Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

We can continue to talk about Cancel Culture, but the opening assertion of the editorial was that we have a right to, "...speak [our] minds and voice [our] opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned." That's gobsmackingly wrong.

It's the kind of sentence that, to me at least, grinds my mental gears to a halt. I just... I have a very hard time thinking generously about the author of that sentence.

I'm glad people like Ken exist, to put into words something more coherent than what I'd ever be able to create.

At least you are clear in what you think about the average person that is concerned about this topic.

This is a bit flawed, essentially 'straw man' argument in the grand scheme.

While there might be good reason to critique the NYT article, the response I think missed the bigger point.

Nobody is really making the argument that speech isn't going to have consequences.

The 'Cancel Culture Does not Exist' or 'This Is Not A 1st Amendment Issue' arguments are already tired, empty canards.

The awful failure of the authors argument are clearly evident in his dismissal of the Harper's Magazine moment - he argues 'nobody bothers to define cancel culture' etc. which is bullshit.

Stephen Pinker, one of the Harper's signatories, faced concerted and vicious attempt at 'cancellation' of some of his positions and credentials when he dared to voice the heretic idea along the lines that policing in America is largely much more heavy handed than eslewehere, and that this is the fundamental issues, less so race. God forbid (!).

Thankfully, Stephen Pinker has enough credentials to hold off the cancellers.

JK Rowling is another good pop culture example. People lament that 'she's a billionaire and can't be cancelled' again which is not true. The amount of front page sardonic vitriol about her by ostensibly 'respectable' publications is very directly translated into hesitancy on every popular front: movie deals, book deals, actors fear of 'being in the out club' if they appear in a film based upon her book etc. Her 'cancellation' can be literally be measured in dollars.

It's pernicious specifically because the vast majority of participants actually are probably not bothered entirely by Rowling or Pinker comments - but that the 'fear of association' created by the 'Cancel Screamers' creates a chilling effect on speech and participation.

Ergo the 'consequence' of speech is not legitimate: people are not 'running from Rowling' because of what they think of her positions, they are running from her because of what others might think of them.

I'll step back my argument an inch and admit that there are actually nutbars (of all stripes) who probably believe they can 'say whatever, whenever' - 1 minute on Twitter will remind us of that, however there's a gigantic grey are of obvious areas of public cancellation.

And that's just not true anymore. I've got in trouble with white progressives in my social circle (which is mostly white progressives) for saying we should carefully scrutinize refugees from Syria and Iraq. Meanwhile my dad--whose grandfather was an Imam and who has worked in Afghanistan--expressed the exact same opinion after we withdrew from Afghanistan and there was the question of Afghan refugees.

Ken is absolutely correct that conservatives used to do it too. But I didn't grow up in the deep south where being in favor of same-sex marriage in the 1990s would get you socially ostracized. I am alarmed, however, that in blue America in 2022, I can't even discuss how my Muslim family members feel about marriage, divorce, etc., except to condemn their views. Saying "rural America in the 1990s was just as bad" doesn't actually score any points with me.

I think the New York Times editorial is confused and inelegant. But kudos to them for actually speaking up. Because I don't think we're all just having some collective delusion that something has changed in "liberal society" and that change isn't a good one.

With so many things defined as cancel culture, with so many qualities ascribed to cancel culture, with cancel culture having committed so many crimes and offended so many people, how indeed could it not be real? How preposterous! So many now are lying in the gutter with ruined lives, so many have ruined careers, what thing could have done this if not cancel culture? How could it not be real?

True, cancel culture might have some contradictions in it's definition. But I propose we iron those out those straight away and define cancel culture as American culture and then clearly, we can say, as Doonesbury author Garry Trudeau said, "we have me the enemy and he is us".

Edit: More seriously, the phrase "cancel culture" is poor way to way to deal with something with a raft of only semi-related explosions of anger against things that used to be OK. If someone doesn't like what's happening, they need to deal constructive with what's happening, not imagine that the genie will go back into the bottle by condemnation of this "cancel culture".

> To be free of shame or shunning is to be free of other people's speech. If you're saying something provocative, you are almost certainly responding in a sense to something someone else said; if you think you have the right to speak without shame or shunning, so does the person you're effectively responding to.

While it's true that almost anything you might say contradicts something that someone else has said before, it's not the case that anything you might say, even something provocative, encourages shaming or shunning of that previous speaker, or really harms or threatens them in any way.*

No one is advocating for the "right" to speak without any response. They're advocating for the liberal norm that one can speak freely without disproportionate shaming and ostracism.

*And there's the rub. Anyone can claim to have been horribly harmed, shamed, or excluded by something a speaker said, which then justifies retaliatory harm, shame, or exclusion against that speaker. We can't get away from adjudicating these claims of harm if we want to have a healthy culture. No abstract system of rules and rights will suffice.

