Chess Grandmaster Kasparov on Mob Mentality and Groupthink
wsj.com
wsj.com
Can somebody please post the article or post a trustworthy link?
Their most recent one was "Cancel Culture is Toxic"[0] and Kasparov was arguing in favor of the motion.
While I ultimately disagree with the motion, I think Kasparov and Kmele Foster (mostly Kmele, really) made the stronger case. And regardless, it was a fascinating and well-argued discussion of the sort you almost never see around topics like "cancel culture." Well worth a listen.
[0] https://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/cancel-culture-tox...
What makes the Weinstein case difficult are the widespread claims that lots of people in Weinstein's circle did know what he was doing, and did not (a) report him (b) dissassociate from him. Their lack of willingness to report him (let alone their willingness to actively aid him) means that they are not part of the category described above.
[ EDITED because my final sentence was a clear logical error, but is now correct. ]
I'm not some ageless immortal who has personally witnessed all social strife in human history. So while I can confidently say this is a problem now, I can't say for sure if this has always been a problem and inherent to the human condition or if its a recent one and its causes lay in the circumstances of our time.
People have always stood up to abuses that were previously hidden. They have always been dismissed as not real problems. A few have always been selfish, and have always been portrayed as if they were the true reason for the movement.
This Time It's Different because of the Internet, enabling more people to talk about it, more people to spread misinformation, more people to say stupid things, and generally creating more heat than light at a vaster scale. Everybody involved adapts their tactics to that. But the core issues are identical.
[EDIT] To be clear, I picked something extreme so it'd be easy to see that this situation could exist without getting distracted by minutia, and am not equating anti-cancel-culture with holocaust denial. I hope that was obvious, but just in case.
Added one word. Would like to add, the oppocite of what you state, seems to be the default behaviour in the cancel culture climate, which shuts down a lot of reasonable commentors, as in, "fuck it, I am staying out of this one"
AFAIK this kind of redundant and absurdly explicit writing style aimed squarely at bad or inattentive readers who nonetheless find the time to post (plus, the occasional troll who looks for things to misunderstand on purpose) predates the current cultural moment we're in, by years.
Said “anti-woke” side argued well that the vein of cancel culture that oversteps and ruins the lives of people just living pay check to pay check and posting bad takes on Twitter on their 15 minute bathroom break is toxic. Meanwhile, it’s ineffective against the people who the movement claims to be targeting. They’re right, in my humble opinion. However, I vehemently disagree that it’s anything new or that it threatens discourse or “free speech.”
The “woke” side argued well about holding people accountable for what they say. Especially people with outsize influence. I also agree that it’s an important avenue for minority voices to be amplified and heard. However, the “Cancel Culture” they argued for only exists in the minority now. They didn’t really acknowledge that the majority of cancels are just normal people who post stupid Tweets that then lose their jobs and get radicalized.
In effect, they just kinda talked past each other because neither was arguing with sufficient nuance to encapsulate the entire movement. The people for the motion (the motion being “Cancel culture is toxic”) won in my head, just because they landed the closest to the reality of the situation.
For reference: My politics skew in the direction of wishing UN Agenda 21 was even half the conspiracy Republicans made it out to be. If even I’m backing away from social media and side eyeing the people to my left…uh. It’s not good.
Can you provide any examples of this? I found myself agreeing with the against side because I really don’t see this happening.
- Keith John Sampson (11/2007)
- Adria Richards (3/2013)
- Justine Sacco (12/2013)
- Nicholas & Erika Christakis (5/2016)
- Justine Schwarz (2/2017)
- Bret Weinstein (5/2017)
- James Damore (8/2017)
- Ben Frisch (3/2018)
- Jonathan Friedland (6/2018)
- No Winegard (3/2020)
- Colin Wright (4/2020)
- David Shor (5/2020)
- Emmanuel Cafferty (6/2020)
- Gordon Klein (6/2020)
- Stephen Hsu (6/2020)
- Elisa Parrett (6/2020)
- Norman C. Wang (8/2020)
- Will Wilkinson (1/2021)
- Lauren Wolfe (1/2021)
- Chris Harrison (2/2021)
- Donald Mcneil (2/2021)
- Alexi McCammond (3/2021)
- Sandra Sellers (3/2021)
- Paul Rossi (4/2021)
- Ryan Singer (4/2021)
- Antonio Garcia Martinez (5/2021)
- Emily Wilder (5/2021)
As an extreme example, imagine a child debating with an adult. The adult asserts that the moon is made of cheese. It's entirely possible that the adult could "win" that debate by any reasonable measure because most children are (understandably) terrible debaters. This being despite the fact that the adult is clearly wrong.
Now, it's certainly harder to debate well in favor of a bad idea. Given two equivalently-skilled debaters (eg two random adults), one would expect the cheese-moon position to be soundly trounced. But given a proposition that's much more contentious (like "Cancel Culture is Toxic"), I think it's pretty easy to "win" despite being (imo) incorrect.
This is possible because I judge the best debater only by what was said in the debate, but I judge whether cancel culture is really toxic or not from years of information, experience, and many points and nuances of argument that none of the debaters hit on (or didn't hit on in depth).
Hence the disparity.
(And, as an aside, I love how IntelligenceSquared handles this when judging the debate: they poll the audience before and after the debase and whichever side moved the larger percentage of the audience to their side "wins").
