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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

>But IMO the larger issue of cancel culture, is it makes people less likely to say edgy jokes or borderline politically-incorrect statements for fear they will also get "cancelled".

This comes up all the time that "you can't make edgy jokes anymore", but it isn't true. Just look up someone like Anthony Jessolnik. Here is his most recent joke on Twitter[1]. Mocking both pedophilia and the death of a 4-year-old. This guy has 1.2m followers and plenty of those are liberals. A talented comedian can joke about anything.

I think this narrative comes from the fact that many people don't see a difference between a joke about racism and a racist joke. They see someone "canceled" for a transphobic joke and take it to mean we can't joke about trans people. It isn't the case. I have seen comedians kill with material about trans people in front of young leftist crowds. It is possible.

I see the value in joking about these issues. I don't see the value in making a racist, sexist, transphobic, or overall bigoted joke made at the expense of innocent people simply trying to live their life.

[1] - https://twitter.com/anthonyjeselnik/status/15046838415957196...

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And I'm so tired of people responding "nope, there's nothing to see here, [good] people aren't being cancelled, and no-one is afraid to speak their mind." It's dehumanizing. Or maybe gaslighting. You're telling them that they aren't seeing and feeling the thing they are seeing and feeling. You're not arguing against their take, just denying their experience.

Cancel culture exists. It hurts people, and it generates fear. Heresy exists and it is punished. Most people are self-censuring heavily now. I have experienced it myself in personal and professional contexts, and I am a moderate liberal. The OP mentions the fact that both sides always have truthful anecdotes to support their positions, and use it to attack the other. And that is what you've done here.

Regardless of the details of cancel culture, how could you think a system like that could ever possibly work? When there is status to be gained from making an allegation then they'll be made, true or not. When allegation is enough to generate a mob, which affects your employer, your friends and family, you're entire life, this is a disproportionate punishment even if the allegation were true. But the accused rarely, if ever, even gets to speak in their own defense. It's called "social justice" but it's not a court, there are no rules, and the judge jury and executioner feels just fine if they never take a dispassionate look at facts. This system, applied to anything, is the opposite of justice. To believe otherwise is to reveal a deeply flawed understanding of how human beings respond to incentives. (Of course, one way to get around this problem is to redefine "guilt" to require only that the victim feel bad. But again, this incentivizes victims to feel bad, and somehow everyone forgets that people feel bad for all sorts of reasons, sometimes having nothing to do with the accused.)

Maybe this reply to my comment wasn't directed specifically at me, but I want to make it clear you are arguing against points I didn't make. I wasn't saying cancel culture doesn't exist. I wasn't saying people don't self-censor.

I was instead saying that people who complain about self-censorship often don't understand the reason behind why some things are now objectionable. This results in them painting with too broad of a brush when they talk about that self-censorship and cancel culture. You can still make edgy and politically incorrect jokes today if you do it right.

> You can still make edgy and politically incorrect jokes today if you do it right.

Not really. Doing it right means adhering to the left’s idea of what is right. Your whole position is based on the left being correct about everything.

Take non-binary for example. I’ve looked into it, read the studies and my conclusion is that it’s pseudoscience that deserves to be mocked. But you probably think it’s real so if I joke about it you think I’m a bigot. From my perspective, joking about it is like when we used to mock people who believed in creationism.

So what is doing it right if we both have two fundamentally different positions about a subject?

——- I’m not gonna get into a debate over non-binary. That’s not the point here, it’s an example.

It's not a democrat thing. Large parts of the population disagree on things. When people do things objectionable to republicans, they all try to cancel them too. Many republicans want to cancel gay people, trans people, immigrants, minorities, socialists, etc.

So were you against mocking people who believed in creationism? It sounds like you’re fine with shaming people when you’re in the ingroup, while at the same time you don’t want to be shamed for being part of an outgroup.

I mocked creationism too. You can mock my dying mother for all I care. I wouldn’t like it but believe in your right to say whatever you want.

You are free to mock non-binary people, though. And others are free to call you a bigot. Both of those comport with a right to say whatever you want.

Let me focus on this part of what I said in my first comment "joke made at the expense of innocent people simply trying to live their life." Would your joke about non-binary people be about the idea of being non-binary or at the expense of the people who are non-binary? The former is allowed. The latter is cruel regardless of your opinion on the science. Even if you believe that every non-binary person in the world is mentally ill and suffering from a mass delusion, why would you think it should be acceptable to mock the mentally ill? It is cruel regardless of politics.

> Would your joke about non-binary people be about the idea of being non-binary or at the expense of the people who are non-binary?

That line is so thin, one person might think it has been crossed while another might not. Ideally, the joke would be about the idea but some will say that’s still at the expense of those people.

Mocking the mentally ill has been done for decades. I don’t think there should be any taboo in humor. There’s always someone who will be offended, no matter who or what you joke about.

For the record, I don’t think non-binary people are mentally ill.

>That line is so thin, one person might think it has been crossed while another might not. Ideally, the joke would be about the idea but some will say that’s still at the expense of those people.

This is shifting the goal posts. We were talking about cancel culture not offending one person. No one is cancelled when there is only a single person that objects. The problem is when large groups of people object. The line for that is not nearly as thin or hard to ascertain.

>Mocking the mentally ill has been done for decades.

Do I have to point out how silly this excuse is? People also spent centuries yelling the n-word as Black people. Should that still be acceptable today?

>I don’t think there should be any taboo in humor.

I have seen comedians joke about almost every controversial issue under the sun. The only real taboo in modern comedy is to not punch down. Mocking people who have historically been oppressed and who want nothing but the end of that oppression is punching down.

I don't agree that there is something as punching down. Jokes are jokes. Doesn't matter who makes them or who or what the joke is about. This is once again you thinking that your ideas are the norm. It's clear why you think that though, people who disagree get canceled and thus fringe ideas like punching down get pushed into the mainstream even though most people disagree with it.

> Do I have to point out how silly this excuse is? People also spent centuries yelling the n-word as Black people. Should that still be acceptable today?

You misunderstood, it's not an excuse, I'm saying there is no taboo on jokes about mental illness. Except in the progressive part of society, which is only 8 % of the US. There is nothing cruel about making jokes. They are just jokes. Don't like it, don't listen. It's not that hard.

> Mocking people who have historically been oppressed and who want nothing but the end of that oppression is punching down.

This line of reasoning doesn't even apply in this case, non-binary people haven't been historically oppressed as it didn't even exist 10 years ago, it was invented on tumblr by teens. 99,99 % of non-binary people are under 30, it's brand new.

>I don't agree that there is something as punching down. Jokes are jokes. Doesn't matter who makes them or who or what the joke is about. This is once again you thinking that your ideas are the norm.

This is not just my opinion. This is a rather mainstream opinion in the comedy community.

>This line of reasoning doesn't even apply in this case, non-binary people haven't been historically oppressed as it didn't even exist 10 years ago, it was invented on tumblr by teens. 99,99 % of non-binary people are under 30, it's brand new.

I'm not going to criticize your opinions of non-binary people, but this is statement of supposed fact that is simply wrong. There are plenty of examples of non-binary people throughout history and in various cultures. Just because the specific terminology we use today is relatively new does not mean these concepts are new. So whatever studying you claimed to have done about this issue, you should know that exercise was wildly incomplete and therefore your conclusions were at best premature.

No, I knew that and I stand by what I said. It didn't exist here until tumblr. There are also tribes who believed that every man in the village needs to have sex with a woman for her to get pregnant. I guess that's science now too. And the world is flat because that's what Europe in the Middle Ages believed.

And again, we can't historically have oppressed something that didn't exist in society 10 years ago. Look at the numbers. It's all under 30. Look at the numbers for gay people, even before they were accepted by society. There were gay people in every age group, spread evenly by age. Not for non-binary. Why not? Where is the oppressed 70 year old non-binary person? That person doesn't exist.

