identify one-or-two cut and dry cases?
Regardless, the point I'm making is that leftists must self-censor (just like the right wing people in the article) because those in power are anti-left neo-liberals.
Lol nope.
> Regardless, the point I'm making is that leftists must self-censor (just like the right wing people in the article) because those in power are anti-left neo-liberals.
Ok, I disagree with your point. I don’t like conservative beliefs, but people with even moderate points of view get fired due to Twitter mobs. There are perhaps hundreds of videos of people physically assaulting strangers for wearing MAGA hats (you know, “Social Consequences” TM). I’m not aware of any similar instances of moderate liberals attacking progressives or getting them fired or even passed up for promotion. I don’t think there’s any comparison at all.
Look at what the liberals have done to Tara Reade for instance. There's a group on Twitter called KHive that's dedicated to taking down leftists.
You just don't hear about this stuff as much because again, the neo-liberals control the media and they don't want to show you how much they punch left.
This is also a fractal observation, relative to the perspective of "orthodoxy" you are taking at the moment; within the directly opposed group, there is another dangerous place of just outside the opposed group's orthodoxy.
I'd contrast this with the common intuitive belief that by indicating your agreement with the orthodoxy in most other ways, you've somehow built up "credit" with which you can "afford" a deviation. I would observe that model does not match reality very often. There's a few relatively idealistic communities where that may work, but in general that is not how people work.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
They regularly have people on expressing minority views that directly contest facts accepted by the majority of the US and the world.
> Shor is still consulting in Democratic politics, but he is no longer working for a firm that restricts his freedom to publicly opine.
This is why claims of "cancel culture" aren't taken seriously. If he was "cancelled", but is still gainfully employed in the field of his choice and expertise what does "cancelled" really mean?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Crispin_Miller
2020: "As of September 2020, Miller is under a behavioral review by New York University ...".
An 'educational moment' for NYU students and faculty ..
>> There's ample evidence that the current is the greatest opportunity for dissenting thought and opinion to have massive reach without much consequence or effort.
.. and possibly your GP.
https://www.afaf.org.uk/the-banned-list/ https://sutherlandhousebooks.com/who-cancel/
Crucially, nowadays, you can still communicate when cancelled. Perhaps to a smaller audience, but this is a necessity because of how human social interactions work.
Yeah, and while the right loves to use “lynching” as a metaphor for the public criticisms they get that they also label as “cancel culture”, it's worth noting that when the cancel culture shoe was on the other foot regarding race issues, the lynchings (including of Whites) for expressing the wrong views were, frequently, not at all metaphorical.
I'd suggest you read the entire thread to get context on the point of contention.
No, the argument is “things used to be more extreme in this precise area, so the argument that the present situation is a new and unique historical threat is false”.
Public and professional consequences have always existed and they always should. The idea that people should be able to do anything and never suffer repercussions for their actions would lead to an unhealthy world.
That second link is telling - they list 9 people; one lost a book deal, one had a book withdrawn, one had to switch to smaller publisher, and one lost an honorary charity position. How is this being cancelled?
Jerry Seinfeld, a mainstream comedian, stopped playing at college campuses years ago already because he was getting picked apart and no longer welcome. at precisely the place that is supposed to be the most transgressive and open to ideas! a place to expand minds, remember? now it fully embraces orthodoxy and censorship.
or take the case of Bret Weinstein. a liberal, progressive professor who was exiled from campus for not bending to the mob. now he's being called a eugenicist, white supremacist and more with little resistance. here's a transcript from Clubhouse just a few days ago:
Brett W: "Let me just say, I am an evolutionary biologist. I'm very interested in how language actually changes..."
Brooklyn: "A eugenicist."
Brett: "Say again?"
Brooklyn: "A eugenicist. That's what you mean as evolution..."
Brett: "No, no, no..."
Brooklyn: "Those are the same thing."
Brett: "No, it's not the same thing."
Brooklyn: "They are the same. They are the same. I've seen the research. They are the same. You will not argue that here, you're not about to wiggle out of that."
you can hear the whole exchange here: https://youtu.be/YyCj5UaG1kI?t=9900
this isn't just a one off thing, it's increasingly prevalent. if we're not already in an intellectual dark age, we're on the fast track to it. the trend line is clear.