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2014-10-18%202...
black lives matter only exists during the election. And what do they have to show for it? Nothing at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_Justice_in_Polici...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_Law_Enforcement_T...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ending_Qualified_Immunity_Act
Nothing at all passed.
They control the house and never actually passed the legislation. They know they have no power at all. In fact the only person to have done anything for the black community was an exceutive order. https://cops.usdoj.gov/SafePolicingEO
Black lives matter organizers know the democrats aren't doing anything for them. This is in the context of a clear humanitarian crisis. They are actively harming their own goals. Why would they do that?
In any event, it seems to me that BLM should focus on police money, and ways to put that money in the hands of people who feel that killing unarmed civilians is wrong, the militarization of the police is wrong, and who is willing to peel off some of that money to fund wholly independent police accountability policies, and non-police solutions to community problems (e.g. community intervention, mental health, etc.)
[1] I am highly supportive of BLM, but even more so of the implied general movement toward police accountability. Blacks get it more than the rest of us, but everyone is victimized, regularly, to greater or lesser degrees, by a totally unaccountable police force.
[2] Except in the unlikely event that one of the candidates is overtly racist, approves of violent behavior, and even pardons military and law enforcement personel convicted of murder and torture. Of course, such a candidate would never be a problem in the USA. We're too good for that.)
Which happens because black people are overrepresented when it comes to crime, which happens because they are overrepresented in being poor as dirt.
There is racism in the police force in the US, no doubt, but constantly dealing with criminals and seeing a disparity in a race is bound to make people racist. If you were to wave a magic wand and make all racism in the US disappear overnight, new racism would appear in the span of a month because poor people are still poor. This is why I think BLM was headed towards failure from the very start.
This approach won't work because blacks don't vote. Which I frankly don't understand. Even with problematic voter laws, I can't think of a scenario, short of someone pointing a gun in my face, that would stop me from voting. And yet, awhile back in the Abrams race in black turnout in Georgia was like 50%. That is...insanely low, and implies a thick, wide self-destructive streak. It bodes poorly for the community, because if you can't be bothered to help yourself, then what hope do you have of changing your situation?
Unless BLM can come up with another solution, I don't see them making headway with the black community. That said, other communities may be able to propel BLM agenda into action against the consensus in the black community. Really a bizarre situation overall.
Have you tried to confirm this hypothesis, by for example looking at studies that examine the crime rate by both socioeconomic status and race?
This isn't a hypothesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...
Unfortunately the metric it uses is whether they were ever incarcerated for any reason. Someone hostile to those results would probably dismiss them as due to police racism.
One could try to use homicide and victim surveys as a mostly objective proxy for all violent crime (very difficult and impossible, respectively, for racist police practices to affect), compare that to the violent crime rate of each racial group, and use any disparity to estimate how racist the police and justice system are being.
But then one would risk getting a result one doesn't like.
and there are some cities which have done some minimalist attempts to help the situation. I think though it's not a per-state thing. So federal I guess is appropriate but yes so divided from the actual level of government responsible.
>In any event, it seems to me that BLM should focus on police money, and ways to put that money in the hands of people who feel that killing unarmed civilians is wrong, the militarization of the police is wrong, and who is willing to peel off some of that money to fund wholly independent police accountability policies, and non-police solutions to community problems (e.g. community intervention, mental health, etc.)
I think we are divided here. The whole 'defund the police' thing is such a bad approach. If the black community is already interacting with law enforcement so often. Defunding will only harm them.
What's more important to note is there is a problem. There are countless studies and real life examples proving the problem. Even wider, you can clearly prove the bias. Do some action as a white dude and police drive by and nod. Do example the same action as a black guy and you will have a dozen cop cars.
Yet here we are with BLM and they are 99% ineffective. That's an impossible task. In fact like I said in my first post, the only person to have actually done something for them is Trump and he's painted as racist. The democrats who control the government entirely have done absolutely nothing. This is intentional. This is expected. If the democrats solve the problem, blm goes away and then they have to figure out another way to attract the black vote.
So they are intentionally doing nothing.
But you have to give that person power, and that means control of the money. The police chief, sheriff, and mayor are great places to start, but at the legislative level you've got to start funding and testing other approaches.
It might be that we've all become a bit tired from shouting the same things without seeing much progress. As if the left burned out from trying to convince people of the values of science, of socialism, or helping the less fortunate and so, as a result, is now playing the game of forcing the hand, almost apathetically.
The article is free on his website by the way: https://www.kasparov.com/woke-is-a-bad-word-for-a-real-threa...
I hope people get it.
Ain't he more anti-Putin that russophobic?
This is a good sentiment, but it's worth noting that the overwhelming majority of pressure to "cancel" books and academics is directed at the left by the right, regardless of what gets column inches and think-pieces.
https://archive.thinkprogress.org/texas-board-of-education-c...
Thomas Jefferson was successfully removed from all Texas schoolbooks, as one example of many. The Right is no stranger to censorship.
I have seen stories recently about removing Jefferson from the public view / cancelling him, based upon far-left / progressive / anti-racist/slavery ideals (I think/assume) that are removing monuments around the country (and murals and building names, etc), not right-wing censorship, so I was quite curious.
sadly some of the supporting links are 404 on the thinkprogress page you linked to.
However reading the texas tribune article it says that Jefferson was not removed from all Texas schoolbooks, it says that he was removed from a list of 'revolutionary thinkers' - the other references were all left in.