Anyway, I think we're wasting our time. We're not gonna convince each other. Thanks for staying civil. Have a great Easter.

>And again, we can't historically have oppressed something that didn't exist in society 10 years ago. Look at the numbers. It's all under 30. Look at the numbers for gay people, even before they were accepted by society. There were gay people in every age group, spread evenly by age. Not for non-binary.

This also isn't true. The percentage of people who identify as homosexual is not "spread evenly be age". Look at the chart toward the bottom of the page here[1]. Rates of bisexual, gay, lesbian, and transgender people were 0.2%, 0.4%, 0.1% and 0.2% among the traditionalist/silent generation and grew to 15%, 2.5%, 2.0%, 2.1% in Gen Z. The rate of transgender people grew almost identically to the rate of increase in the gay and lesbian population and nowhere near the growth in the bisexual population. Do you not understand how a society that is openly against LGBT people might keep those people in the closet and a society that is more accepting allows people to be more open about themselves?

Once again, the "facts" that you are using to support your opinion are wrong. Maybe it is therefore time to reconsider those opinions.

[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/389792/lgbt-identification-tick...

You misunderstood what I was saying. Doesn’t matter, it’s too sunny outside to keep arguing about this.

Yet… there are no witch hunts for those that mock creationists. Some things are acceptable to mock to leftists. I have seen a student kicked from the University where I am finishing my PhD for mocking LGBTQIAP issues…never have I seen someone kicked for making fun of the religious folks.

You missed the second part of my quote "innocent people simply trying to live their life".

Mocking is often excused because many (but obviously not all) creationist will try to push their views on others. No one cares what your beliefs are. They care when you use those beliefs as a basis to impose your morality onto others. That opens them up to justifiable backlash.

Non-binary people generally aren't pushing any belief beyond just wanting to live their life how they want to live it. The change they are looking for is acceptance.

Is it not ok to mock creationism anymore? I need to get out of my cave that's 5,000 years old and learn modern customs.

You either used a bad example, or don't understand your terms. There's nothing pertinent about non-binary you could possibly glean from studies, because it's cultural. What someone feels about their identity isn't the sort of thing you can create a science around.

This is precisely why someone would call you a bigot; Oxford defines the term thusly:

> a person who is obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.

The belief in this case being that your opinion of their identity, based on the studies you have read, is more relevant to their truth (or anyone's) than their feelings about their identity. As far as some of us are concerned, it isn't.

This isn't a left-vs-right matter, either. That framing establishes factional conflict where there could be simple misunderstanding, which isn't terribly productive.

Really, the issue at hand is that you feel like you should get to make jokes about people's identity, and others feel like joking about people based on their identity is rude so they call you out on it. It just happens that there are enough people who feel that way that being ostracized by them stings. Your options are to not do it or accept that a large portion of society will think you're a dick.

> The belief in this case being that your opinion of their identity, based on the studies you have read, is more relevant to their truth (or anyone's) than their feelings about their identity. As far as some of us are concerned, it isn't.

But why should I take someone's view of their identity without question? Why, and to what extent, am I obliged to uphold and reinforce someone's self-perception? And why on some issues but not their race, height, age, etc.?

Saying it's a "cultural issue" or a "social construct" doesn't help here. "Social construct" does not mean an individual gets to decide unilaterally - quite the opposite in fact! A social constructed category is one which society decides.

Nor does "socially constructed" mean something is arbitrary. Language is socially constructed, but that does not mean we can change anything we want about a given language without consequence.

> Really, the issue at hand is that you feel like you should get to make jokes about people's identity, and others feel like joking about people based on their identity is rude so they call you out on it.

Presuming to know someone else's motives better than they know themselves is not persuasive.

> But why should I take someone's view of their identity without question?

Basic respect of others involves at least paying lip service to their preferences (and I realise it’s not a preference but I don’t have the correct language here), or ideally genuinely respecting other people.

You don’t have to do it, but it’s awfully rude and in cases can be quite a nasty thing to not respect their wishes. Why not do the right thing? How much does it really hurt you to do so (not how much does it irritate you, that’s not really relevant here)?

Ideally you try respect the, and they forgive and accept mistakes on others part. Both people should try be kind to one another.

Whenever I ask these questions, this is always the response I get. It's really frustrating because it's really a non-answer that isn't at all helpful.

Firstly, do you think I go around taunting people about their self-perceptions of their gender? Even if it wasn't something I could be fired for (which it is) I don't actually take delight in causing other people psychological distress. I am asking these questions here, in this forum, because I want to hear better reasons other than "it's the nice thing to do".

Secondly, I listed several cases where your rules of politeness don't apply and aren't the norm - how are those different? This whole "take people's identity claims without question" works in some limited contexts, but breaks down in so many different cases that it really isn't a generalizable moral principle. At best what you propose is a useful tactic for having pleasant water cooler conversations with strangers and acquaintances. It is not a solution for the rest of life where our identities have important implications for how we relate to each other.

Thirdly, that social etiquette is the only justification you provide suggests you understand our acceptance of these identity claims is merely a social fiction. Now, I am a well-socialized adult, which means I understand how often little fictions, little white-lies grease the gears of society. And like I said previously, I don't like to cause others undue distress. But I also think forcing other people to lie (by threatening their job, for example) to be dehumanizing and immoral in its own right.

Lots of LGBTQ organizations have FAQs about transgender issues. E.g. https://www.hrc.org/resources/transgender-and-non-binary-faq What questions do you have that are not answered in this sort of material?

If someone says "I identify as a woman and prefer female pronouns", it's not clear to me what it is that you'd want to 'question' anyway. If the person is, for example, a colleague, why would you care about their anatomy or what gender they were assigned at birth?

It's important to be kind to everyone. Anyone "skeptical" of a trans person really ought to mind their own business. I agree with you there.

To play devil's advocate, some identities have less currency in current society. See "Neopronoun" [1] for examples. To lliamander's point, there is a gray area where not everyone is going to feel comfortable with unfamiliar gender constructs. If the rule is to accept everybody's identity at face value, then that closes down any space to feel uncomfortable calling someone "kitten," to use an extreme example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopronoun

You are indeed using extreme examples. This is not the sort of thing that is causing people to get shouted at on twitter.

I'd be interested to know if you can link to a single example of someone insisting that they be referred to using a neopronoun (and not accepting e.g. they). Here, for example, is a discussion of neopronouns on r/nonbinary: https://www.reddit.com/r/NonBinary/comments/k7hegi/can_someo... I don't see anyone getting canceled for expressing a degree of skepticism about neopronouns.

I also think you're being slightly disingenuous in talking about 'accepting people's identity at face value' as if it was being proposed as an absolutely rigid rule. No rule of social interaction is completely rigid or without exception. If you really have a reason to think that someone is being dishonest or disingenuous about their gender identity then you don't necessarily have to go along with whatever they tell you. But if you are not inherently unwilling to believe trans people in general, how often is that scenario going to come up?

> I'd be interested to know if you can link to a single example of someone insisting that they be referred to using a neopronoun (and not accepting e.g. they).

Read the HRC FAQ you just linked to in the previous comment. It includes this:

> Some transgender and non-binary people do not identify with the gender binary and prefer not to use pronouns typically associated with men (he/him) or women (she/her). Instead, they may prefer if people simply use their names, use gender neutral pronouns such as “they/them” or use other pronouns such as “fae/faer” or “ey/em.”

I meant a real example of someone refusing to accept any of he/she/they as an acceptable choice of pronoun. So much of this debate is based on trans people being truculent in someone’s imagination.

My point in using the extreme example is not to suggest that people are insisting on their use. I chose a fringe example, for which it is socially acceptable to express skepticism, in order to illustrate the point that there are gray areas in how society validates some identities and is less inclusive of others.

In the link you provided, one Redditor "struggles to stay progressive about" neo-pronouns. Another Redditor considers such skepticism to be "extremely gatekeepy and transphobic."