Someone calling you a eugenicist is not a "cancellation." Moreover, Weinstein was not fired, and has an arguably more distinguished career now than before.
They slandered him unfairly, then prevented him from responding unless he met their demands of sending cash via Venmo for some supposed slight against black creators.
They did this in a semi-public forum without any concern for him or his reputation. They did it with zero fear of repercussions because they are emboldened by the fact that our current society makes certain people completely beyond reproach due to the color of their skin (or other identity characteristics).
It was wrong, and the fact that people won't call it out when they certainly would if the variables were changed, is exactly why these "dumb people" will continue to do it. Stop giving them a free pass.
Was Jerry Seinfeld banned from any campuses? Or did he elect to stop performing at campuses? From everything I've read, it was a choice he personally made.
So, why did he make that choice? Well, because people didn't find his jokes funny. And moreover, they had reasons that they didn't find them funny. He couldn't stand the heat, and left the kitchen.
Free speech is not freedom from critical response. This isn't some failure of free speech on campus, it's a failure of one comedian to keep his material fresh.
and it's not just Seinfeld, many comedians have said the same thing. as Dave Chappelle recently pointed out, the audience is the problem:
Side note: was Seinfeld ever funny or were we just laughing at him the whole time?
Previously, they may not have been able to disseminate their ideas at all or may have actually been jailed or killed to contain their ideas.
How would even prevent someone from being "cancelled" without taking away publishers' freedom of expression?
If you can write a book, you can self-publish on Amazon or on Amazon competitor's and reach a commercial audience billions large.
If a self-publishing marketplace for some reason won't take you, you can host a pdf on a $5/month server that can reach every internet connected individual with a format that can be read by that internet connected device.
It's hard to say that these people don't have the conviction to stand by their ideas. They are losing the right to speak in front of others because they are standing by their ideas.
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/08/professor-sus...
[2] https://www.bschools.org/blog/ucla-anderson-professor-suspen...
>The university’s Office for Equity, Equal Opportunity and Title IX (EEO-TIX) looked into this matter and concluded that the concerns expressed by students were sincere, but that Professor Patton’s actions did not violate the university’s policy. They have also communicated this to the professor and he allowed me to share their conclusion with you.
>To be clear, Professor Patton was never suspended nor did his status at Marshall change. He is currently teaching in Marshall’s EMBA program and he will continue his regular teaching schedule next semester.
Seems to me there has been some misinformation in this matter. The professor ended up getting paid holiday if anything.
Yeah, people are just imagining the waves of deplatforming and online censorship, being fired from their jobs for dissenting from the orthodoxy.
The whole point of intellectual exchange and growth is from the idea of freely sharing ideas regardless of how "thought through" they are. How do you ever go about sharpening a knife if you aren't encouraged to bring a dull one to the grinder?
Have YOU "thought through" your theory/argument/belief/ideology here?
This is nonsense. Losing your audience has always been a concern for authors and it is easier to get an audience now than it has ever been.
The topic becomes too controversial for a vocal minority and an author "voluntarily" self-censored. I chuckled when you said she did it herself. She did, likely after she was told what would happen otherwise.
I chuckled, because I assume you think she is free the way Sartre suggested she is free?
| This is truly the dark age of the information era.
and this:
| popular platforms are pressured to not do business with you
Both implies greater forces at play than a small, small minority of voices on twitter making authors feel bad.
Social media gave everyone a voice, what I don't understand is why anyone is surprised that there are vocal micro-minorities like this.
Years ago, they wrote a letter to the editor or the television station. Now they write it on Twitter.
That's not a dark age, and the opportunity to publish is much, much better now than it has ever been in the modern era.
| She did, likely after she was told what would happen otherwise.
Do you have any evidence of this or are you just saying it?
Do you have any evidence of this or are you just saying it? "
If you are asking if I have inside information and maybe personal email between author and medium. I do not. It would be odd if I did. What I do have, however, is rather vivid memories of the same kind of idiocy working in practice in the old country, the only difference being that it was done under barely hidden threat from the state. All I have is instinct and here it is flashing bright red, because there are people in US right now, who are happily accepting this not only acceptable, but necessary ( not completely unlike communism era writers writing morality plays about the importance of writing things that are not upsetting to the system ).
