It's a pretty famous letter. Should be an easy Google search.
Because I can't seriously think that woke people are saying that MLK's work must be banned, censored, and otherwise removed from history courses, national discourse, etc., which is how anti-cancel-culture people usually seem to characterize the matter.
Lots of people tried to cancel Brendan Eich because of something unrelated to the his professional career. There are still comments on HN that try to cancel him from time to time.
Does it mean that people shouldn't face criticism and negative consequences for what they do in the public sphere?
The argument was that LGBT people and their fellow travelers working for and supporting Mozilla would likely not want to continue if the head of the organization supported anti-LGBT laws. As such, that would diminish his leadership effectiveness.
How is leadership effectiveness unrelated to his professional career in a leadership role?
When I've looked into it, opposition to "cancel" seems more like the belief that rich, powerful, or famous people shouldn't suffer negative consequences for saying or doing something that liberals don't like.
It's fine to criticize people. Do you believe that someone should never be able to hold a job again because they donated money to a politician that an employee finds unsavory?
> The argument was that LGBT people and their fellow travelers working for and supporting Mozilla would likely not want to continue if the head of the organization supported anti-LGBT laws. As such, that would diminish his leadership effectiveness.
There is no proof he acted against the interests of LGBT employees at Mozilla. I like the idea of due process and if you can't come up with something that actually hurts employees then I don't find it to be a substantial argument. There are millions of people that don't support LGBT laws. We can't force them all to be jobless homeless. That's totalitarian.
What I get from your post is that an employees personal feelings are more important than facts and reality. Employees can always go somewhere else instead of launching campaigns to have someone fired.
You have changed the goalposts, because 1) "someone" is a much broader category than CEO, and 2) "an employee" is much narrower than "many employees, a board member, and external supporters."
> I like the idea of due process
Due process has never applied to employment positions. Ever.
> There is no proof he acted against the interests of LGBT employees at Mozilla
You mean against their employment interest. He did help fund opposition to their personal interests.
> We can't force them all to be jobless homeless. That's totalitarian.
Funny thing is, Eich is neither jobless nor homeless, and people still hear about him. Wikipedia summarizes his few on masks, for example, and his work on Brave regularly appears on HN.
John Stuart Mill described it much better than I in "On Liberty":
"""We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement. In these various modes a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others, for faults which directly concern only himself; but he suffers these penalties only in so far as they are the natural, and, as it were, the spontaneous consequences of the faults themselves, not because they are purposely inflicted on him for the sake of punishment. """
> an employees personal feelings
Multiple employees, and volunteers. And at least one board member.
Certainly personal feelings are important. People are turned down all the time for a position because of "bad culture fit" or "rubs me wrong" or any number of personal reasons.
The fact and reality is that we are all emotional creatures. You cannot separate them.
But now that we're well off track - what does "cancel" mean?
Because I've looked and looked, and never found a definition which fits better than "rich, powerful, or famous people facing unwanted negative consequences of actions or expressions that liberals disagree with"?
Consider how you might think differently if it were people facing unwanted negative consequences of actions or expressions that conservatives disagreed with.
When CPAC de-platformed Milo Yiannopoulos and Young Pharaoh, weren't they being canceled? Yet I have no problem with them doing that.
Whenever I try to come up with a non-partisan definition of "cancel" - one that doesn't explicitly point to "liberals" or "left" - I easily discover that of course conservatives also cancel.
Because facing negative consequences of actions or expressions is part of human nature.
Now, of course there are times when I think that the "canceling" was wrong. If someone loses their job because of their support for unionizing, or faces pressure to suppress reporting sexual harassment, then that's both canceling and illegal, and I am definitely against both cases.
My problem is that "cancel" seems to have a built-in anti-left bias, making it simply a proxy for "leftists should stop complaining."
The point is, there is always someone trying to push things one way or another, and up until about 20 years ago, it seemed like things always found their way to an equilibrium...
My how things have changed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture gives example definitions:
"to stop giving support to that person"
That happens all the time. My Senator consistently voted in ways I don't like, so I'm voting for someone else next election and not contributing to his election campaign = stop giving support = cancel? Yet, entirely acceptable.
"withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive"
You'll note that "public figures and companies" has the built-in bias to the rich, powerful, and famous I mentioned - minimum-wage service employees cannot be canceled, according to this definition.
You'll also notice a long history of, say, the NRA withdrawing support from a politician after that politician support gun sale restrictions. And what happened to Kaepernick in the NFL is surely an example of cancelling, yes?
That is, both definitions are so broad that, when stripped of its specific anti-left bias, becomes no different than what John Stuart Mill says we should expect from liberty, and may even be our duty.
Goalposts? Are we in a formal debate now?
Anyway, Brendan Eich is a person. And it doesn't matter how many employees object to him if they are in the wrong.
> I like the idea of due process
I'm not speaking from a legal standpoint. Are you willing to be terminated in a capricious way?
> You mean against their employment interest. He did help fund opposition to their personal interests.
No, I'm talking about the question of whether he discriminated against LGBT folks at Mozilla. He clearly didn't so your point is moot.