I don't have any reason to believe that someone preferring kitten-folk pronouns is being dishonest or disingenuous, even in this more extreme example.

But what is the principle under which some identity claims are accepted more than others? I have my own thoughts, but I'm curious to get yours. Do you think there is room in society for people on occasion to feel uncomfortable with someone's proposed identity?

Obviously there is not some simple set of rules that will help you to navigate every difficult question relating to personal identity. But now you are talking about hypotheticals, not real problems that occur in choosing a suitable pronoun for someone in a realistic situation.

I’m highly skeptical that there are people who go through life getting angry with every person who won’t call them ‘kitten’. But if you know of any actual examples of this, feel free to provide them.

It’s sad that debates about issues that affect real trans people so often get sidetracked into these irrelevant hypotheticals. This isn’t an academic debate. We don’t have to solve all the edge cases before we can start doing the right thing in the common case.

All too often in these discussions, one side is just saying to be kind to everyone, while the other insists on a philosophical debate, so they end up talking past each other. I would hope that someone learning about trans people is able to update their beliefs about gender: “I used to believe that gender is always tied to sex, but there seems to be a sizeable majority of people for whom this is not the case, and so I will update my beliefs and learn.” Anybody who isn’t capable of this is honestly stubborn, and there are also assholes who go out of their way to harass or debate this topic in contexts where they shouldn’t. The majority of discussion around gender should focus on these points and being humble about your beliefs and kind to others.

But these are all points agreed on by myself, GP, and GGP comments. The question you replied to asked, “Yes, we should be kind to people and refer to people how they prefer. But, there are some non-binary identities that I don’t have buy-in for. I will of course refer to people by their preferred pronouns to be kind, but can anyone give another reason?” There is a place for this kind of conversation, too, on occasion.

You can see that lliamander doesn’t actually agree with all of those points from replies upthread (they are being asked to “lie”).

> But, there are some non-binary identities that I don’t have buy-in for. I will of course refer to people by their preferred pronouns to be kind, but can anyone give another reason?

In the general case your question answers itself. If you don't believe that someone is really (e.g.) a woman, then obviously there is no reason to refer to them using their preferred female pronouns except general politeness and kindness.

If I understand correctly, you are concerned about cases where someone does not accept either 'they', 'he' or 'she' as acceptable pronouns. I would urge you to find a real example, as discussing such cases in the abstract based on Wikipedia articles is frankly ridiculous. But again, the answer to your question in the abstract is obvious. If you don't believe that the person's identity is real, then you can either use their preferred pronouns to be polite – or not.

I fail to see any real philosophical issue that's raised here, given that you already accept that gender and biological sex are not inextricably linked. I guess there's the question of "How do I tell if someone's reported identity is real?", but that seems to be just a special case of "How do I tell if someone is being honest?". The answer is of course that you do so using your general nous.

> that seems to be just a special case of "How do I tell if someone is being honest?"

Is it that simple? Nobody is doubting the honesty of anyone involved. The real matter is there is a cultural tradition called gender, and some people see it as a flexible thing, and to others it’s not, or less so.

You linked to the HRC FAQ, so you must have felt it was relevant to what lliamander was saying. I’m curious what information it contains that could convince someone to be more flexible in their gender definition? What would you say to someone who doubts the validity of non-binary identities? What would it take to convince you that those “extreme,” to reflect your language, neopronoun-based identities are real and valid?

> If I understand correctly, you are concerned about cases where someone does not accept either 'they', 'he' or 'she' as acceptable pronouns.

That’s not what I said at all. I’m not sure how you got that impression. I brought up neopronouns to show that most people have a degree of inflexibility in their conception of gender. These examples you’re asking for are besides the point.

Edit: Do you see how I’m using devils advocate? I personally believe that transgender identities are real and valid, for whatever that’s worth. But if you consider an extremely liberal position on gender, it’s useful to see how you react to it.

>I brought up neopronouns to show that most people have a degree of inflexibility in their conception of gender.

People's objections to neopronouns are usually practical and linguistic in nature rather than stemming from any particular inflexibility about gender. I don't really doubt that some people have gender identities that fall completely outside the usual male/female classification scheme. What I do doubt is that any significant number of these people think that the pronominal system of any given language must necessarily encode the relevant conceptual aparatus in its morphology. After all, there are plenty of languages where pronouns don't have gender at all. If someone is talking about you in Chinese, then 'tā' is all you're getting – and who could reasonably complain about that? That's not to say that I'm reflexively (tee hee) opposed to all neopronouns. Adding additional gender-neutral pronouns to some languages might make sense, conceivably.

I can see how it would be nice to have a general argument that would prove to a skeptic that any arbitrary non-binary identity was 'valid'. However, there are a couple of reasons why I don't think this is a reasonable thing to ask for. First, different identities are different. If the 'validity' of a given identity comes into question, then one has to argue on a case-by-case basis. Second, while it is almost certainly very rare for people to be delusional or dishonest about their gender identities, it is clearly possible in principle. Thus, the requested argument would either be an argument to a false conclusion, or would have to presuppose the honesty and sanity of the relevant person, at which point it would beg the very question that is usually at issue.

> Lots of LGBTQ organizations have FAQs about transgender issues. E.g. https://www.hrc.org/resources/transgender-and-non-binary-faq

That site makes some obviously false statements (e.g. about what 'sex' is).

> What questions do you have that are not answered in this sort of material?

Allow me to quote myself:

> But why should I take someone's view of their identity without question? Why, and to what extent, am I obliged to uphold and reinforce someone's self-perception? And why on some issues but not their race, height, age, etc.?

None of these questions except the first have been addressed, and the answer to the first was wholly inadequate as I explain up thread.

> If someone says "I identify as a woman and prefer female pronouns", it's not clear to me what it is that you'd want to 'question' anyway. If the person is, for example, a colleague, why would you care about their anatomy or what gender they were assigned at birth?

Again, I'm not going to be needlessly confrontational with a colleague, but I still don't believe their identity claim (I believe they feel that way, I just don't think that feeling is has much bearing on my beliefs). And while I will comply with their pronoun requests, I do care that I am being expected to lie, and there are limits to how far I am willing to go to preserve the fiction.

> Whenever I ask these questions, this is always the response I get. It's really frustrating because it's really a non-answer that isn't at all helpful.

Do you think it might be possible that you keep getting this answer because you are asking why no one respects your opinion that you don’t need to respect other opinions? You’re kinda coming from a hypocritical ground on the root argument here.

> Do you think it might be possible...

So far my experience has been that, no matter how respectfully I dissent from modern views of gender and sex, the only level considered "acceptable" is to not express my dissent at all.

I don't really have time for some side discussion about my level of propriety. Let's either discuss the object-level issue or be done.

This answers nothing.

Respect is earned, otherwise it's meaningless. And who said this is the "right thing"? Why does it matter how much it "hurt"? All you're doing is saying that one group must always be "respected" at the cost of the others agency. This is ridiculous and dystopic.

People have the freedom to behave and accept whatever they want. What you're talking about is manners, politeness, and civility. And sure, people should be civil, but civility doesn't mean acceptance without question either and should never come at the cost of freedom. The moment you do so, you've lost both.

> Respect is earned

Respect isn't earned in polite society at some base level. I say "Good Morning" to the people I meet on my run not because they saved five children from a burning building, but because they're people I ran into today. That's the right thing to do. Sure, I don't put the person that I said "Good Morning" on some bright pedestal and worship their feet, but I still treat them with respect.

To call someone by the name they prefer and the pronouns they prefer and not being a dick to them is pretty basic, and it's not dystopic to expect people to do so.

> "Respect isn't earned in polite society at some base level."

Polite society requires politeness. Manners. Decorum. Civility. Not respect. These are different words for different concepts and should not be conflated.