- So this is kind of a red herring thing?
From the TexasTribune Article you linked:
"the Colbert Report got the board's move technically correct, noting it removed Jefferson from a list of "revolutionary thinkers," which is exactly what the board did. Colbert simply didn't provide the context that Jefferson was mentioned elsewhere. (Colbert, of course, is comedy and can't be held to journalistic standards.) "
... "None of the news stories from the day in The Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News (which share state coverage), the Austin American-Statesman, and The Texas Tribune (that's me) mentioned the Jefferson amendment, much less asserted he had been removed entirely from the curriculum. "
Not that I disagree that "The Right is no stranger to censorship." - however this is not a good example for such, and perhaps the bigger debate should center around what tactics of censoring should be out of bounds, and example of such from different 'sides'.
Although it becomes tougher to paint sides when we have to wonder if a twitter mob is a side? if none of the leaders of a side are advocating for thing X - and which leaders are actual leaders of a side, and which influencers are a thing, and if 'leaders' denounce an influencer, then does it really count for/against a 'side'.. much to consider with all this.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-lawmaker-says-850...
> Along with the letter, which was first obtained by The Texas Tribune, Krause appended the book list that includes well-known titles like the Pulitzer Prize-winning William Styron novel, “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and best-sellers that were turned into movies or television series, such as John Irving’s “The Cider House Rules,” Alan Moore’s dystopian “V For Vendetta,” and the graphic novel version of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Censorship, especially censorship applied to schools and education, is simply a tool of those in power to remain in power. In my experience, the conservative states seem to do it the most.
The conservative states also force upon the textbook writers things like "Intelligent Design" or whatnot.
-------
Book banning, removal of icons (Thomas Jefferson), etc. etc. Its all the same techniques. Conservatives simply ignore it when their peers do it, so you don't get to see those issues come up in conservative circles / conservative bubbles.
Many would say that the overwhelming majority of the academy is left of center. This makes it intuitive that if there is censorship of academics, then the recipients of the censorship would be people left of center. But I do not think it follows that the censors are on the right.
I argue that most of the censorship on campus, be it people being uninvited or forced to resigned, comes from the academy itself. It is true that, quite possibly, the vast majority of the people being censored are on the left, but I think it is also true that the vast majority of the people censoring are also on the left.
The right simply occupies very little room in the academy. It mostly exists outside of the academy.
This is not to say that people on the right (mostly from outside of the academy) do not come in with censorious intentions... but my impression is that most universities are very well protected against external interventions. It is simply not the case that a business leader or a radio show host can easily censor a professor on campus.
So if we are thinking about, say, college professors, I would say that we are mostly dealing with a left-left censorship.
That is, the left is not this uniform block.
Kathleen Stock is a leftist: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-59084446 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Stock
Bret Weinstein is a leftist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Weinstein
Verushka Lieutenant-Duval is a leftist: https://arts.uottawa.ca/visualarts/people/lieutenant-duval-v...
The people doing the cancelling were on the left.
Which means that they'll levy the most censorship / control over the academics. Its the nature of the beast. If local school boards want to force the teachers to teach "intelligent design" and remove references to Thomas Jefferson, it will happen (and does happen regularly).
The whole "Critical Race Theory" stuff going on is just the newest push by the right to reshape education into their mold. Whether this works or fails, we can be certain that in a year or two, another educational issue will pop up and the right will use it as a rallying cry to change education again.
Thomas Jefferson, Intelligent Design / Creationism, Critical Race Theory. Just a few of the culture wars that the right has waged in the past decade and more will come.
-----
Welcome to educational politics. We didn't start the fire. It was always burning, since the world's been turning. This "censorship" stuff has been going on for decades.
It would appear that the average school board in the US is only about 31% conservative ( https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/... ) at least as of 2017 - I expect this to shift a bit post 2022.
"The whole "Critical Race Theory" stuff going on is just the newest push by the right to reshape education into their mold" - not sure I disagree with this, but the way it comes off is like 'the left' and 'the moderates' have not been trying to reshape education in their mold.. and I would say I think since about 12 years ago there has been an aggressive pursual of more liberal pushing within the halls of various academia.
I am glad that more parents are taking a look at what our schools are teaching - I think it had been assumed the education we got it was today's kids are getting, and I think now more eyes are open that today's lessons may be very different - in some areas that is great and in some areas we may not want out schools teaching certain things in certain ways or at certain ages - we should all pay more attention and have more transparency across the board.
I see you mention the Thomas Jefferson thing again like it's an abomination that some conservative folks wanted it removed - this even after I showed you details of your own linking that says that headline was overblown and used in pop culture wars in a way to make conservatives look extreme / outrageous - when the actual doing was leaving all the history of Jefferson in the books, yet removing him from a list of very influential American originalists or whatever.
The funny thing is that the far left has been more active in removing historically famous old school folks from statues to murals, school names and more. There are those saying that washington and jefferson should be removed from public places the same as confederate generals. - So if cancelling Jefferson is an example of an extremist thing to be shocked by, there is, I believe, more demand from the far left to remove / cancel him than there is the far right.
RE your GP comment:
I don't know much about the Texas school board being conservative or liberal - I do recall some years ago that Texas' decisions about what goes into their school books had national repercussions, as the book inclusions they chose ended up making reprints the most affordable and so most or many of the school systems in the US ended up buying the same books -
The good thing is that brought national attention to subject matter included - and lots of discussions about supplemental material that should be xeroxed and added to the classes.