> Funny thing is, Eich is neither jobless nor homeless, and people still hear about him. Wikipedia summarizes his few on masks, for example, and his work on Brave regularly appears on HN.
Yes, many commenters on HN are unhappy he has any kind of job. That is my point. That they haven't been successful at his current gig isn't a cause for celebration, or in your case, indifference. But I actually think you might prefer him to not have a job.
> Multiple employees, and volunteers. And at least one board member.
What are you trying to prove? I don't get it.
> Certainly personal feelings are important. People are turned down all the time for a position because of "bad culture fit" or "rubs me wrong" or any number of personal reasons.
Yeah and usually that comes down to ageism and sexism.
> The fact and reality is that we are all emotional creatures. You cannot separate them.
We can use logic. There is hope.
What is your definition of "cancel"?
Capricious termination is not uncommon. I don't think you regard all capricious termination due to "cancel"? How do we apply your guideline to distinguishing if a capricious firing is or is not due to "cancel"?
So can Brendan Eich, which is what he did? Is the CEO not an employee of a company?
I think you're confused about what totalitarianism is. Totalitarianism is the government sending you to the gulag, not consumers or workers boycotting individuals or companies whose values they dislike. That's both the literal market and the marketplace of ideas doing their job.
What exactly is it actually you're suggesting here, that people aren't allowed to speak their mind, or lobby against CEOs? That Brendan Eich has some sort of job guarantee regardless of what people think of his beliefs? That's actually fairly totalitarian.
How many of them actually said so? Or was someone offended on their behalf, preemptively?
This is part of what I mean by how "cancel" is only applied to the powerful. How many managers are needed to fire someone? Often, only one.
https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/3/5579516/outfoxed-how-prote... reports about one of the fellow travelers:
> On a rainy morning this week in San Francisco, newly appointed Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich sat down for coffee with one of the people calling for his resignation. Hampton Catlin, a prominent developer of apps for the nascent Firefox OS, announced he was abandoning the platform due to Eich’s handling of the disclosure that in 2008 he donated $1,000 to the fight against same-sex marriage. California’s Proposition 8, which passed with 52 percent of the vote in 2008, made same-sex marriage illegal in California until the law was overturned by the Supreme Court. Over the course of an hour, Catlin explained the suffering that Prop. 8 caused for him and his partner, a Brit who couldn’t immigrate until marriage became legal. Catlin asked Eich for an apology. He didn’t get one.
And it's not like this reaction was out of the blue:
> ... For starters, Mozilla already fought this battle once, in 2012. That’s when Eich’s donation first became public, leading to a firestorm on Twitter.
The Verge also links to https://twitter.com/iamjessklein/status/449233331352514560 "@amjessklein Have waited too long to say this. I'm an employee of @mozilla and I'm asking @brendaneich to step down as CEO.", so there's at least one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Catlin says "After a large public outcry and several Mozilla Foundation employees publicly calling for him to step down". So there's at least "several".
Is that enough for you? If not, how many are enough?
To get back to my main thesis - which is that "cancel" has a built-in bias against left-leaning views - we need only to look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Firearms_of_Montana#Pol... , where the founder and CEO was ousted for supporting Obama. I don't see any mention of employees there, and while discussions about "cancel culture" often mention things like Eich's situation, they rarely include Cooper.
I do not know, I am interested in the real size of the potential problem.
Every change of leadership in a big corporation carries a risk of someone leaving, if not immediately, then within a few months. People who are universally liked rarely get into CEO positions. (High agreeableness makes it really hard to execute painful decisions.)
Of course, if 1 person leaves, it is not dramatic. If half of the staff leaves, it is dramatic. But how many are enough? You probably cannot answer the question any more than I do, it is the same question like "how many sand particles you need to call it a heap".
Mozilla made their choice. They have a CEO that offends no one and a market share under 1 per cent. Perhaps they would have the same market share under Eich. Perhaps not. I think that Eich was more passionate about the product than current leadership and that it would have made some difference. Individual programmers are, to some degree, fungible; Mozilla ecosystem is one of a kind.
The overarching question I have: what does "cancel" mean? According to my definition ("negative consequences to rich, powerful, or famous people because of actions or statements that the left disagrees with"), Eich was indeed canceled. But of course, my definition is little different than "those lefties need to shut up and stop complaining!" - just couched in fancier terms. [1]
Then, if he was meaningfully "canceled", does that mean that what happened was necessarily a bad thing? Obviously, as a lefty, I don't, since that would mean my complaints would never be heard.
I'll construct a dramatic hypothetical. Suppose 90% of the staff threatened to leave if Eich stayed on, because of his support for homophobic legislation. This would have shown that Eich's leadership role would have been rather ineffectual, so decided to leave, in order that Mozilla survive as an organization.
Would that still have been "cancelling" Eich in that case? And therefore would it be an intrinsically immoral or unethical act?
[1] And I still don't know how "cancel" can be applied to this Suess case, where the copyright holder [2] has decided to stop the publication on what appears to be a voluntary decision with only scattered activism for the change.