Respect is earned based on your knowledge of that person. Why would you respect random people when you know nothing about them? What if they were murderers? Would you respect them less? If so, why? Because its new knowledge about them that caused a new score, therefore zero knowledge = zero respect until you learn enough to make an assessment. I can also be polite with a murderer but not respect them; see the difference?

> "I say "Good Morning" to the people I meet ... because they're people ... That's the right thing to do."

What's right about it? What if they didn't want to talk to you? A lack of engagement is not wrong.

> "name ... and the pronouns they prefer"

Preferences do not overrule rights and freedoms. The point is why should someone accept an identity without question - and both you and the other user made the same argument that it's "the right thing to do".

But that means not accepting identity without question is wrong, which therefore removes the rights and agency of one group (to question) the preferences of another. Your rights are my responsibility; your right to question my identity is my responsibility to accept that my identity is open to questioning.

That's why those arguments are meaningless. They may sound good but they fail to hold any logical consistency. Expectations of civility are more than enough for society to function, however as soon as you mandate civility at the cost of freedom them you will end up with neither.

So when I meet a flat earther I need to be respectful and acknowledge the earth is flat? Those people consider it to be part of their identity too.

Why is it ok to dismiss one group but we have to be respectful of another?

Anyway, I never said I want to mock people in their face but the ideas they believe in should be fair game.

Presuming to know someone else's motives better than they know themselves is not persuasive.

Saying that people shouldn't presume to know your motives about a joke when you're talking about mocking people's self identity is hilariously hypocritical.

"Don't assume things about me when I'm mocking people I've made a massive assumption about!"

Just for clarification, I'm not vimy. But further more, he didn't say he wanted to mock people, but the concept of "non-binary" as presently accepted in our society (and presumably related concepts around gender identity) because he concludes it is nonsense.

Pksebben is not arguing with vimy about whether the concept of "non-binary" is meaningful or coherent; Pksebben is merely making the accusation that vimy is rationalizing his desire to mock other people.

If I say you have an incoherent view of the world, and you claim that I only think that because I'm a mean person who wants to hurt people, then I'm not going to find you persuasive.

he didn't say he wanted to mock people, but the concept of "non-binary" as presently accepted in our society

You can't separate the two things though. Mocking a belief is the same as mocking people who hold that belief. If someone says "I am a man" and someone else says "Men don't exist" then it's entirely fair to say the second person is attacking the first. They are. Maybe that's OK under the guises of free speech though.

You can't then also say that the first person should be free to say what they want without acknowledging that the second group should be able to call them out for it (aka cancel them). There's no reasonable way for the first person to have the freedom to say what they like without the second group also being able to say what they like.

Cancelling just means that the first person is scared of the consequences of the second person being upset. Well, tough luck. If you're scared of the consequences of your actions then you don't get to do those actions.

You can separate the two things, most people are multidimensional. I have a lot of friends that I respect who hold abhorrent beliefs.

You can say that the first person should be free to say whatever they want, and that the people affected by it should be able to say whatever they want, that's completely irrelevant to the issue.

Cancelling means someone losing their financial safety and that of their family for expressing their opinion. If your response to this is "tough luck", I'd say you're showing a lot of privilege, and lack of empathy that'd get you cancelled if expressed about one of the hot button social issues.

You cannot both claim there is free speech (the principle) and that it's fine that people get fired for what they say, it is fundamentally incompatible.

> Cancelling means someone losing their financial safety and that of their family for expressing their opinion. If your response to this is "tough luck", I'd say you're showing a lot of privilege, and lack of empathy that'd get you cancelled if expressed about one of the hot button social issues.

Tell a racist joke at work, and there are good odds you'll get fired. Tell a sexist joke at work, and odds are good, you'll get fired. Are you going to argue that freedom of speech should prevent you from being fired for telling a racist or sexist jokes?

Three points with regards to that scenario you laid out.

First, I won't be fired. If I make such a joke around colleagues who know me, they'll probably take me apart and tell me they found it hurtful and I'll apologize and it'll end there. If I do it around someone who feels more strongly about it, I'll have to have a serious talk with people I know and who know me in HR and in my hierarchy, who value my contributions, understand the larger context of the person that I am and my personal circumstances, yet recognize I did something inappropriate that needs to be addressed and corrected, and importantly with whom I have a contract enforced by the state. That's a whole lot more nuance, maturity and sanity than getting a hundred thousand people calling for your job online because you made a joke.

Second, the way you behave at work and outside of work are not equivalent. If I'm just some lambda employee, no reasonable person should assume I speak for my company when I express myself on a non-professional public platform.

Third, nobody holds the ultimate truth about what is sexist, racist and to a larger extent right and wrong wrt current social and political issues. That's the nature of social and political issues, there are two sides, one is not good and the other evil. If your job depends on complying with online zealots representing a single extremist side of an issue, you are in essence forbidding some political opinions.

Sure, there's process at most jobs for disciplining employees - but there are generally still consequences for speech that is racist, sexist, and so on. If a company doesn't enforce those standards, they will probably find their legal bills becoming very expensive. Ergo, there are consequences for speech in the workplace.

If an employee takes part in a KKK rally, should their employer turn a blind eye towards it if they find out? If a person advocates for killing gay people online, should their employer ignore it? If the employer ignores it, then there is a good chance that black people or gay people won't work for them. Why? Because gay people won't feel safe working next to someone who advocates their death.

> Mocking a belief is the same as mocking people who hold that belief.

So, do you defend defend creationists with the same vigor when their beliefs are being mocked?

I'm saying mocking creationism is the same as mocking creationists, sure. I'm not defending them though. They can defend themselves if they want. They don't need my help.

Why the difference?

Not OP and not agreeing with this, but I believe the purported difference is that some beliefs are granted the status of identity, which makes them in some sense sacrosanct.

The (faulty) chain of logic goes:

1. You are challenging my belief.

2. This belief is about part of who I am.

3. Therefore you are challenging me and/or my existence.

If it's about "challenging me and/or my existence", why is acceptable to make jokes about, say, bald people? Why hasn't Chris Rock been cancelled?

> I believe the purported difference is that some beliefs are granted the status of identity, which makes them in some sense sacrosanct. The (faulty) chain of logic goes:

In the case of mocking, I would say there's no difference between the two. Mocking either creationists or nonbinary people is mean-spirited and a wrong thing to do. In fact, I've always had quite a problem with Richard Dawkins for this very reason. But I'm not going to say that either one should be deplatformed or anything like that.

When it comes to laws then there is a big difference between the two. In the case of creationists, no one is creating laws restricting creationists from participating in public life. It's true that people have an issue with creationists teaching creationism as fact, but that's a different matter entirely. However, on the other side what we see are laws against certain people existing in public places.

That's what we mean by "challenging me and/or my existence." It's not, "You can't talk about creationism here". Instead it's, "You can't be here if you believe in creationism", which I don't think is a law anywhere. And yet in the past many people have passed such laws against minorities of all kinds restricting them using attributes they can't change about themselves. This is what you perceive as "granted the status of identity, which makes them in some sense sacrosanct". While it's true that being a Christian and believing in creationism is in some sense an immutable property of one's self identity, at the same time no one is passing laws barring Christians from bathrooms because the Catholic Church has a problem with harboring pedophiles.

Who is passing laws restricting nonbinary people from participating in public life?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_non-bin...

In particular, there is a very strong conservative movement in the US dedicated to the idea there are exactly two genders, and they are very intent on legislating as such, just as they legislated gay people from participating in public institutions such as marriage.

I see no examples in that article of laws restricting nonbinary people from participating in public life, and somewhat the opposite (recognition of nonbinary as a protected characteristic under anti-discrimination laws).

It's amazing to me that same-sex marriage was legalized just in 2015 by the slimmest of margins (a decision that wouldn't have been made by the current court, and is vowed to be legislated away by the GOP), we're on the cusp of a new moral panic regarding transgendered people, and you're still requesting to be spoon feed proof that this discrimination exists, even after I already spoon fed it to you. Here's another spoonful: https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/15/politics/anti-transgender-leg...