The problem gets much worse if your karma is a thing that you are obligated to attach to your real identity to.

It was an eye-opening experience to realize that I was taken egalitarianism as a given. I, too, couldn't help but see people who were simultaneously demanding the right to speak while also demanding that others should be denied the right to speak out against their original speech. I dismissed these people as irrational hypocrites. But eventually I realized that they weren't hypocrites, their philosophy is entirely consistent. I was implicitly assuming that they valued egalitarianism, but this was a mistake on my part. When these people beat the drum of free speech, they're referring only to their own rights. They aren't interested in granting rights to others. With such people, any appeal to "natural rights" is not intended to be reciprocal: you should be obligated to give them rights, but they should not be obligated to give you rights. They have managed to solve the ethical dilemma of "if people have the freedom to swing their fist and the freedom to not be punched in the face, what happens when someone swings their fist into your face?"; rather than arriving at the egalitarian solution of making some freedoms subservient to other freedoms, they have arrived at the classist solution of making some people subservient to other people. It's entirely coherent. Terrible, but coherent.

For people to stop calling it "cancel culture" whenever they face reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others would be a good start.

People not wanting to patronize or associate with you when you cause harm to people they care about is really not a bad thing, and it's not new either, and yet it is what gets called "cancel culture" by a lot of people.

Contextless social media that encourages misunderstanding, a lack of ability to find retractions, and the ability to dig up old sins and present them as present views are an issue, and result in people piling onto others over misconceptions. It's a real problem. That's almost never what actually gets talked about, it's just "I should get to say whatever I want without people disliking me".

targeted at individuals,

for the loss of their job, invitations, or positions,

for offenses that are minor in comparison to historical offenses,

or offenses that are based on guilt by association or speculative inference,

often for things in the past,

which were things many people accepted at the time,

and often which the individual disavows today.

I think he wants people who say "we should end cancel culture" to recognize that their cause is not "the spirit of free speech".

I really disagree, I think he addresses this very specifically at the end of the article, where he writes, "I believe more specificity — action items — is the answer":

> Pointing to specific instances of “cancellation” and debating why they are inside or outside of our norms is a productive action item. Saying “colleges shouldn’t disinvite speakers because of controversy” is a good specific action item; we can debate it. Saying “Ken, stop piling on 20-follower Twitter accounts when they say stupid things” is an action item; I can debate it. [Shan’t.] Saying “stop demanding that businesses fire people for what they say off the job” is an action item. I might not agree but we can discuss it.

He's not at all falling into a definition trap! I think that misses the point of the article, which is one of the most coherent articles I've ever encountered on the subject.

US politics is full of ambiguities, word games, and of course attacks that exploit these clarity gaps. See a list [0] of them below.

Of course slogans are useful, and trying to hold hypocrites to account by using their slogan against them, yet at the same time it seems the political discourse is extremely low signal-to-noise, and there's almost no general need/demand for clarity. For example the both the "rich people pay no taxes" and the usual "XY corp last year paid 3.50 in taxes" memes are just that, catchy memes.

And all of this puts a brutally counter productive shouting at the late night game feeling on politics. (Sure, there's a reason why political discourse is like this... we probably have to go through the catchy meme arms race.)

[0] BLM, defund the police, liberal and classical liberal, gender/sex, socialism, recently critical race theory, equality vs equity (equal outcome, equal opportunity), free speech vs. selective publishing/hosting of content free from government interference; safe space vs. safe space from certain ideas/trigger vs. safe space for expressing ideas free of consequences, and maybe also "no child left behind" too. (Of course a few of them are proper slogans, but then due to the ambiguity in semantics folks try to use these as concrete promises.)

Certainly it leads to more clarity. Two parties talking "past" each other is one of the most common sources of disagreement in my experience. Of course it isn't a panacea and there will still be disagreement on when the definition is being used correctly, and bad actors, and .... But it is an excellent (and I would argue necessary) starting point for any meaningful discussion.

> Additionally, I think Popehat is dead wrong here:.... I don't know what Popehat actually wants here

The headings of the sections work pretty neatly for me to distill this down (skipping the intro).

1) (Why) Working Towards A Definition Is Important -> dont just handwave

2) Propaganda Drives Perception -> rethink what you think cancel culture is

3) Everybody’s Rights Matter -> The person being cancelled may have been out of bounds and trying to cancel someone else too. Context is important

4) We Need Action Items -> stop these stupid articles that simply clutch pearls and propose something anything that can actually be considered

You can have an accountable society and cancel someone for crossing the line. That line used to be for things such as Pedophilia, encouraging violence, promoting rape-culture, etc. Truly terrible things.