You mention the school board and censoring in Texas, but the article you cited is not talking about school board demands, it talks about a Texas lawmaker wanting to know about books in public schools..
I don't know enough about the list of books you cited or the others mentioned in the article.. although "V" is one of my two favorite movies, and I think everyone should see it more than once.. I can understand that different types of parents may have objections to certain types of books that may be available to all the kids.
I don't see transparency about books in high/middle/elementary schools as a bad thing - and I don't think if some books were blocked from access in those schools is really the kind of censorship we should worry about.
If lawmakers were demanding that Amazon, Barnes and noble, etc are to remove books - then it's stand to make noise.
"The Underground Guide to Teenage Sexuality: An Essential Handbook for Today's Teens" - mentioned in the article - I would advocate that all schools should have multiple copies of such a book - however I would not object to it being only available to students who's parents have opted in to allowing such material.. and the cover being on the shelf, but the book being being the library counter.
What is right for each kid is going to be different for each kid and each family and at different ages. Each local school needs to take those things into consideration.
"Censorship, especially censorship applied to schools and education, is simply a tool of those in power to remain in power. In my experience, the conservative states seem to do it the most." - I wonder what you really mean by 'those in power' - is this a racial thing? a church vs non-church thing?
I'm not sure I am buying into the conservative state vs liberal here - I think it depends on each district within and even teacher by teacher.
"conservative states also force upon the textbook writers things like "Intelligent Design" or whatnot." - I'll need to research this more.. I did see an article where Louisiana made a law saying it had to also be offered, and maybe other states have done similar -
However most of the country teaches evolution as settled science - (around 59% ) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evolution-educati... )) - the ban on teaching that in TN ended in 1970 - a lot has changed since then.
I've got to add that I'm more concerned about what colleges are banning, and what they are not teaching... It's one thing to ban / burn a book.. but it's not much different to have all your faculty pushing exclusively a certain set of books.
Parents should be more involved in providing additional / limiting certain things for kids / teens.. but that option is not really a thing after 18.
I think we all need to know more about what the various schools are offering children and young adults, and what they are not offering - our collective future is certainly being affected by it unfortunately.
Public universities are not well-protected in the United States from conservatives seeking to defund programs with which they disagree. One might be well-protected against being fired directly for saying something controversial, but if your whole department is closed, you can be gotten rid of, even with tenure.
https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/education/2021-04-07/l...
There's an echo chamber out there that amplifies the notion that there is some sort of epidemic of "woke cancellations" and critical race theory etc. - this is heavily emphasized by conservative media. There's plenty of ridiculous behavior by students - e.g. at Reed College - which I am aware of a massive amount of left-on-left cancellation - someone I know had their career upended by the unlimited claims of the rather stereotypically woke students there. But stupidity at places like Evergreen and Reed will beget endless think pieces and have left cancellation magnified endlessly.
Meanwhile, conservatives' own role in cancellation is minimized to the point of ridiculousness: so Bari Weiss can straight-facedly claim to be a fan of academic freedom.
There's a quieter, but considerably more effective, campaign to defund entire departments among conservatives - the model is a narrow "university as career prep". This means getting rid of the humanities and social sciences in favour of business/law/engineering/CS (good for us, I guess?).
In Australia, the conservative governments have been fairly unabashed in raising the cost of a humanities degree (paid for via our "HECS" scheme) in a way that seems pretty much Amazingly, this gets considerably less press in the echo chamber than some jackass left students acting like jackasses. I wonder why...
I'll agree with you that most of the noisiest and embarrassing cancellations are left-on-right or left-on-left, but this a narrow slice of "actions taken against academics", and their noisiness is not indicative of their effectiveness. Some of these cancellations are simply part of right-wing grift: schedule a talk from someone with credentials designed to enraged the "woke left" somewhere on their home turf, then enjoy the newfound credibility when you get cancelled and get to be a Free Speech Martyr.
What about being suspended? Being strong armed into "volunteering" into stepping back from teaching/speaking roles? Having career-advancing opportunities pass you by "for some reason"? Never getting a job in the first place because of your reputation?
More recently though, Kathy Griffin hasn't recovered from the Trump's severed head controversy.
I'd also like to point out that the type of cancelling and thought suppression the Right does is much more insidious than the Twitter mob, which has the attention span of about a week. The way the Right targets school boards at the local and State level to suppress any curricula which makes them uncomfortable is a huge, widespread problem. Countless teachers in America are legally forced to teach demonstrably false narratives about racism and slavery, as well as to present evolution and Creationism as "equally valid theories."
Comparing a comedian getting cancelled by the Left on Twitter (which rarely sticks; even Louis CK is doing gigs again) with the systematic miseducation of millions of kids based on demonstrably false narratives by the Right, I'd say the latter is much more harmful.
An illiberal debate culture is taking root in the West, where certain positions may be publicly held only at great risk for one’s career. In academia, which is supposed to shape the thinking of future generations, this is nothing short of an inquisition. Read Anne Applebaum’a “The new puritans” for a detailed analysis of the situation in the US. Something similar is happening in the UK and Germany for example.
But if cancel culture is synonymous with effective public harassment, then virtually every single non-trumpist republican is a victim. Various public servants related to voting and elections have told a few harrowing tales.