You seem to be equating nonbinary and transgender. I’m quite aware of the state of play on transgender bathroom bills and sports inclusion, but I’m really genuinely unaware of any legislation that would prevent nonbinary people from participating in things like marriage (we’re taking about legislation aren’t we? Not discrimination in general?)

> You seem to be equating nonbinary and transgender.

First, many nonbinary people identify as transgender. Second, anti-trans laws don't have very clear delineations on who they target, first of all because the legislation is written by clueless people who hardly have an idea or even care to have an idea what it means to be trans versus nonbinary.

But moreover it should be obvious by now that the current crop of anti-trans laws are just a backlash to the Obergefell decision in 2015, and it's not even intended to target specifically trans people. They are vice signals intended to put LGBTQIA people in general on notice as to the ideological posture of the state. They are not going to be very discriminate about targeting you if you're trans but leaving you alone if you're nonbinary. It's a distinction without a difference to them.

Anti trans laws are an admission that the anti-LGBTQIA movement lost a battle but intends to continue the war by moving over to a new letter of the acronym. We know this to be true because they're recycling all the same anti-gay rhetoric and tactics they used to use in the 90s against gay rights, but this time subbing in "trans", who appear to be targeted next because of their visibility in the community. There are no principles behind these arguments, because if there were they'd still be making the same arguments about gay people. They aren't making those arguments anymore because they know they lost those arguments culturally. But they still believe those things and want to keep saying them but this time directing their hate toward trans people.

And it's true Obergefell gave us same sex marriage, but since 2015 they have been vowing to erase that decision, and they've worked tirelessly to make that a reality. The Supreme Court is now exactly where the GOP have wanted it for a generation, and they are using it as they promised; abortion rights will be done this summer, and next on the chopping block is gay marriage as promised. They said they are going to do it, and it looks like they will. Right now it doesn't seem like there's a lot to stop them.

> we’re taking about legislation aren’t we? Not discrimination in general?

One last thing I'd like to point out, is that when lawmakers stand in the way of anti-discrimination laws because they want the discrimination to continue, this is a form of legalized discrimination. You don't need to make harassment and discrimination legal by passing a law saying it's okay, instead you keep it legal by preventing the passage of laws saying it's forbidden.

> If you're scared of the consequences of your actions then you don't get to do those actions.

I’m pretty sure you don’t actually believe that.

... or it is being biological.

Would you extend your analysis to mockery of creationism too? That’s part of people’s identity too, and creationists are undoubtedly offended at being mocked.

And if you mock them, creationists will also start a mob against you. And probably try to prevent you from ever being hired at places they work at.

Such behavior always existed.

It's just that if a sect cancels you it's less painful than if the majority of society cancels you. And lots of right wing people don't want to believe how left wing society as a whole has become, so they see canceling as a conspiracy by the left, when it's really just the majority of society boycotting you.

Progressives are not a majority of society, they are a vocal minority. The majority is not on Twitter and doesn't care much about politics either way

There are very few regions in the western world where progressives are not the majority.

In terms of the total population of countries, pretty much the enture west has a significant majority towards progressive policies.

The opposite is true though, conservatives — while, with some exceptions, being the minority — tend to feel like they deserve more publicity, and tend to believe in a silent majority (which isn't real, btw).

(Some of aforementioned exceptions are smaller communities — people tend to cluster spatially based on their beliefs).

Mocking individual creationists often is a cheap shot. Particularly a decade or two ago there was a slightly nasty side to the 'new atheism' that took delight in making fun of people who were either just morons or extremely uneducated.

Not going to dive further than this into this ridiculous can of worms, but this is not an issue of accepting someone's expression of identity, it is the use of that expression to change culture and reality through force of law, by deign of grievance.

You should absolutely be allowed to make terrible jokes about that, people are also allowed to tell you you're not funny.

> by deign of grievance.

What you call a grievance is someone's life.

> You should absolutely be allowed to make terrible jokes about that, people are also allowed to tell you you're not funny.

And you might face consequences for telling jokes that aren't funny and are offensive. Tell a racist joke at work, and there are decent odds you'll lose your job.

Facts are more important than feelings.

> It just happens that there are enough people who feel that way that being ostracized by them stings. Your options are to not do it or accept that a large portion of society will think you're a dick.

In this case it’s 10 % of the population (progressives or woke whatever you want to call them) who make a lot of noise and have the power to push their ideas on the rest of society. You get banned on twitter for questioning or mocking current gender ideas. Media also don’t give airplay to people who disagree. There’s no debate possible. So we get a misrepresentation of what society really thinks. And that’s why, if you believe him, Elon wants to buy twitter.

I've never really been persuaded by the 'facts are more important than feelings' statement. At best, it's an apples and oranges comparison in most cases. People don't typically claim they feel creationism is true, rather they take creationism as a fact. Similarly, the fact that I feel this way is nevertheless a fact, one which we take on good faith many times a day in person and online. If someone tells you they're angry, we're usually justified in believing that fact about their mental state. The degree to which we're skeptical of that claim is heavily influeneced in turn by epistemic trustworthiness and epistemic justice.

I think GP's point is that being or not being non-binary is unfalsifiable. I don't have a horse in that race, as I'm not sufficiently informed on the topic. However, it's important to note that (i) falsifiability is not the only reason to believe something and (ii) there is serious criticism of the idea that a statement must be falsifiable to be considered scientific.

I accept that someone is non-binary the same way that I accept that someone is a man or woman. I haven't had any issues with it so far, and it has the added bonus of making people feel validated, accepted, and comfortable around me, which is also a benefit to me in turn.

> What someone feels about their identity

The meaning of "identity" has changed over the last 10 years in two distinct ways. First, the number of identities has increased (which is great), and second, my identity is a stick with which I can beat up others (which is not fine).

The most common and visible "stick" takes the form of creating a new pronoun to represent my identity and forcing others to use it, lest they be labelled a bigot. This strategy is coercive and antisocial. You change language and then use the threat of attack to enforce the change. (The argument that without the change, people are disrespected, or unable to express their identity, is simply false. This is why God created adjectives! Foot fetishists don't need a pronoun.) It is authoritarian in the sense that you brook no argument, and accept only submission. Anything else means (social) death. This is a leftist authoritarian power play, and I resist it totally.

There are secondary "sticks", like when liberals think it's okay to let trans women compete with bio women, especially in sports that are dangerous, like MMA. That's not okay, it will never be okay, and I would have though that was obvious, but a sentiment like that will get you labelled transphobic. There seems to be some sort of slippery slope effect at play, which makes every argument all or nothing - the possibility that you might respect and like transwomen (as I do) AND be against them participating in competitive sports (as I am) isn't a reasonable possibility in the current climate. Ironically, and sadly, this bad position weakens the path to trans acceptance.

All that said, none of this matters if we're all dead, so better to focus on fixing climate, nukes, and authoritarianism.

You poor oppressed baby. How mean those liberals/gays are to you that they ask you to call them by their preferred name and pronoun. You're so brave in resisting our hegemony!

I would resist any rule system enforced in this way, even if I agreed with it. Not that it matters, but I do agree with most of the rules, as I understand them.

Also, I'm a liberal as stated, and I prefer the company of gay people. I'm happy to do what I can to make those around me comfortable. I am not happy to do that, or anything else, on pain of cancellation.

I don't really get the 'pronoun-as-stick' thing. I've never met somebody who has created a pronoun to express themselves. I've only really come across novel pronouns in 80's literature. I have met (and had friends) who were semi-regularly called the wrong pronoun, (as far as I could see) so people could make a point. That for me is the common case of 'pronoun-as-stick', not authoritarian foot-fetishists or whatever.

the OP's point was that public reaction will depend on the specific joke you make and the context in which you make it. a skilled comedian can make a nonbinary joke that is perfectly acceptable. a person at random is more likely to have their joke taken the wrong way. Or, in the common case, just reveal their bigotry.

