I try to do right from my "side," but sometimes it's scary when popular checkmarked people on Twitter call for genocides of "red" states, where I happen to live, to thunderous applause.
I try to do right from my "side," but sometimes it's scary when popular checkmarked people on Twitter call for genocides of "red" states, where I happen to live, to thunderous applause.
What I see as troubling is the "cancel culture", the force of the righteous mob. I believe that a society with more justice and grace than we have now can be built entirely without it, and that the intolerant fighters for inclusion and tolerance make the prospects of building such a society weaker.
You can't force people to be just, loving, and caring. You can force them feign that, but I suppose you very well understand how fraught such a society would be. There is a number of historical examples, all sad.
"They’re mostly people whose elders, the people who might guide them to a fierce but strategic advocacy, were murdered by police or mob violence, thrown in prison for bullshit reasons, or allowed to die in a plague. If you can bring empathy for the guy who got fired from Google for circulating a paper that made his colleagues uncomfortable, you can bring it for people who are dealing with a strange world with no one to talk to who gets what they’re going through."
https://viewfinderfox.com/history-is-canceled/
This is the part where I'd anticipate a crusader type accusing me of infantalizing people if I were on Twitter. I don't think it's entirely people who have no guidance + people taking up their cause (often without asking), but I think it's a large part of it. Some of it, maybe most of it, is Well-Meaning Allies causing a lot of noise while not listening to the people they're trying to help. I had a cis woman on Twitter lecture me on nonbinary identity because she didn't realize I was describing my own experience. I think that type is what most people get annoyed at, and sometimes their anger/fear has splash damage on people who didn't ask for that help.
The founders of great spiritual movements, Buddha, Christ, Muhammad, all warned against revenge and called for forgiveness (even though Quran calls more to the due process and justice while gospels call to radical forgiveness). This is easy to understand rationally: a society with a lot of revenge keeps killing itself and keeps nurturing cruelty. Such societies tend to not survive for long.
I'm very sorry for all the Black, queer, Jewish, Arabian, East Asian, etc people who were victims of bitter oppression. I adore those of them who struggle for justice, cessation of oppression, peace, and reconciliation with the rest of the society. But I would not join those of them who strive for a war and a revenge.
Fighting against a powerful enemy, it's important to be watchful and not become the enemy's mirror image. I hope the people among them who possess more wisdom and compassion will eventually help most of them choose a better path.
The OP is referring to issus which are faced by LGBTQI rights advocacy. Who do you think they're waging war on? How many people has radical gay rights murdered recently?
The lure to use the fury of the crowd gathered for a just cause is always strong for their leaders. Holding this fury back and not allowing it to turn the gathering into a riot is always hard work for those leaders who strive for a non-agressive way to protest.
Same applies online.
Or is this that thing where shop windows are more important then lives?
When someone tells others to vote with their wallets against something that is contrary to their own interests if a conservative is effected by people's free choice not to associate with him we are told its "cancel culture" likewise when someone hires someone nearly entirely for their image then no longer desires to be associated with their former hire's flagging popularity which is flagging precisely because of their own bad behavior.
There is not a week that goes by that a conservative group of some stripe is not calling for the boycott of something or someone. There hasn't been a year that has gone by that this is not the case - anyone who grew up in the 90s would remember that this was generically video games in response to every social issue, then specific developers, before that it was comic books. For some reason in the 80s it was the imagined cabal's of Satan worshipers and the very real lives which were ruined by it in an actual way (they went to jail).
"I can't wait for vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight"
2 days later when 5 are killed at the Capitol Gazette
"jk"
Then there was the article he wrote ""Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy" where he argued that the pill made women fat crazy and promiscuous and then declared his birthday "World Patriarchy Day"
Then the time he said that being gay was "a lifestyle choice guaranteed to bring pain and unhappiness." Just reroll as hetrosexual folks!