"I was responding to this:
| This is truly the dark age of the information era.
and this:
| popular platforms are pressured to not do business with you
Both implies greater forces at play than a small, small minority of voices on twitter making authors feel bad.
Social media gave everyone a voice, what I don't understand is why anyone is surprised that there are vocal micro-minorities like this.
Years ago, they wrote a letter to the editor or the television station. Now they write it on Twitter.
That's not a dark age, and the opportunity to publish is much, much better now than it has ever been in the modern era."
If dissenting voices are silenced, it absolutely bears comparison to a dark age of information. You cannot excuse it. Nor should you.
I think statements like this are hysterical and ahistorical. The amount of actual censorship and the way moral panics occurred throughout history make twitter dogpiling look absolutely quaint in comparison.
I don't disagree with Kazuo Ishiguro one bit, but I think all it means is that authors need to get thicker skin, because unlike the past, they can read their readers opinions.
I find this line of defense interesting. Can you elaborate a little further, because I would want to avoid putting words in your mouth? Are suggesting that the overall volume of censorship is lower so it can be ignored and explained away? I find your perspective somewhat fascinating.
Cancel culture does not have the (physical) death penalty, only a possibly social one, but the impulse seems similar. Once you are put on the show trial, you are expected to grovel, beg, repudiate yourself etc. before being finally dispatched.
Plus, what interests me is the underlying mentality. It seems to be similar. It only does not have enough power right now, fortunately.
But the idea of destroying the heretic in maximal possible extent seems to be a fairly consistent common denominator. It is actually useful to know that it is still present in contemporary population; it means that if enough things go wrong and that faction gains power, you will see similar results once again.
It has much more in common with the Amish than it does with Soviet style authoritarianism.
Cancel culture coming for me yet? No? Obama and Trump have condemned it and here we are.
It's hard, from the outside of the bubble of this generally white and male forum, sometimes to appreciate how badly other people have it. Some people are effectively cancelled all the time and even a small taste of it has people in an uproar here. Perhaps a little empathy on all sides would be beneficial.
* The dutch translator for Amanda Gorman's inaugural poem quit after backlash due to the fact that they are a white, nonbinary individual rather than a "spoken-word artist, young, female and unapologetically Black". This despite the fact that they were specifically chosen by Gorman, herself a black female. [0]
* Back in 2018, a black female student at Smith College complained of being discriminated against for "eating while black" because she was asked to leave an area that had been marked as off-limits to everyone. Subsequent investigations revealed the employees involved did nothing wrong and did not target the student. Despite this, the New York Times reported last week that they continue to receive harassment and threats. One woman, a cafeteria worker who suffers from chronic health issues, can't find employment because of it. The ACLU has continued to insist that the employees wronged the student, despite the result of the investigations. [1]
* The YA fiction scene is constantly embroiled in controversy, often due to perceived crimes against woke culture. In one notable instance, the author Amelie Wen Zhao, a Chinese-American immigrant, had her upcoming novel cancelled and her career derailed due to the story involving a society in which people could be enslaved on a basis not involving the color of their skin. [2]
* A highly praised science fiction short story published in Clarksworld magazine called "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter", written by a trans author who was repurposing the meme, was pulled (along with all of the author's future submissions) after intense public backlash towards the author by the Twitter woke mob. [3]
* Glenn Greenwald, a gay journalist, has been targeted in recent weeks as a "transphobe" for drawing attention to recent study defending a book questioning if young people are being pressured into transitioning too strongly against an ACLU lawyer who was publicly arguing the book should be censored, and for drawing attention to recent research regarding the skyrocketing rates of those who identify as LGBTQ in the youngest generations [4] [5]
Plenty of women, people of color, members of the LGBT community, and the poor are being targeted and harmed for not toeing the cultural party line. This cultish group think is dangerous for individuals, and it's dangerous for our society, regardless of who you are.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/01/amanda-gorman-...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/us/smith-college-race.htm...
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/in-ya-where-is-...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/17/sci-fi-magazin...