The consequences for a misunderstood joke / revealed bigotry are going to be higher when billions of people can interpret your comments out of context. keep that in mind when posting to social media?

When has it ever been possible to be openly and purposefully offensive without consequence? What about cancel culture is unique to the left? The thing that’s so tiring about this argument is that people seem to have forgotten about societal events that took place before Twitter was created. This strain in society has always existed, the U.S. evangelical wing mastered cancel culture before smartphones were invented. So yeah, if you want to be openly derisive about wide swaths of the population, you’re going to get pushback. I’m not sure what about this is novel or noteworthy, this is part of the way society functions. I mean hell, Bentham invented the panopticon in 1786!

Right? People have been getting “canceled” for things since humans have had fire. Probably before. It was possibly also more lethal. “Let them eat cake” <- doesn't go well

There was a brief period of time, say from the 60s to the early 10s, where offensive takes in public were slightly more tolerated, but that's what's in a lot of peoples memory. I'm sure it waxes and wanes.

Either way it's not as personally damaging to be accused of being a racist in 2022 as being accused of being a communist in 1952, let alone before that when expressing the wrong opinions loudly enough could get you tarred and feathered.

> being a communist in 1952

A bit different as that was the mortal enemy of the day, with good reason. It wasn’t someone with a different viewpoint, it was a very real potential mole from the enemy.

The red scare was about as justified as the invasion of Iraq, which is to say, not at all and not even a little bit.

>> You can still make edgy and politically incorrect jokes today if you do it right.

>Not really. Doing it right means adhering to the left’s idea of what is right. Your whole position is based on the left being correct about everything.

Also, whats right today may not be right tomorrow. Tweets live forever.

> Not really. Doing it right means adhering to the left’s idea of what is right.

A good counter-example to that is South Park. They make edgy jokes that offend everyone and have withstood criticism from both the left and the right.

I think this thread is missing the main point, which is people are being cancelled for the content of their speech, not their behaviour.

That is the key difference between free speech and censorship. You can support free speech and still remove people for horrible behaviour, but as soon as you start removing people because of the content of their speech, you move to tyranny.

That is cancelling and why people self censor (you're full of it if you say that's not happening), because their content is considered dangerous, not their behaviour.

Just watch, if Musk buys Twitter the mass of woke narcissists will immediately move to demand social media be regulated, after feverishly admonishing Trump for desiring the same thing...

How is speech not a behavior?

Self-censoring is crudely how civilisation works. We accept some restraints on our biological urges for the safety and order collective society provides.

You could say everything we do is behavior, but it's still useful to make a distinction between one thing and another. Maybe you'd like a different term, but I really think everybody understands what is meant by distinguishing word from action, or message from tone, etc. We're not talking zoology here.

I was going to question whether you agreed in "free speech" because our U.S. counterparts are always up in arms about that, but then I see you're from Stockholm so no worries!

> Self-censoring is crudely how civilisation works. We accept some restraints on our biological urges for the safety and order collective society provides.

Are you saying our civilization is no longer working?

Speech is a behavior, it could be unpleasant, it could hurt, and it is also dangerous.

The reason free speech being cherished is because limiting it brings upon cons much out weight the pros. In particular you block the escape hatch of a death spiral. I'm not super familiar with history but even I remember it's repeated many times in many places, just that this time it's global.

That's not what I said. I said it's the content of the speech that is the distinction, not the behaviour around how it is presented.

People are self-censoring because of the fear of an out of proportion response to their speech's content, which is rife currently.

The saying goes 'Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.'

It's like all of society collectively forgot about "political correctness", and how the exact same complaints about "cancel culture" used to be called "political correctness" and behold society continued to function so well we completely forgot about the horrors of "political correctness" only to now worry about the horrors of "cancel culture!"

We didn't forget. It's the same problem, but morphed and magnified by social media.

I'd challenge the idea it's been morphed or magnified. It's the exact same nonsense.

And just like political correctness, the label of cancel culture is very selectively applied and is often agenda driven.

> And I'm so tired of people responding "nope, there's nothing to see here, [good] people aren't being cancelled, and no-one is afraid to speak their mind." It's dehumanizing. Or maybe gaslighting. You're telling them that they aren't seeing and feeling the thing they are seeing and feeling. You're not arguing against their take, just denying their experience.

We used to debate things and have different views and opinions. Milo Ydbjsixjebdoaod, Ben Shapiro.

But now instead of debating and proving people right or wrong. It’s just complain and protest the venue and people and get them knocked off Twitter YouTube Facebook etc.

Climate change is another one. Anyone who wants to debate the topic is instantly cancelled as a denialist. Social media has ruined information to some extent.

> Climate change is another one. Anyone who wants to debate the topic is instantly cancelled as a denialist.

This is nothing to do with cancel culture or social media. It’s because big energy companies paid people to deny climate change. Unsurprisingly this makes people tetchy around those with let’s say heterodox views.

The well has been poisoned for fair criticism and it was not poisoned by environmentalists.

While I believe climate change is a real thing. When someone questions why data is excluded from models it’s automatically flagged as denial. You can argue that there’s people paid to deny but it doesn’t change the fact anyone who even questions it is cancelled. Look at the “97% of scientists” report that came out and half the scientists were either not even in that subject or said their opinions were taken out of context. Yet everyone cites that as absolute fact and questioning it gets you blasted.

That’s cancel culture no matter how you try to spin it.

You clearly don't remember the 'smoking causes cancer' debate - yes, there was a debate and it was hotly contested, and it was very emotionally charged. It played out similarly to the topic of climate change has so far. There has never been an era of reasonable public discussion and consensus building.

If that's cancel culture, then it's nothing new.

Sure but I would like to think the debates occurred and happened people argued back and forth and ultimately convinced the other side.

But what we have now is basically “you are wrong you have no say”

When you shut people out like that and they feel like they are not being heard you end up more divided and against each other. Which is basically what’s happening now in many topics.

Perhaps. I see what you are getting at. I’d suggest that there’s been an erosion of intelligent debate in general and what we see is just what’s left behind rather than something new. Complexity is not tolerated any more.

Maybe they did or didn't - but regardless of what those companies might have once done, they are now all owning big solar and wind businesses too.

If you look at the people asking tough questions about climatology, none of them have any links with energy firms. The median climate change skeptic is a retired engineer of some kind, or sometimes a retired climatologist. They don't have any links and they attack climate science because they think science should be accurate and disagree that big changes should be made on the back of bad science, but disagree that this particular field is accurate. That's it, that's their whole motivation.

Doesn't matter. Look at the post you're replying to. It's greyed out. You aren't allowed to even observe that people get cancelled for arguing about climate change - that's how far it's gone.

Yes, it exists. Remember when Trump called for the cancellation of Kaepernick? The treatment that whistleblowers get? Freedom fries? Cancel culture is a deeply embedded component of US society.

> You're telling them that they aren't seeing and feeling the thing they are seeing and feeling. You're not arguing against their take, just denying their experience.

In psychology, a term for that is "minimisation" [1]. I commented on the power-play aspect of it here [2]. It seems so common in all forms of social media (and seems significantly less common in real-life to openly minimise another's experience [3]) that one suspects it's an immanent feature of electronic communication.

That seems to mesh not just with diffusion of responsibility, but that every other person in the digital world appears as a single, isolated data point who could be gaslighted into thinking they were totally alone in holding their opinions. As an amplified tyranny of the majority it seems the go-to attack in tech circles, where minority users are openly threatened with the "inevitable" march of "ubiquitous" technologies and will be "left behind" for failing to fall into line.

Until these mechanisms have widespread recognition and are named I don't think it's possible to build social media technologies absent of serious harms.

[1] https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Minimisation_(psychology)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31006944

[3] Perhaps it's my privileged position to experience/witness it less.