Then there was the time he said it was OK for sexually mature 13 year olds to have sex with adults then claimed being the victim of sexual abuse made him say it. He also said abuse victims were "whinging selfish brats" for "suddenly" remembering they were abused, and "suddenly" deciding it was a problem, 20 years after the abuse occurred.
How about the fact that he used his tenure at Breitbart to court white supremacists and promote their views.
He was canceled in fact by none other than Breitbart not for this of course but for the pedophile comments which was apparently a bridge too far.
Is this an example "cancel culture" gone too far?
I'm not aware of psychological side effects, but weight gain while taking the most common form of birth control pills is expected and normal. At least that's what the doctor told my wife and I.
Milo was basically a professional troll though. His banning was inevitable.
She seems to have survived the cancel mob, but not for lack of trying on their part.
You could imagine how someone with less clout than her wouldn't have fared as well.
Imagine if someone said its totally wrong to put Jewish people in camps, after all they deserve the same rights as you and I, but maybe they really did cause us to lose WWI...
There are people who really are just mistaken and then there are others who are weaponizing this strategy to minimize their obvious racism.
I think she is merely incorrect not malicious but the reaction is easy to understand and it absolutely has to do with the size of her megaphone not just what she said. Someone who wasn't the world famous author of Harry Potter just wouldn't have got the same reaction in the first place.
JK rowling has a billion dollars and a bright future despite the reaction to her views. Can you give me an example of some people who have actually and in fact been canceled?
Protecting billionaires from people saying mean things about them on twitter doesn't seem like a worthy cause.
"In a long winded fashion what she said could reasonably be interpreted as trans women aren't women."
Wasn't she saying that trans women have a possible biological advantage over non-trans women in performance sports such as weightlifting?Isn't that a fair question to be asking and within the realm of scientific plausibility?
The frenzied cancel mob attacking her on Twitter was frankly insane. The fact that you need to be a billionaire to survive that and speak (or earnestly question) the truth is not good.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/j-k-rowling-s-maya-for...
I think JK Rowling's main point is that trans activists conflate sex and gender and this creates unfair outcomes in areas like sports, not to mention there's a deeply anti-science bent to it (for example denying that trans women have any biological advantages).
For being one of the few cultural mainstream voices speaking against those aspects in particular, despite the vitriol she receives, I think she's brave and I appreciate that.
Maya didn't have her contract renewed because she said things like the senior director of Credit Suisse was "a man who likes to express himself part of the week by wearing a dress"
Not for advocating for fairness in woman's sports.
To be clear as far as athletics. Trans people make up 0.5% of the population. The female->male portion is most apt to experience on average a measurable disadvantage while the male->female portion if they start hormones when it is medically advisable to do so wont experience the same clear average advantage as a male athlete who simply declared himself a female one day and switched teams.
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/trans-women-retain-a...
From the British Journal of Sports Medicine
> “For the Olympic level, the elite level, I'd say probably two years is more realistic than one year,” said the study's lead author, Dr. Timothy Roberts, a pediatrician and the director of the adolescent medicine training program at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. “At one year, the trans women on average still have an advantage over the cis women," he said, referring to cisgender, or nontransgender, women.
> For the first two years after starting hormones, the trans women in their review were able to do 10 percent more pushups and 6 percent more situps than their cisgender female counterparts. After two years, Roberts told NBC News, “they were fairly equivalent to the cisgender women.”
It's a tempest in a teapot. All things being equal you are likely to end up with a small percentage of woman's athletics being trans women and nothing else changes. This is especially true of school athletics which are after all supposed to be for the betterment of the student body as opposed to for objective success.
https://play.acast.com/s/f3fb5c75-b943-4f5d-bd87-27c91611dd2...
This is fundamentally a different question from should someone hate her or say hateful things to her. Anything that stirs up strong emotions and reaches millions will result in both reasonable dialogue and insane screeching. The people who reasonably disagree with her can't do anything about the nutjobs nor are they responsible for same.