[4] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-ongoing-death-of-free-s...
[5] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1364617687423471621
Defending the right of someone to write a book about their thinly veiled hatred is one thing; commenting that you think there’s a good point in it and other people should read it is another.
Ok, let us look at your examples and see how "white males" fared in it, right?
"same-sex marriages illegal" - white male gays had no exception.
"Hitler and Franco" - the first one massacred helluva lot of white males (Czechs, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians etc.). The second one led a civil war against whom? White male Spanish republicans.
"mass shooting of a synagogue" - are Jewish people white or not in your book? Because they seem to be considered white whenever affirmative action applies or Israeli-Palestinian conflict is being discussed (ironically so, given that random Israelis and Palestinians are hard to tell apart by color of their skins).
Do you have some examples?
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/07/nyt-opinion-bennet-...
Incited by "violence" (mostly property damage, some clashes with cops trying to box in and disperse non-violent protestors) - but calling for dispersal of everyone. Using the military to crush a civil rights movement
Please show me where he said peaceful protestors should have force used upon them.
The military isn't going to walk through the crowd picking out the few people smashing windows or throwing bottles. That would not be an OVERWHELMING SHOW OF FORCE. They would march on the crowds, and almost inevitably use lethal force on them. Even if the target is only the ones throwing bottles or smashing windows, the military cannot and would not make that distinction in the moment.
We don't have to imagine what it would be like, it's happened before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
Do you understand the difference between how you say something, and the ideas you are conveying? The thing he suggested was using military force on the people protesting.
Even setting aside that. Even if he did mean to magically only use military force on protestors who broke the law. There were a lot of protests happening peacefully, but after an 8pm curfew - those would have been lawbreakers... and also peaceful protestors. Should they have military force used on them because they broke a curfew? Tom Cotton appears to think so
https://www.wsj.com/articles/academic-freedom-is-withering-1...
depending on if you consider george will "mainstream"- he is an establishment conservative which certainly is a dissenting viewpoint at the washington post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/unprecedented-untarg...
not a newspaper, but a national magazine a front page article with a definitively non-mainstream message: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/04/good-guys-with-guns-soci...
Seems like a mainstream article. Not sure what the point of this was? I didn't look at the articles mentioned in this article so if that was your point then let me know so I can review them.
> https://www.wsj.com/articles/academic-freedom-is-withering-1...
I got a paywall so I could only read part of the article. The first part of the article seems to agree with my point that viewpoint discrimination is in fact happening. I didn't get to anything about newspapers before I got the paywall so I don't know what exact this had to do with what I posted. The article seemed quite mainstream to me though.
> depending on if you consider george will "mainstream"- he is an establishment conservative which certainly is a dissenting viewpoint at the washington post
I am getting a paywall so I couldn't read the article, but it seemed mainstream. Based on what I could gather it sounds like he supports a more fiscally responsible stimulus and to have it targeted to people who actually need it rather than to everybody. Assuming that is the gist of the article then I think that is decently mainstream. I would agree that it is a dissenting viewpoint for the Washington Post though.
>not a newspaper, but a national magazine a front page article with a definitively non-mainstream message
This article was pretty long so I skimmed it (so if I missed an important detail let me know). It sounds like a mainstream message. Gun ownership and protection of oneself with guns is a mainstream message in the US. Maybe it is a bit non-mainstream since the author is a socialist, but nothing stood out as out of the norm.
The last article is not mainstream at all. Gun ownership as a means of pushing a leftist agenda is extremely different from the somewhat mainstream, right-leaning ideas about gun ownership
We shouldn’t assume that all or even most unpopular opinions will advance our intellectual progress. Like always there’s plenty of noise.
I’m not keen on the automated (AI) filtering though, or how fast opinions can spread in the Information Age. Feels like we’re headed for disaster by skipping the organic and slow human vetting process.
Certainly it's true that the Overton window has shifted in large sections of the legacy media, but the Overton window always existed. The idea that its illegitimate for a private organization to shift their personal Overton window seems vaguely authoritarian to me.
Anyway it's never been easier to grow, reach, and monetize your personal audience (substack, podcasts, etc.) without gatekeepers.