I hope people will wake up or we'll end up with a worse place than ever.

He does seem to be obsessing over nomenclature. A more useful question is, what happens if you express an unpopular opinion? Do you get fired? Arrested? Lynched? Torn to bits by a mob? Shamed on social media? Blocked by social media companies? Can't get published in major media? Attacked by TV pundits? Not invited to the good parties? Also, how long does this go on, and is it retroactive for things said in the past?

What do you mean by “rights”? Legal rights or moral rights? If legal rights, under which law in which jurisdiction? I agree very many cases of “cancellation” are not illegal, and as such not violating anyone’s legal rights - but a lot of people seem to approach this with a narrow focus on the US 1st Amendment (hereafter 1A), when this isn’t a US-only issue, and even in the US there are other laws involved than just 1A - a private company firing someone for their publicly expressed political views cannot violate 1A, but it might violate state laws against political discrimination in employment (such as California Labor Code section 1101), and those state laws can also be understood as creating (or recognising) legal rights. Also, law is not static, it evolves through case law and legislation, so something which is legal today might not be legal in the future-people who believe that we have a problem with “cancel culture” are likely to lobby for laws against it, and we’ll see if they succeed.

If one acknowledges the existence of ethics/morality independent of the law, it follows people may have ethical/moral rights which are violated even if their legal rights (in a certain jurisdiction at a certain time) are not being violated.

I'm not sure that accepting certain spaces becoming unwelcome is the same as a reduction in speech.

The quote toward the end of the article really hits the nail on the head for me:

> The room felt tense... I was shaken, but also determined to not silence myself. Still, the disdain of my fellow students stuck with me. I was a welcome member of the group — and then I wasn’t.

Feeling tense and unwelcome in a space where people disagree with you is totally normal and to be expected. A huge fraction of people grow up feeling exactly like that in virtually every space they inhabit.

(BTW, I'd be unsurprised if the tenseness in this case was more about annoyance with a loudmouth once again derailing a seminar with what they think is profoundly courageous iconoclasm but is actually annoying low-effort culture war trolling that's spoiling a quite expensive educational product for the rest of the paying customers...)

I grew up non-straight and atheist in the midwest, decades ago, and not in a city. The feeling of tenseness described here is totally normal. Gays are not entitled to a complete absence of tenseness in midwest churches or sports bars. That tenseness and unwelcomeness will result in lost opportunities for socialization, employment, etc. even without overt discrimination.

Not everyone will feel comfortable in every space. Not everyone will fit in everywhere. That's life. It seems like literally everyone except a certain brand of conservative hothead understands this.

To me, the entire cancel culture thing can be summed up as: "apparently some people went through a lot of life without ever desiring to inhabit a space where they weren't 100% welcome and, unsurprisingly, react in an emotionally stunted and frankly embarrassing way when encountering this situation."

IDK. Half the country -- and a much larger percentage of its landmass -- is wholly hostile to anyone who isn't a died-in-the-wool conservative. Whence the entitlement to also fit in perfectly everywhere else with zero friction? As a queer person, I don't even have that much sympathy for fellow queer people who try to get along in conservative religious communities. You have a right to free association. If you don't like feeling tense and unwelcome, exercise that right. If you choose to inhabit spaces where you aren't welcome... well, I can sympathize up to a point, but I'm mostly going to roll my eyes if you complain too much.

No, he’s very clearly making the argument that vigorously avoiding defining it at all while trying to argue about it prevents any coherency or utility, not that precisely defining it leads to clarity.

It's not a trap, it's essentially true. Clarity doesn't mean solvability, but reducing ambiguity, or at the very least getting some better consensual agreement on terms among adversaries usually helps flash out the discourse beyond tropes and jabs.

Or Chelsea Manning who was disinvited from speaking at Harvard after pressure from the government

Actually, many progressives do acknowledge that. Plenty of people on the left feel that cancel culture sometimes goes too far, including marginalized groups who feel it appropriates their struggle and does more harm than good, primarily serving as a way for outsiders to virtue signal allyship in ways that don't really threaten their privilege, or require skin in the game as it were.

On the other hand, given a corrupt system which often protects and insulates powerful people from the consequences of their vile actions, cancel culture is sometimes the only lever people have to effect progressive change in that system. I mean, cancellation, protest and collective action are the only reason certain issues are even part of the greater cultural conversation at all.

One of the reasons this debate is so useless is that it's mostly about cherry-picking anecdotes that support your partisan biases.

I think that's an essential part of the problem: the fact that the views being penalized are (generally) widely held. From a purely practical standpoint it seems foolish. It's possible to ostracize a group of people for their beliefs when the group is small, but completely impractical if that belief gains any sort of traction.

