Ad-hominem.
> Not every thought that goes through a person's mind the need be put out into the open immediately.
Straw man.
> When you're from a marginalized community and you've had your existence questioned a thousand times,
She's a black woman, I'd say there's a good chance she's been marginalized already and knows what she's talking about.
> you can be excused for being a little impatient with someone who's actually curious the 1001st time.
She's not talking about someone being a little impatient. To quote the end of the article:
> this kind of backlash, ugly personal insults, putting addresses of homes and children's schools online, trying to make people lose their jobs. [...]. It is a virtual vigilante action whose aim is not just to silence the person who has spoken, but to create a vengeful atmosphere that deters others from speaking."
Doesn't sound like a straw man to me. What is self-censorship if not thinking through what you want to say before speaking? Generally when I speak I try to think about what effect my words will have, and if they would have what I consider to be a bad effect either on myself or others, I self-censor.
Nobody thinks they're wrong. So I'd make the bold claim that more often than not people who think before speaking are going to self-censor because their opinion is unpopular even if objectively correct. One right statement to the wrong crowd can "sink your ship" with some terrible consequences.
The combination between this "thinking" process and the reaction of certain groups selects in favor of the opinions held by the most belligerent group. You're more likely to self-censor when your audience will throw a brick at your head compared to when they just give you a stern response.
Anyway you can have a stupid opinion on one topic and a very sound one on another topic. You can promote equality of gender while rejecting equality of race/color. Even if you believe both are equally correct you may censor your second opinion to not have it sink your first one.
Thinking before speaking is filtering out anything where its cons for being said outweigh its pros. It has nothing to do with whether or not you think something is true or false. It doesn't even need to be a truth statement.
Self-censorship is a different name for the same concept. The only reason I avoid saying certain things in certain contexts is because I believe there will be negative backlash that outweighs any possible gains in communicating my thought.
Originally, the word "censorship" was not used in a context where this consideration was done, be it thoughtfully or at all. So while defining self-censorship like you do is certainly possible, it is inconsistent with other meanings of censorship, where multiple parties may be involved.
It is up to you, of course, to expand its meaning to "thinking before speaking", but other people seem to mean similar, but not quite equal, things with these words. Unifying them by using a weaker definition (Although I don't believe that "think before you speak" is well defined at all) will only lead to a loss of information that facilitates misunderstandings. I'd rather know that I might be misunderstanding something instead of having peace of mind with a definition that is so broad it becomes meaningless.
While I do agree "cancel culture" in the way of "someone misspeaks once, so the twitter mob digs up their entire past and puts them on trial for every shitty thing they've ever said" is toxic and unhelpful, I'm perfectly in agreement that deplatforming bigots is actually helpful. As a concrete example, I'm very happy Kanye West has lost essentially all of his contracts and a lot of his supporters; he thinks "Jews secretly control the world" is true and wasn't afraid to say it, maybe others will be now and will self-censor.
<<In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.
The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.
We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention.>>
Coming from an ex-communist country, where the word: "reactionary" is still useless after being used as a weapon for so long, I find it really scary that it is now, again, used unironically in the west and appears to be regaining its power.
My grandmother lost her job because she was part of the anti-communist, democratic opposition, and the reason given to her was that she was "divisive, and anti-worker".
- what kinds of speech are unacceptable?
- what reaction does society take when someone crosses the line?
To continue on the Kanye example: essentially he lost his job, and I think that's perfectly acceptable. His employers/contractors found his speech disgusting, and fired him/ended his contracts. You can compare that to what happened with your grandma, and the only reason I think it's wrong is because I think pro-capitalism should be an "allowed" opinion, even though I disagree with it. To me the difference is that her opinion was a matter of political opinion, Kanye's directly targets jews, a marginalized group (note: in your grandma's case, "anti-worker" is no targeting a marginalized group since in a communist country the workers are definitionally not marginalized).
Every country I'm aware of (even the United States, for instance bomb threats are illegal) agrees that some speech should be prohibited. Where they disagree is what is prohibited and what the punishment is. In Germany, you can be jailed for denying the holocaust. Is that just? I don't really know but most of the Germans I've met agree with the law in this case.
Yes.
But people pushing back on what someone says is a normal, healthy part of discourse and it absolutely should scale with the power and influence of the person voicing that opinion (Kanye is the perfect example).
(The quote is usually ascribed to Voltaire, but some researchers say that he was quoting another French philosopher.)