The issue here is that saying a thing on twitter with the potential audience of the whole world is an inherently different thing than e.g. saying that thing to your blokes in the pub.

Imagine it is 1980 and you went into a disco with a certain percentage of people of $ethnicity: What is your expectation for what would happen if you started yelling that people of $ethnicity have $negative_attributes and no right to exist? That they come to you and tell you that you have a point there? Of course the group will not ignore you, you are directly criticising their existence from an outside position.

And this is the issue here: expectations. When speaking on a global online platform with near instant feedback your expectation shouldn't be that you can just voice a controversial opinion and have nobody disagree like it would happen when you talk to your likeminded friends in a small circle. Your expectation should be that you are in close vicinity of all the people you are talking about, because you are.

And this can also be a good thing, because assuming a ton of things about others that you could just directly talk to is a sounds like a receipe for disaster. Imagine that instead of yelling stuff in the disco you were to talk to people and getting to know their point of view. The issue is that you can't do that on social media because you are always in the spotlight. And in the spotlight it is hard not to wave the flag of your team and have a human conversation instead.

Social media is a constant spotlight, global, instant and huge public space and the behaviour you discribe is a direct result of the fact that people treat it as their living room conversation instead.

Shitstorms are real and often they can get quite bad, but paradoxically you won't get rid of them with less moderation ("more free speech") but by interfering with the spread of the word.

"Imagine that instead of yelling stuff in the disco you were to talk to people and getting to know their point of view. The issue is that you can't do that on social media because you are always in the spotlight"

You can, with a direct private message/email. (not sure if that is possible with twitter, though)

That works very well to solve many issues, but of course it does not get you the same attention like publicly responding to someone stupid/insensitive and most people are on social media for attention.

Nah, private messages have been reposted on social media as clickbait to incite the lynch mobs called cancel culture.

>your expectation shouldn't be that you can just voice a controversial opinion and have nobody disagree //

Cancelling people isn't just disagreeing. Of course people can disagree -- but those who do disagree take the disagreement to other fora and greater levels. An audience member can always heckle, it's expected to some level, but if you follow a comedian home and harass them it's entirely different.

This is a consequence of twitter being a different place than what people are used to:

- your opinion will not be bound to where you say it (your local pub), but potentially visible to anyone on earth

- your opinion will not be bound to the time you say it like in verbal speech, but might re-emerge at any point in time

- your opinion might be seen as a public statement (or even a declaration) to the world

- the friction to post your opinion, to react to your opinion or to jump on bandwaggons is as low as it gets

This is fundamentally different from any place you could speech in ever before in history, yet most people speak the same way they might in their local pub after the third beer. This impedance mismatch produces all kinds of wonky results.

The bandwaggon problem is yet another class of problem, that is much more systemically rooted and could probably be addressed by introducing a little bit of friction in the right places. My hunch is that this is less of a culture problem showing up on twitter, but a twitter problem showing up in culture. Certain forms of media make certain forms of communication more likely while preventing others due to their systems of communications. Twitters systems make such phenomena more likely, so they show up more often.

I agree with most of what you're saying here, but those who get discussed on Twitter are not always tweeters. You can get dragged to the public square by someone who takes a video of you at that proverbial local pub.

True. The media spotlight can shine on everybody and improve or destroy lives. This was also true with boulevard press before social media.

Within social media this can take the shape of a angry mob with torches and pitchforks — and this is certainly undesireable. My point however was that this is not "a new school of thought" which has been emerging in the past decade or so, but this is emergent behaviour which stems from the communicative system social media has designed. What people might call cancel culture is therefore not a culture that somehow went and inflitrated social media, but instead a culture that formed precisely in reaction to or enabled by the communicative structures of social media.

The consequence of this would be that the only way to get rid of online mobs would be to change the design of online interaction on those platforms (e.g. by limiting post visibility, adding friction on retweeting and sharing, highlighting options to privately communicatiate etc).

Arguing with someone that their opinion is wrong is not gaslighting. Gaslighting is denying fundamental reality. Like a man screaming obscenities at his girlfriend and then later telling her he never used any curse words towards her.

You can debate whether a joke is racist or a joke about race, or whether there's a difference between the two. It's not gaslighting

"Denying fundamental reality" is exactly what "cancel culture isn't real" is. Cracking one's knuckles can't reasonably be construed as objectionable in any way, and yet once the mob finds out you can lose your job https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...

Especially when there are plentiful examples of cancel culture in the news on a nearly weekly basis.

Arguing against the existence of empirical evidence showing real consequences is absolutely gaslighting, and I see it all the time from primarily left-leaning folks who, without always saying it, believe the people who were cancelled fully deserved their punishment, without bothering to assess the context or conditions of the situation in relation to our fundamental rights in society, where fair trial and freedom of speech/thought are ignored in favor of an unregulated digital militia composed of Twitter bots and large corporations like VISA/Mastercard coercing businesses to terminate payments for controversial people -- while narrative-approved late night entertainers humiliate you and people like you for daring to exist, opine, and jest differently than them as they broadcast their dogmatic standards as gospel to their fervent viewers who fail to see through them.

I recall when Patreon spent way too much manpower to silence Sargon of Akkad because their payment providers were enforcing their own private societal norms on Patreon's users, by proxy.

Imagine, if you will, that you're an Uber driver and while driving someone to their destination, you nearly get hit by another vehicle and in your fear, you scream an expletive that upsets just this one customer. You later lose your ability to drive for any taxi service because their payment services refuse to facilitate paying you for that one cross remark.

Many people argue that private companies have every right to deny service or operate their services in any way they like, but if most of them are operating in unison to control speech and aid in humiliating average people for breaching their "community standards", then having a society with rights to free speech, expression, and thought without undue punishment outside of the court of law is pointless. These rights may as well not exist if they only serve a vocal, angry minority. The irony being that those same rights are protected for them because large corporations use them as fodder for shallow marketing campaigns that take advantage of human compassion towards manufactured victimhood that inaccurately represent the realities of this world, signaling their defense of complete lunacy for profit.

Cancel culture is an absolutely pathetic way to treat citizens in our society, I don't care how "private" your company is in their ability to make decisions like these — you cannot deny the backbone of society to individuals for spilling their milk.

The term “cancel culture” suggests that there is some sort of epidemic of social mob justice that is consuming society—at least that’s the impression I get from most people who are railing against it. That is not an objective fact. IMO, that’s not real.

You are incredibly privileged.

You are incredibly bad at offering substantive criticism of opinions with which you disagree.

I have never wished for awards on HN, but this comment surely deserves one.

The point wasn’t that saying something racist was acceptable, it’s that a single tweet sent before taking off with racist overtones should not result in losing your career and 50,000 people screaming at you when the plane lands. A Disney star should not openly lambast a 14 year old kid in front of their entire Twitter audience for an edgy ironic tweet. These are real things that happened.

To quote Anthony Jeselnik himself, “I get away with it because I’m just the guy who does it.” Anthony built a brand around saying horrible things. I admit he is a talented comic, but that’s not the point; even when South Park misses, people don’t suddenly turn on it and start feigning surprise about how crude it is. “Of course it’s crude; it’s South Park, you idiot.”

People say stupid stuff all the time. Read my HN comment history and tell me how long it takes you to get to something I’ve said that’s stupid. I try to self-censor rather heavily by simply trying not to engage in too many controversial topics and I’m sure there’s still some statement or other in this entire corpus of my own comments that would appear pretty ugly in a decontextualized light (and perhaps even with context, I dunno.) Well, thanks to context collapse, that happens all the time. It’s almost the default and exceedingly few people care to check.

And if the mob winds up being wrong, do 50,000 people apologize? Do you get your job prospects back? OR: does it get ignored, you get a permanent set of headlines in the search results for your name, and your mere association with unscrupulous topics limits your potential indefinitely? Yeah, I am pretty sure I already know the answer here.