I disagree, because she doesn't want to strip anyone of any rights. I think people scolding others on these issues could seriously profit from a bit of headwind.
If you cannot be convinced to let people have their standpoints, I am for canceling you. Believe me, I would not enjoy it like you do.
The only reason the phrase TWAW exists is as an ideological counter to "trans women are men". They're really not either one, and saying trans women are women, full stop, is just an indefensible position.
Let's say the only thing she said on the topic was that she thought trans women shouldn't be allowed in competitive women sports because they probably have a biological advantage over non-trans women, or at least that there's insufficient evidence that they do not.
Would this be enough to justify the label of "despicable" in your mind?
I now see them for the attacks that they are.
Unfortunately...it took overcoming my repression, a lot of soul searching, and a lot of educating myself about all manner of topics in orbit of trans people.
I'm proud to say I'm a trans woman. J.K. Rowling and her hate-mob would like to see a genocide of anyone like me.
If you're earnestly interested in learning more, here's a recent-and-relevant video essay on just that topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ2s_bjMpZY
PLEASE do not be another hate-mob to her, because after all, that's what we're all proclaiming our disgust with in this thread.
I truly wish everyone reading this could see it from my perspective...and I wouldn't wish --on anyone-- the suffering that entails.
Ignorance may well be bliss, but if things had stayed the same, I'd be hating who I turned into. ♥
Edit: Ooh, and for those earnestly edifying themselves, explore "Falsehoods about Gender 1 + 2", found here: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood#human-identit... -- I think you'll find out the edge cases are far greater in scope than we (even yours truly, previously) presume.
They did a world tour in 2016 that sold out stadiums then did the Country Music Awards. In 2019 they released a new album and reportedly sold 33 million albums.
Off the top of my head: Scott Aaronson, Scott Alexander, Richard Stallman, Eric S Raymond. I could list more if I could be bothered to research it.
you'll never be able to reconcile all the beliefs of a "side" with your own, or another side with your "opponents", so are relegated to either paralysis by cognitive dissonance or selective rationality.
most people are generally decent and most people have some odd beliefs and proclivities. that's just life. it's not reducible to some "sides", much less two sides, no matter what the dominant mediopolitical narratives want you to believe.
two sides are chosen by tribal groups like political parties because it simplifies the quest for power. 2 is the lowest common denominator of power, and it's chosen exactly to simplify choices, and neatly bypass the inherent frictions of nuance and humanity. it's done for power, not to realistically represent the world or to cleanly align with your beliefs. instead, each side exerts pressure on you to conform to it (that is, coalescing its own power). in exchange, you get little random hits of dopamine, which is oddly as lopsided as it is surprisingly effective.
It's social media, optimising for "engagement". The most engaging content is not the normal, run-of-the-mill commentary from normal people with normal opinions. It's the far-out nut-job stuff that makes you mad. So that's what get prioritised in your feed.
I signed off of Twitter and was able to completely ignore it while being publicly abused on it. I've recently uninstalled Facebook and my rage at the culture wars has subsided noticeably. Now it's just Imgur and HN that spark this. I'm working on getting off here too (unsuccessfully).
The vast majority of people (I think, I have no proof) are not zealots for the cause (any cause). But the self-censorship effect of our society-wide Purity Spiral[1] means that we never hear from them. We hear the worst, most deranged, opinions out there first because human psychology isn't suited to this kind of situation.
I think the answer is to stop optimising for engagement, because we can't hack human psychology.
[0] I can't find it now, but there is a blog post out there explaining how politicians are getting hurt by the increasing extremism. The need to be more extreme than your rivals in your gerrymandered district where any sign of "weakness" or ambiguity can be taken advantage of on social media isn't good for politicians either.
[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Purity%20Spi...
social media does distort towards the extremes but that’s marginal, only flattening the distribution of opinions, not fundamentally changing the distribution’s shape. the real problem is the mediopolitical machine amplifying certain of those opinions and ignoring others in service of its own pursuit of power.