A quick bit of googling find a bunch of articles devoted to conservative cancel culture, e.g. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/07/politics/fact-check-trump..., https://www.salon.com/2021/05/01/conservatives-claim-to-hate..., https://www.vox.com/22384308/cancel-culture-free-speech-acco..., https://www.thenation.com/article/society/republicans-cancel...
And while cancel culture may typically be about retribution for perceived slights by the public (or a mob), if you take a slightly broader view and include any backlash against speaking out, well, then most whistleblowers unfortunately suffer consequences that qualify. Many whistleblowers are treated absolutely terribly, and some suffer really serious consequences - inflicted not just by liberals, corporations, or the politically agnostic, but also by conservatives. While this may be stretching the definition, the most reasonable criticism of cancel culture I've heard is that it stifles reasonable discourse, and from that perspective cancel culture and whistleblower punishments are in a similar ballpark.
(I don't really want to express an opinion on right or wrong here - because given today's hyper-partisan and highly combative atmosphere it seems to me that these kind of backslashes or mob outrages are inevitable; i.e. this is a symptom, not really a cause.)
In fact that’s what makes it so concerning, this illiberal way of thinking is spreading in most if not all liberal democracies.
Also, there is a massive difference between using government entities to ban books, and a bunch of people on Twitter saying we don't like you and what you said.
Free and open discussion lets me know who's worthwhile listening to and who should be ignored.
Without some kind of legal exemption, however, you cannot prevent them from saying more (unless you own the platform, but that level of control is limited only to the platform that you own).
Such is my understanding.
Our UK students unions are repeatedly preventing people speaking on campuses because they object to their views [1]. This IS 'cancel culture' and it is not healthy for our democracy.
Whatever happend to "I disprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it" ?
[1] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-is-cancel-culture-aff...
The saying goes that my right to swing my arms ends where your face begins.
Equally the student unions right to decide what they personally listen too ends when they prevent others that want to hear the speaker from listening.
At that point they are infringing on another's right to free speech.
In the case of the student unions it is an inherently political organisation using their power to restrict the rights of what I can only assume is a minority of the student body.
Edit - formatting
Are you seriously suggesting a students speech should be curtailed because they are in a minority! (Or a majority for that matter). You are either trolling, or you are part of the problem.
If I don't want to listen to somebodies ideas (or read their books), I will make that decision thakyou. Not the students union!
What is is about "I disprove of what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it" that YOU do not understand?
> a bunch of people on Twitter saying we don't like you and what you said
No one thinks this is cancel culture. It's specifically wielding economic/political power to silence people you disagree with.
You are not entitled to a job or a platform and the people who have control over those positions are well within their right to remove you for the views and actions you take. Removing you from a position is a form of speech. And this isn't new, we've been doing this forever. Was Nixon cancelled? Were the Dixie Chicks cancelled?
Maybe you think they were, maybe you don't, but this idea that somehow someone is cancelled because society says "we don't like your bullshit anymore" is new or dangerous is just preposterous to me.
I find the influence that right/conservatives have in infecting our school curriculum (even if not always successfully) far more dangerous. "The war of norther aggression" is an actual thing taught to actual children in the south. I find that far more damaging to our society.
He's being fired because of his actions, not his beliefs or speech. Nixon resigned because he broke the law. There were two things that happened with Dixie Chicks, people calling into their radio stations requesting they be blacklisted, this is most definitely cancel culture. They also offended their core audience who just stopped buying their records which isn't cancel culture. Maybe in 2003 you were excited they had to face consequences for sharing their beliefs, but I wasn't enthused about it then, and I'm not now.
Would it be healthy to live in a culture where Walmart fired every worker who pro-BLM?
Where Amazon asks anyone they hire how they feel about unions before hiring them?
>The war of northern aggression
I grew up in the south. I've heard this term before but I've never seen it in a single textbook or ever heard a teacher use it.
And I don't really care about the Dixie Chicks, they were right, but people don't have to listen to them either. The same way I feel about all these people that are claiming that they have been cancelled. They might be right, I don't think most of them are, but none of us have to listen to them, they are not entitled to anything.
Walmart and Amazon could certainly try to do those things, but both of those specifics do at least have some legal questions that I am not qualified to answer.
And I'm going to go out on a limb that you haven't seen every textbook in the South. And while I will fully admit here that it may not be pervasive, it certainly was taught in some schools in the South. Another term more frequently used is the "war for southern independence". While not as objectionable, it certainly was not the intent of the Civil War.
Walmart and Amazon could do those things, but I want to live in a world where they don't because we have a culture that values freedom of expression.
There are over a million teachers in the south I'm sure at least one used that term. But it hasn't been anywhere close to common for a generation or two.
No, Nixon resigned because he (or, rather, his party) had done a whip count and knew he would be removed from office.
(Now, sure, that was because other people were not prepared to accept the manner in which he had broken the law, but Nixon absolutely did not resign because he broke the law.)
He spent his presidency attempting to keep them happy and in particular working with them on Supreme Court appointments.
I would say that makes them relevant.
And to be clear, I'm not taking a "both sides are equally bad" stance, I'm just describing the hypocrisy of this particular line of complaining.
I am down with History of Racism, naked and in all its gory details. But, let's not confuse that with how fusion of Big Tech with Big Gov to move more and more towards totalitarianism - we've seen this happen in Australia in the name of COVID. Vast majority of this is a push from Left, not the Right.