And I don’t care how rare it is. It’s not rare enough. It’s not good if it happens once. “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” And again, I agree that sometimes people just said something shitty or at least that got interpreted shittily, but I have never seen something even once where it didn’t feel like a horridly disproportionate response. Not even once.

Even if you did feel it was a proportionate response, somehow, it’s hard to argue that it actually accomplishes much of value. However, it has lead to some documented suicide attempts! So that’s just peachy.

Maybe people should stop trying so hard to justify vigilante internet mobs. Even if its not exactly a lynching, it certainly is character assassination, harassment, and frankly, disgusting shitty human behavior that is hard to justify.

Okay.. this comment finally got me to login and chime-in on this topic. > And I don’t care how rare it is. It’s not rare enough. It’s not good if it happens once. “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” And again, I agree that sometimes people just said something shitty or at least that got interpreted shittily, but I have never seen something even once where it didn’t feel like a horridly disproportionate response. Not even once.

Completely agree... No arguments with this ..

And as always there is a but.. (Note: following is not a personal or specific counter-argument to this comment). The general calling it "cancel-culture" or "leftist political correctness forcing it's way (Aka fascist-leftist" narrative misses the point as much as the common "it's rare, but these people deserve it. They're horrible people" narrative.

The way i look at it "freedom to innovate, and have a system that sets up a market that encourages innovation" has brought us this current social media centered around outrage, fear, anger and rage centered way of connecting to people. Those employers are "free-to-fire" as much as each person in the mob that responds with rage is free to express their opinion and the one person who uncensoredly tweeted something is free to make mistakes. So what's the solution, I don't know anything specific outside of going all mystic/mythic/wishful saying we should all practice empathy better, we should find better ways of connecting to each other and may be (social networking and recommendation) algorithms that can help deeper connections than shallow ones.

To be honest, there's a skeptical(and pessimistic and fearful) side of me that thinks that's not gonna happen and we'll end up in a divergent world(https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2022/02/23/divergentism/).

The other solution proposed is (completely free speech with pure anonymity based protection from society based outlash) also suffers from the problems like minority voices getting drowned out. Majority opinions and stereotypes being elevated to "The capital "T" Truth"(https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/224865-the-capital-t-truth-...) rather than being viewed in perspective..

> “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” This is a noble sentiment, but I do wonder how much this is true in what we have managed to implement and wonder if we would ever be able to implement something like this without going to "minority report" level extreme censoring and monitoring. (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=925249... ) or with some humour(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXPOw2unxy0).

>this current social media centered around outrage, fear, anger and rage

Whenever I see takes like this, I wonder what platforms people are using and how they're using them.

I interact with my family on facebook, read some stuff on subreddits I like, and don't use twitter; I don't really experience any of the above. My girlfriend, by contrast, will come to me visibly shaken once a week regarding some drama happening on instagram, which baffles me.

Am I the one that's out of touch here? Or is this 'FUDmedia' a bit overblown and the result of spending time looking for the hot goss? I'm probably the one that's out of touch, but oh boy is it nice.

You know, for a long time, I used to blame Twitter or Tumblr for making people neurotic and thus causing “cancel culture” or whatever you want to call it. And, maybe there is some truth there. But honestly, I think the true issue that’s making us all sick is our neurotic attachment to the internet. If anything is making us sickly, it’s having smartphones that basically ensure we’re online literally all the time and can’t escape it. Maybe it isn't literally unhealthy in and of itself to have a smartphone around at all times, but I think the degree to which it enables people to become “integrated” with Twitter and other social media is insane. Things that were nice conveniences on desktop, like push notifications, can become scary and frankly intimidating when they follow you around literally all day.

The old internet Yishan speaks of might not be that old, but it feels ancient and very distinct from what we have today. The old internet was an escape from whatever life had to offer. It was something you could log into when you got home and hang out with other nerds and enthusiasts in your niche. That’s all gone because now it’s not just nerds and now your niche is decontextualized into a giant social media soup where people are constantly judging and critiquing everything and often in bad faith or at least irrationally.

I actually fully agree that cancel culture is a silly concept, because cancel culture doesn’t capture how insidious and unhealthy internet relations have become. It isolates one specific dysfunctional behavior (the tendency for people to form mobs and absolutely try to obliterate livelihoods over relatively small transgressions) while ignoring or maybe even inherently accepting all of the dysfunctional crap that leads up to it and surrounds it. “Cancel culture” is just a symptom of deeply unhealthy social relationships, rather than an intentional plot by the “radical left”. And maybe the reason we only complain about cancellation is because deep down, we don’t want to give up all of what the internet offers, even a lot of the less healthy things. Because yeah, quote retweets dunking on someone with bad faith arguments may make for great screenshots to send to your group chat of likeminded people, but is it really advancing the discourse?

I think it’s not necessarily Twitter’s responsibility to figure out all of the answers here. It would be kind of tragic if we couldn’t find some sort of solution that didn’t involve regulating social media or computers, though. Maybe it’s unlikely, but my hope is kind of that it resolves itself. If social media usage started to shrink simply because people became tired of it and it was no longer socially “cool”, that alone might help out a lot. In general, convincing people to take social media far less seriously would help a lot. The reduction of the real world influence of Twitter and its respective beefs and callouts would basically kneecap the concept of “cancelling” somebody online.

For now though, I agree it’s all a bit nebulous. There’s no obvious way out. I guess the only difference for me before and after reading the tweet thread from the OP is that I understand now that it isn’t Twitter’s fault. They’re just the platform currently holding the curse.

>I don't see the value in making a racist, sexist, transphobic, or overall bigoted joke made at the expense of innocent people simply trying to live their life.

I don't think the average non-"woke" person sees much value in transphobic/racist jokes either - at least not in public.

That said, I don't think there would be anywhere near the level of backlash if the average activist simply aired their disapproval in a normal way (ie, expressing discomfort at a live show, or leaving a comment online calling a comedian a talentless hack for making shit transphobic jokes) rather than vindictively trying to destroy their entire life.

But, that is someone who makes a living from making edgy jokes. I think OP was talking about random plumber/professor/programmer Joe/Jill making an edgy joke.

> many people don't see a difference between a joke about racism and a racist joke

Many people don't see the difference between a joke about racism and racism.

I'm not sure that's true <edit, snipped out a preface I had about my not-racist self, as after writing the whole comment I don't think I need to fear looking like a racist justifying their jokes, though perhaps I will look like someone who can't write a funny joke>

A joke about racism could be in the form of a story where "Person A says racist thing (that we don't get to hear), then Person B hits them". Sure, that's nowhere near funny enough to be called a joke, but it is simultaneously about racism while surely not being remotely racist?

I appreciate that a lot of the time people will define a joke as "about racism" while ignoring the fact that it ALSO contained racism - after all, if the actual racism in the joke isn't funny then why are you making the joke be about racism at all? - but I've definitely heard off-hand jokes that were about racism without having any racism in them (either in content or intent).

Not to mention that if you make a joke about racism that gets directed against your own race, it's hard to see many people viewing that joke as racist in itself.

I'm not saying that people that can see the difference don't exist. I'm saying that many people exist that don't see that difference.

Ah, sorry for misunderstanding, that is indeed what you clearly wrote I just interpreted it without thinking as including yourself in the 'many people'.

No problem!

No skin in this race.

Perspective is the mechanism that changes the perception of a joke, that's not something the joke teller can influence.

Anyone can take offense to anything. Only when it gains critical mass will it be cared about.

> This comes up all the time that "you can't make edgy jokes anymore", but it isn't true.

What would be your explanation for Nimesh Patel being removed from stage at Columbia?

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/former-snl-writer-nimesh...

Can parents laugh about a joke like this?

Man that joke’s fucking tasteless. Bonus points for the icon of an impeccably-coiffed white dude sitting above the photo of a black lady he’s making fun of.

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