You felt the anti-woke side made the stronger case, but you still disagree? Can you add some more detail here?
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.
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").
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)
[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.