Edit: Australia passes mass surveillance laws: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28451066 . I can't reply because of limits, been too much on HN, I need to get off :-). It is indirectly linked to quanrantine and other measures Australian government is taking as a result of COVID. I would go a step further and argue that the world has become more authoritarian post-COVID in general.
Edit: Those saying this is a naive and disingenious take - my observations are pretty much consistent with censorship is mostly from the left than right. Sure you can give examples of suppression from the Right (which I would oppose), but that doesn't really change my observation. Generally speaking, it is indisputedly obvious to me. Here is an economist article that goes in much more depth than single counter examples in the responses: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/09/04/the-threat-from...
I don't know what you're referring to here, could you give some links? Thanks. (Sydney here)
edit: The link you added is about new laws that seem nothing to do with covid. What's the connection? (And you edited again. Maybe I'll wait until you stop doing that. In general, please reply to comments rather than repeatedly adding to your initial comment!)
This seems a very naive or disingenuous take. Here are two examples that immediately came to mind:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_the_Art... particularly actions against Mapplethorpe
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed#Rece... 2006 Arizona State Legislature
Someone has to decide what to teach children. Teachers and parents both influence that decision. Teachers through what books they pick and parents through who they elect. And since Teachers are to the left the population as a whole, it makes sense that they would push books to the left of center, and elected officials would rein in that impulse.
To me these are textbook examples of censorship. Note that I don't think your summary captures the relevant facts.
NEA: the issue is not whether it should be funded but how the funds, which were already approved, were allocated. Exhibitions were cancelled after receiving funding due to political pressure, and 4 artists won a court case when their funding was vetoed due to political pressure.
Pedagogy of the oppressed. I'll just quote wikipedia here: "The book was among seven titles officially confiscated from Mexican American studies classrooms, sometimes in front of students, by the Tucson Unified School District after the passing of HB 2281." This was ruled a violation of the First Amendment: https://ncac.org/news/blog/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-a...
> This was ruled a violation of the First Amendment: https://ncac.org/news/blog/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-a...
It looks like that ruling was just because it was racist, and has since been overturned at the circuit court. Maybe I don't understand something, but the government fundamentally determines what does and does not get taught in public schools.
1. There's a difference between defining a curriculum (what needs to be taught) and banning things (what cannot be taught). The government is generally allowed to determine the first, but the second is more dubious. It's difficult to claim, for example, that banning certain books has a legitimate interest in improving academic freedom, as educators already had the freedom to not teach those books.
2. This specific example is from a university, where "defining a curriculum" is even more dubious due to the existence of elective classes. If a university wants to, in addition to its core curricula, offer a class on racial or gender studies, why is that any less legitimate than a class on water polo or whatever?
NEA: again, what do you think is an action against free speech if not someone organizing action against an art exhibition?
Ruling: I couldn't find anything about the circuit court overturning the ruling. Here is a direct quote from the article, emphasis mine: "After a lengthy trial, Judge Tashima wrote in an interim opinion yesterday, that the Arizona Superintendent’s office violated the First ... Amendment"
The economist article you cite is interesting in that it doesn't actually explain what's wrong with the progressive approach, it just describes it as bad. It says
> Individuals, not just groups, must be treated fairly for society to flourish.
But this fails to realize that favoring "individuals" over groups disfavored the invidiuals in those groups. Intersectionality suggests that you can't treat individuals fairly without understanding how the groups they're apart of impact their identity.
And this is really just disparate impact, a well understood, classically liberal, civil rights era policy that the right is slowly scratching away at!
"You may be right about one instance, but I've never seen anything but pro-freedom of speech from the right."
And then wind up saying sure, there are plenty of examples of right-wing censorship, but check out this article in the Economist?
Come on.
They are just called the Liberals, but they are Economic Liberals, not social, and are considered our "right wing" party with an evangelical Christian as our Prime Minister.
When I catch myself saying things like this, I contemplate whether the availability heuristic is deceiving me. It might not be -- I haven't done a rigorous review of this topic either -- but I usually find it's worth introspection when I have this thought.
The parallel to my immediate life that comes to mind is when my kids are bickering about some inconsequential triviality and I say "I don't care who started it, I only care that you stop fighting". It must surely be an "important" topic for them that they feel the need to argue about it, but in the grander scheme of things, the resolution shouldn't come at a cost of a losing a core principle (i.e. aiming for resolution through vengeful means is not a productive course of action).
I stopped doing that when I realized this is systematically enabling aggressor. The kid that minds own business is on the defense and effectively forced always do what aggressor wants. Because if it protects or defends itself, adult steps in to tell him he is equally wrong.
In school there is a better (worse?) chance to meet somebody particularly nasty, who's bullying kids around. That should be answered by "authorities". In families it's less of the case, so GP logic is reasonable.
I keep a high respect to Gary Kasparov. I however have a question regarding what he writes here -
"It is the coordinated, coercive attempt to win a debate by ending debate—to punish, not to educate."
Could it be that those who "cancel" just found a tool which is more effective than those before, something which they were missing in the "old status quo" of inter-class interactions? Could it be that the voices of those who do cancelling today weren't heard enough, so now they use this new opportunity to participate in the societal decisions?
When I wrote "I have seen it" originally I meant siblings in families. At this point, I have seen dynamic three times. Each time one kid ended up being systematic aggressor and other victim. The victim was pushed to submissivity and aggressor honestly believed he/she is entitled to act like that. And that victim is bad for defending own toys or boundaries.