[2] Really, isn't the problem that copyright is entirely too long? Why should we wait another 40 years before a book published in 1937 enters the public domain? When he wrote it, the maximum copyright period was 56 years - until 1993. As a public domain book, we wouldn't be having this tempest in a teapot!
I would be for 10 years of automatic copyright, with the possibility to purchase up to X years more for a registration fee that would start very low but would grow to significant levels, so that only the most lucrative works stay protected after, say, 30 years.
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2013/07/01/implementation-supreme-c...
I've been on the record against DOMA for years, on constitutional grounds.
2. Catlin didn't just try to persuade me, his condition was that "Brendan Eich is completely removed from any day to day activities at Mozilla":
https://web.archive.org/web/20140401004029/http://www.teamra...
Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic called out the self-deceptive, self-pitying ending of Catlin's followup blog post for claiming to be sad about my leaving Mozilla, and for rewriting an explicit demand to remove me from any job at Mozilla, spinning his stance as just an citizen-to-citizen attempt to "try and change someone's mind":
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/mozilla...
3. All the "I'm asking @brendaneich to step down as CEO" tweets were from six people who worked for the Mozilla Foundation, not for me at the Mozilla Corporation. The two organizations are arms-length due to non-profit tax law, with separate management and boards (Mitchell Baker is the only common member, and long-standing chair, of both boards). No one who worked for me in fact tweeted asking me to step down.
You yourself quote from Catlin's wikipedia page which states my point (2), but you missed the meaning of the "Mozilla Foundation" reference there, which undermines your argument here. None of those people worked for me. They had asked the Foundation executive director, Mark Surman, for permission to tweet as they did, and he gave them a "go" sign. Again, no connection to the Corporation I was running.
Obviously there's no guaranteed cancel button that people on the left or right can press, but the left is much better organized than the right in general, and it uses soft power more effectively (see Alinsky). Some on the right aim to play by the same rules and take as many scalps as they can. This won't end well, especially as HN commenters keep misstating facts of my case to support false equivalence or "no such thing" narratives about cancel culture, reopening an old wound and making themselves look like unreliable narrators of recent history.
Of course every culture, every society, defines deviance and punishes it. This never goes away, even under classical liberalism (I'm Catholic; English penal laws weren't repealed in full until the 19th Century). It would be great if people could just get the facts of my case, attested by web.archive.org primary sources, right for a change, and move on to more current events.
Obviously I don't agree there's no such thing. What I disagree with is that we should avoid "cancel", because the active definition is little different than "liberal complaints shouldn't affect anything."
Classical liberalism (quoting John Stuart Mill) says:
"""We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement. In these various modes a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others, for faults which directly concern only himself; but he suffers these penalties only in so far as they are the natural, and, as it were, the spontaneous consequences of the faults themselves, not because they are purposely inflicted on him for the sake of punishment. """
so of course there's no appeal to classical liberalism because "unfavourable opinion" and "deviance" are closely connected.
The "more current event" discussed here is that Seuss was neither "banned" nor "canceled".
This just flew by on Apple News: "Cancel culture strikes again: Mumford & Son banjoist steps away from band after praising anti-Antifa book". Whatever you call it, this is not classical liberalism. Something new has emerged with social media combined with Critical Theory, etc. It's worth studying, not dismissing as little different from past boycotts or campaigns.
If the NRA stops giving campaign contributions to a Senator who voted for gun-control laws, then is the NRA cancelling the Senator? Some definitions are so broad that they include this otherwise totally acceptable behavior. Since most people say "cancel" is a universally bad thing, those definitions cannot be correct.
If a low-level service worker is fired for supporting the LGBTQ movement while not at work, then have they been canceled? Some definitions only apply to the rich or famous ("public figures and companies"), so exclude those people. Yet obvious if the roles are reversed, with a CEO fired for being against the LGBTQ movement, then people have no problems applying the "cancel" label.
Which is why I argue that "working definition" you refer to appears mostly like a rhetorical technique against left-leaning views.
So far no one had given me any definition, much less one which appears to be a better fit than the one I gave.
Even within the context "public figures and companies", you tell me: by your understanding of "cancel", was Kaepernick canceled? If so, then Trump was a one of the loudest people calling for his cancelling, yes? If not, why not?
Was Cooper (in the direct parent comment you replied to) canceled after he was fired from being CEO at the company he founded? If not, why not?
> "This just flew by on Apple News"
If my thesis is correct, that "cancel culture" is little different from "liberal complaints", then of course it would be a headline on Fox News.
> this is not classical liberalism
This is exactly classic liberalism. It's hard to get more classic than John Stuart Mill, and I just quoted the relevant text from "On Liberty".
Because I can't seriously think that woke people are saying that MLK's work must be banned
You are welcome to think what you like. But the fact remains that there are people trying to cancel MLK for being anti-gay.
A year ago, saying that woke people were trying to cancel Abraham Lincoln would have seemed crazy, too. Yet here we are.
Who wants to ban, censor, or otherwise remove MLK from history courses, national discourse, etc., and is that viewpoint representative of "woke" people or some sort of extreme outlier?
If cancel simply means that no one should be above criticism and that heroes aren't perfect, then ... what's wrong with that?