However, there's an easy fix. The obvious correction to the heuristic is to in turn ask the marginalized group their opinion. In this case, that would mean asking one or more transwoman their opinion on the topic.
I never heard of this person before today, and just checked her Wikipedia page[1] to see what the "goofy opinions" are.
Maybe the page is incomplete, but they don't seem all that "goofy"? What exactly a "woman" is is subject to quite a lot of disagreement, and I don't think there is an "easy" answer here. I think it's important this debate is being held, and this kind of "bruh huh goofy opinions" dismissive attitude is exactly what the author is complaining about.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimamanda_Ngozi_Adichie#LGBT_...
> As for people "just asking questions," it's sometimes really hard to tell if someone is "asking questions" in good faith or not
This is "just asking questions" about someone's motivation, and it's sometimes really hard to tell if that's in good faith or not, too.
We should all stop sowing FUD about people's motivation whenever someone expresses a view we disagree with. It's really toxic.
People have weird opinions all the time. I'm sure I have many myself. The difference is that she's an influential author with a wide reach who can reasonably be expected to think just a little more before she voices an opinion on something that affects a marginalized community.
Ascribing bad intentions off the bat to someone who wanders into a topic "unprompted" (how do you know? Do you talk to her daily?) is a poisonous attitude. Why are you the judge here? And the trans issue is not a "weird topic." It is highly topical. Many are talking and thinking about it. That just bothers you, apparently.
edit: s/off the bad/off the bat
The "trans issue" itself is not a weird topic. But there are certain ideas that seem to have taken hold ("the MASSIVE risk of fentanyl candy", "the HUGE threat of trans women using the bathroom", etc) that are objectively weird and, in the grand scheme of things, non-issues. For a regular person off the street, I might ascribe having an idea like that to ignorance. For people like Rowling, Adichie, etc I can only attribute it to bad intentions.
And when I say "no, you aren't that clearly right", I don't just mean you, great_tankard, on the subject of trans issues. I mean just about everybody who ever says that, or even feels that.
> The difference is that she's an influential author with a wide reach who can reasonably be expected to think just a little more before she voices an opinion on something that affects a marginalized community.
So basically it's fine for people to have any opinion they want, except if they actually have an audience? That is literally self-censorship.
"Affects a marginalized community" is one of those things that gets thrown around left and right, but it's not at all clear to me that people really are really all that affected by someone saying "saying 'trans' and 'cis' acknowledges that there is a distinction between women born female and women who transition". This is something you can disagree with, but I don't see how it really "affects" or "harms" anyone. You make it sound like she said something horrible, but this really isn't that, and it's also something a large number of people – probably a majority, including on the left – would agree with. Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33379058
The alternative is to unquestionably accept any argument from the marginalized people, and that doesn't strike me as a good idea. We accepted MLK's arguments based on the merit of his arguments, but also rejected various arguments from the Nation of Islam and other more radical groups.
> She said that while trans women face tremendous oppression and must be supported, we should also be able to acknowledge real differences between transgender women and women who are not transgender, without suggesting that one experience is more important or valid than the other.
These are the "goofy opinions" in question. You can judge for yourself if this is transphobic or not.
At some point in history, a lot of extremely bad opinions went from “almost everyone” to “vast majority” to an ever shrinking minority. Just to name a few:
- black people are inferior - women are inferior - gay people shouldn’t be allowed to marry - Native Americans are savages - Depression/anxiety should be stigmatized
Each of these opinions followed a predictable but long path where more exposure to better opinions eventually won out. I’m unaware of any progressive opinion on egalitarianism that has failed to become mainstream given a long enough time horizon.
I don’t see any reason why this current “debate” will turn out any differently.
You really should try reading a bit of history and looking a little further afield than your own back yard.
Egalitarianism and tolerance is a cornerstone of Enlightenment thinking. Constitutions gave power to the people over kings. Capitalism gave individuals a chance to rival the power of vassals who were determined by a caste system.
I’d argue it’s a trend that’s gone on much longer, but progress was much slower when access to information and ideas was not the same as the last century.
It’s not to say there aren’t setbacks, but those setbacks have always been temporary or localized.
Now can something completely prevent this progress? Yeah, but it leads to very dystopian futures that everyone should hope to avoid.
Please, do enlighten us how the first multi-cellular organism was literally the Whig view of history embodied. It will be very entertaining.