And each time it went on, until parents changed approach.
I can name dozens of books that have been "cancelled", almost entirely by conservatives.
Depending on the definition of "cancel", I can think of very few professors that have been "cancelled" [0] at all, and roughly equal numbers by conservative and progressive perspectives.
[0] "cancelled" in this case seems to typically mean not a lot more than had to listen to some unpleasant feedback on their views and/or behavior.
If this seems tendentious and unlikely, let's remember that Bari Weiss, now advocating for the University/grift that is University of Austin as a beacon of academic freedom, made her reputation attempting to get academics "cancelled" for having the wrong views on Israel.
There are a lot of people with a vested interest in beating the drum to claim that universities are a mess of "cancel culture", but I'd be intrigued to read some actual statistics on this, rather than heavily publicized anecdotes.
I tend to agree with the poster who complained this was some sort of blame-shifting ("he started it, mom!"). But the portrayal of normal academic life as being rife with endless left-wing cancel culture is a project being done for a reason. I don't like left-wing cancel culture either - and some of the leftiest people I know dislike it from a practical perspective (I know people personally teaching at elite institutions whose teaching has become unmanageable from constant weird student political demands). But any analysis of this that doesn't take into account the fact that universities are under pressure from the whole political spectrum is dumb.
It's also worth noting that "right wing cancel culture" sometimes just manifests itself by quietly shutting whole departments in favour of, say, expanding the "trade school" elements of a university. Just nuke the whole history department and double the size of business... obviously an apolitical act, right?
"Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, in a tizzy over the discontinuation by the estate of Dr. Seuss of six lesser-known books with racist content, had the audacity to gripe via social media that “the woke mob” is trying “to erase our history and cancel anyone who disagrees.” This is the same Tom Cotton who wrote a whole legislative act aimed at banning schools from teaching the 1619 Project, the initiative exploring how the United States was indelibly shaped by slavery—or what Cotton blithely describes as “the necessary evil upon which the union was built.” Cotton is not concerned about the censoring of history; he’s just picky about what parts of history get erased. What the Arkansas senator really means when he gets prickly about preserving “our history” is making sure the mythical white-supremacist recollection of American events is the only version schoolkids can read. Along with racist Dr. Seuss books, of course."
>In the interview, Cotton said the role of slavery can’t be overlooked.
>“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction,” he said.
>Instead of portraying America as “an irredeemably corrupt, rotten and racist country,” the nation should be viewed “as an imperfect and flawed land, but the greatest and noblest country in the history of mankind,” Cotton said.
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2020/jul/26/bill-by-cott... via https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tom-cotton-slavery-necessa...
One common historical argument (I think I got it from H. W. Brands' biography of Benjamin Franklin that I read recently), is that there would had been no union at all if the southern states (with slavery) were not accommodated.
Of course, any decision about a school curriculum excludes other curriculums, unless one chooses to deliberately cover all aspects of debate of any debated school subject, or take an anarchist attitude of no imposed curriculum by the state, giving total control individual teachers or maybe parents themselves.
In Finland, teachers have quite much autonomy as long as the minimum standards of vaguely specified curriculum is adhered to, which is more "free speech compatible" in some sense, but that comes with failure modes too. (I had quite professional teachers in my time, but I recall reading a complaints about politically partisan teachers. System like is prone to have issues because while government schools are, in theory, part of the democratically governed system, the actual decisions about education and choice of teachers are quite many hoops and levels of hierarchy removed from the kids and the parents themselves.)
Deplatforming speakers is largely the left's MO.
Also, it's interesting that even the very ideological "FIRE" group (not exactly a neutral player in all this) shows roughly 60% of user-submitted cases being deplatformed "from the left", which is far from overwhelming.
So your observation is just "left wing professors often work on unscientific subjects and therefore more often gets their department shut down". It has nothing to do with politics, if you had a department full of right wingers who called their blog posts "scientific papers" then I'd call for them to get shut down as well. Blogging is fine, just don't call it science or make university courses based on your blogs.
Your mind is going to get blown when you find out there exist whole departments at universities that aren't sciences, and that there's kinda of a tradition of academic scholarship that goes back centuries in the humanities.
Because all of the focus is on soft and hard right wing cancellation, anything actually on the left is seen as extremist. Extremist speech can be silenced and, just like with the hard right, not acknowledged as being silenced.
If by being "right wing" you mean strong authoritarianism and Mussolini-like fascism, then yes, American 'left' is right wing.
However, if right wing for you are conservative values, like family, independence, free speech, personal responsibility, and "judging by the content of the character, not the color of the skin" then American left is nowhere near the soft right position on any of those things. They are not even close to center.
A right-wing think tank with strong influence on Idaho legislators produces this gem of a report:
'The report doesn't just call for eliminating individual courses, however. It calls for the elimination of five whole departments — Gender Studies, Sociology, Global Studies, Social Work and History — that it claims are infused with "social justice" ideology. (A sixth blacklisted department has since been added: Criminal Justice.) Eight other departments (later updated to nine) are on a watch list of sorts, judged to be "social justice in training."'
Lol. This is the first paragraph of the article. Is there any intellectual honesty in the discussion any more?
> In his recent book “The Contrarian,” journalist Max Chafkin assigns an ideology to Mr. Thiel, then defines it as “fascist” and even tries to blame this concocted “Thielism” for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. There is little doubt that the book would never have come to be had Mr. Thiel not supported Donald Trump in 2016.