I mean, early in our history America ostracized the Mormons, but could you imagine doing it now? And they're not even close to a majority.

To me, this hints that the concept is a convenient tool to own people over social media or use in political attacks for rallying a voter base. There isn’t anything new here except people being shitty to each other. Anything else from it is what you normally get with reputation damage (justified or not).

Once we get rid of the annoying exercise of trying to define cancel culture, there’s some real action items we can talk about regarding reputation/livelihood damage for dumb things being said. Any reason to revisit that is because of technology’s reach now and how seemingly easily it can happen, not that cancel culture is a new thing.

This just isn’t true, and I’m not sure why the discussion around cancel culture is framed like it is true.

It’s exceedingly hard to be cancelled if you’re acting genuinely, kindly, and with empathy for the topic you’re discussing. You can say literally anything you want if you can figure out how to be nice when you say it, but you do have to put real effort into that endeavor.

Getting canceled isn’t a landmine, it’s a tar pit.

I actually think that there is a solution that not many people have mentioned.

What we can do is actually fund enforcement of the actual really bad stuff that people do during these hate/harrassement type situations.

And by that I mean, when people make death threats against someone, or harassment or target them in a similar way, then you have a government run doxxing squad that finds out who sent the death threats, and they arrest them, send them to jail, and put a felony on their record, even if it is a 1 time/first offense.

Right now, if you send a bunch of deaths threats to people, you'll probably get away with it. But if the government actually enforced the law, and sent you to prison, the first time you did that to anybody, well I think the worst of the "cancel culture" type harassment would end really quick.

I think this is more neatly described by the right having more mainstream and surreptitious avenues of "cancelling" people they don't like. Gang lists, credit scores, police intimidation/brutality, selective enforcement of drug policy, the prison system, good ol' boys clubs, etc etc etc.

> some responses to speech are disproportionate and outside norms of decency

> "Cancel culture" is the belief that certain beliefs about race, gender, and equality are so utterly indefensible that anyone holding them is necessarily acting in bad faith and consequently deserving of punishment.

In practice, this means moral condemnation in place of consideration and argumentation, which is precisely illiberalism.

What distinguishes "cancel culture" from, say, the conservative hatred of communism, is the whiff of hypocrisy that comes from the use of mob rule to enforce what are ostensibly academic positions, and the frequent reference to inclusivity as a justification of social exclusion.

This dramatic promotion of the most unreasonable takes is creating a massive divide between the online world and the offline world. Quite a few takes on Twitter when expressed in the real world, may make you wake up in the hospital.

(It's not a motte-and-bailey, that's about a particular sort of shifting goalposts)

a) How it's possible, even hypothetically for citizens to simultaneously have both "the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public" and "without fear of being shamed or shunned". The two are contradictory.

b) How that superposition is "a fundamental right as citizens of a free country", which Americans once had but are losing.

> Until businesses, universities, and institutions say no to the digital mob, it will continue.

You can wait on that, but I prefer labor laws.

What corporations are allowed to do is one thing, but as an individual I've decided to take cancel culture to heart. When possible, I now just put anyone with awful views on my personal ban lists. Twitter and Reddit both allow this. I no longer see any of their posts and they don't see mine.

I'm far happier having done this an I don't think the world has lost anything by it. There are definitely issues I'm willing to engage on and discuss, but there are many that I am not. Hearing the same tired old propaganda talking points from people in certain camps is just poison to me.

You can't stop mobs from forming or trying to do damage, but for sure we can attempt to shield society from it.

Businesses should learn to not panic when a mob calls for the firing of an employee. Often it's done in a blackmail scenario: I will stop using your products if you don't comply.

They didn't use your products in the first place, and if they did, they won't stop using them in numbers. The economic threat is a bluff. Call the bluff. Nothing happens. Then, just wait out the mob as they get impatient and move on to the next target. Stand like an oak, not like a twig in the wind. Don't let a bunch of weird anime avatars tell you how to run your business.

As this return of sanity will not magically happen, I would support legislation to offer employees some reasonable protection from mob terminations.

Universities are perhaps the hardest to fix. Students needs to be taught to be resilient, open to opposing points of view, understand the concept of a zeitgeist and stop seeing being offended as the end of the world.

I genuinely don't know how else they could describe what's going on. Braying means speaking loudly and harshly - an accurate description of how many public figures on the right discuss cancel culture. It's colorful language, sure, but it's an op-ed, which mean's its someone's opinion.

If not, you're really straining even the most generous definition of "cancel culture" beyond the point of even minimal usefulness.

Cancel culture would be if they put your profile or picture on the front page as an example of being a terrible person who has done things every right thinking person should not, and no one should think of employing or working with you - because they didn’t like your comments.