I mean, OK. I guess it's probably unfair. But... to cite this kind of thing as an example of censorious excess and the decline of society and not at least nod to Thiel's own successful cancellation and destruction of Gawker media seems... logically suspect.
I mean, who is it not OK to destroy for ideological reasons and who is fair game?
Did Thiel make them host the video in the first place? Did Thiel make them ignore initial injunction for them to take the video down?
I don’t think Thiel really changed the public’s opinion of Gawker. They were always considered extremely low-brow tabloid media, and to their users I think that was sort of the appeal. They didn’t shut down due to a drop in popularity, they shut down because a lawsuit bankrupted them.
Instead of calling your advertisers to complain about perceived racism, think unsavory stuff like spam and GamerGate threats.
Right canceling grew out of troll and gamer culture. Left canceling SJW grew out of decades-old activism.
It is of similar type: ganging up on someone your group picked as the next victim, robbing them of their safety or speech without a formal and fair judgment.
But left-wing canceling (say, leaving 100 bad reviews on Yelp for a family business of someone going viral for a 10 second out of context clip on Twitter) is way more advanced and sophisticated. 4chan lost gamergate the moment the press focused on the death threats of a few incapable of expressing their autistic rage in an argument.
The left is more savvy. It knows that a single newspaper photo of 3 activists has similar value to a hundred uncovered protests. They know how to wield the taboo of racism as a weapon to avoid critique. They make you remember why their victim deserved it.
To conflate the two is playing into the pitchforks of the cancel crowd. These label legal acts or free speech as illegal racism or hate speech, and we should not go along with that madness.
Cancel tactics are precisely the way they are, because they were designed to function without playing by societies formal rules, or the reasonable defense of choosing not to listen to someone you deeply despise, yet leave their speech and platform alone (they do not care about Alex Jones, but care about the views of those who like to listen to him).
Your absolutely valid point was downvoted/cancelled in a similar manner: projected to be factually incorrect due to political bias against Thiel.
IMHO, that's the problem right there. Once you get into this "you did it, so can I" game, you've set into motion the wheels of destruction. This seems best summarized by this quote:
> Destroying the mechanisms of democracy to preserve democracy won’t work
Incidentally, the history of the aptly descriptive idiom "fighting fire with fire" offers a cautionary tale of its own[0]:
> The source of this phrase was actual fire-fighting that was taken on by US settlers in the 19th century. They attempted to guard against grass or forest fires by deliberately raising small controllable fires, which they called 'back-fires', to remove any flammable material in advance of a larger fire and so deprive it of fuel. This literal 'fighting fire with fire' was often successful, although the settlers' lack of effective fire control equipment meant that their own fires occasionally got out of control and made matters worse rather than better.
[0] https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fight-fire-with-fire.htm...
If I say I don't like your ideology in a hacker news reply, am I attempting to cancel newacct583?
It seems disingenuous to not also mention why Thiel was angry with Gawker, and to not also mention that most people will never be in a position to be able to fight back when a giant media corporation publishes private and personal details about our lives.
He starts by citing two responses from what he considers to be people he disagrees with. These are "it's not happening" and "it happens only to bad people". He never actually addresses these claims directly, and instead heads off on tangential matters.
Kasparov appears (probably correctly) to be worried about "groupthink". Yet who can point me to a position that has actually been silenced? Those who believe in the lab theory, that vaccines are toxic, that covid19 is a hoax - these people all have hundreds of thousands if not millions of people reading, listening, watching presentations of these views. Are they a broadcast TV network? No. Are they on MSNBC? No. But how on earth can anyone seriously make the claim that these sort of views (or any others) are excluded from public consideration?
The major reason why only 58-60% of the US is vaccinated against COVID-19, for example, is precisely that anti-vaccination viewpoints have been widely distributed and viewed, despite being completely non-establishment.
Kasparov cites Thiel as someone who has apparently suffered from "the politics of personal destruction". Excuse me, but just how has Thiel suffered? He still publishes books, appears in what I can only assume is as wide a selection of media as he chooses to (given his historically rather reticent public persona), is frequently asked for comments about matters he appears to the world to be knowledgeable about, and continues to enjoy the benefits of his prodigious wealth (including that IRA).
Then Kasparov dives into lab-leak theory, and the way that many people considered this theory to be "pro-Trump". If his point was merely that it was rather pre-emptive to declare this idea false, it would be an excellent point.
However, that's not his point, and he chooses to ignore the way in which Trump attempted to use "the China virus" and the lab-leak theory as cover for his own administration's ineptitude, which creates a context in which a disdain for lab-leak theory is sort of inevitable. That context is arguably more important than anything else about this episode, particularly given that the origin story of SARS-COV-2 was always going to, and now is, receiving about as much scrutiny as anything like ever could (Chinese reluctance notwithstanding).
If Kasparov had actually addressed "it's not happening" and "it only happens to bad people" effectively, maybe this would have been an interesting essay. Instead, I find it intellectually weak, and basically a great example of a conclusion ("there's a threat to free flow of ideas") in search of some rather weak evidence.
He is also of course the "Avast security ambassador" and tours the world visiting the kinds of conferences where not very important people meet other not very important people telling each other they are very important, like the "WebSummit" or "TechCrunch Disrupt".