3521

Well, she got those racists ideas from somewhere. The father was probably just better at hiding it.

3522

I don’t see your story impacting my original post at all, so I’ll ignore that part.

And, yeah, it is just tough shit. You can be outraged at the Twitter mob if it makes you feel better, but if we had any kind of reasonable employment protections those guys would still have jobs. My sympathy is real, but limited.

3523

Hey look, more entries for this thread - and I didn’t even have to go find them.

Do you have any source on this? Weren’t you especially upset when Tom took things you’ve said here as being racist/sexist (apologies for not remember the exact details)? Why would you turn around and do the same to someone else?

Yes, I am sure she is the first and only teenager to say dumb shit on the internet either out of not knowing better or in an attempt to be edgy. We know that the internet is full of this type of crap and that social media algorithms tend to drag you further and further down the pit of filth after even one or two clicks.

Claiming her parents did a bad job - and are unfit to run a business! - because of some things she wrote 6-10 years ago is certainly one response you can have.

3524

The Atlantic article glosses over it for obvious reasons, but the stuff she wrote was pretty vile. Even a teenager should know better.

Top 3 races you wish to eliminate. Ready, go! Jews, blacks, and the fats.

#IfIwasPresident I’d finish off what hitler started and rule the world

Should her father lose her business over it? Probably not, but there’s plenty of choices on where to shop out there. You have to be careful.

Interestingly, the owner of that bakery loudly boycotted Danish products after the Mohammed cartoon thing. Apparently what’s good for the goose is no longer good for the gander.

3525

I went through my whole teens, as did my brothers and my wife and a whole lot of other people without saying anything racist or making racist posts and making friends with all sorts of people. I really don’t think its an incredible high bar, not to be racist.

Somehow this kid failed to pass the that pretty easy bar. I’m not sure how she failed that leap, but you don’t usually fail those sorts of things without help from friends and family.

3526

It’s odd to me that if the Atlantic article wanted to make their case, these are the examples they chose. I get that any injustice anywhere matters, but I can take a walk down any street in the town I live and and find bigger cases of injustice.

3527

Oh hey, the Holy Land thing! Yeah, I know something about this one.

Holy Land is a bit of an institution round these parts. Really good packaged food, and two well-loved cafeteria-style counters. I’ve spent plenty of money there.

The whole thing turned into a shitshow as soon as the original reporting hit. The precise sequence was:

  1. Aw, Holy Land? I like their stuff tho!
  2. Gyah, whoa, that’s pretty beyond the pale.
  3. Oh huh, the teenaged daughter didn’t spontaneously get hit by a free kampfon but there’s a whole ton of really unfortunate shit coming out? Huh.
  4. Eh, it’s not like I can’t find hummus elsewhere.
3528

BTW, I see that Yascha Mounk’s solution to cancel culture starts not just with an end to at-will employment (a good thing), but actually compelling employers to continue employing e.g. racists, Nazis, etc. I suspect some people will object to that.

On the other hand, I don’t really see how that would have helped that bakery.

3529

Hey, any time businesses want to support ending at-will employment, I’m for it, even if it means a few Nazis stay employed.

Twitter mobs are just working the refs with rules as they exist. You want to short-circuit that, change the rules. Course that would mean business would lose the overwhelming advantage they currently hold over their employees, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.

3530

Teenagers are pretty amazingly stupid. There’s a reason why we don’t hold them accountable for their actions in the same way as an adult.

3531

Until they reach the Threshold of Punishment, anyway.

3532

The threshold of which is variable depending on how regressive state legal systems are, and just how much that 12 year old black boy looked like an adult.

3533

Sure…though that doesn’t really matter in this case.

3534

Man.

I know a guy. Very well. Very successful, raised himself up, great to his friends, the whole thing.

Total shitlord as a teenager.

Dropped solid five figures on a lawyer to beat a drug case (parents took out loans to cover it, he paid it back over a decade plus. Called it his student loans).

He was guilty as fuck, of that and more. Just petty drug bullshit, teenager nonsense. But per the statutes, decades in prison.

Why? What the fuck do we gain, as a society, by throwing all those young men’s lives away?

Grappling with this, and some my own bullshit, and having the basic fucking level of empathy to consider what our paths would have been were we born black on the north side - this is how I get to where I am.

3535

I’d say if cancelling was too much of a problem, then the cancelled could start up a business and do well from it, as there would be popular support for them.

Ask Milo how that worked out for him, maybe after his 4th attempt to get furries to keep him from going bankrupt.

I guess this is one case where the right doesn’t believe in free market solutions. Being a shitty edgelord isn’t profitable. Even Ferengi know better than to be edgelords.

3536

Your post that I was responding to said:

And when faced with two simple examples of minorities who’d overcome prejudice and disadvantage to make themselves comfortable, losing everything they’d gained because in one case a non-white person still somehow has to put up with being “investigated” for being a white supremicist, and in the other being held to answer for someone else’s views, the best response you could manage is “bummer for them”.

It’s clear from many of the responses in this thread that there’s a bunch of people here who cheer on the damage done to other peoples’ lives, because the social media mob is a weapon that’s mostly working for their team. The lack of empathy, and the euphemisms used - getting someone fired for the emotional hit of seeing them punished is “just working the refs” FFS - clearly show a mindset so enamoured with seeing the bad people punished that any appeal to fairness, justice or common humanity is sneered at.

3537

Indeed, it could be that your rhetorical opponents are dastardly fuckers. Or, you know, it could be that your argument isn’t very convincing. So it must be the former.

3538

Honestly, I view it (“cancel culture”) as being rooted in two major areas.

  1. Wealth Inequality leading to Power Oligarchy. People on both the Right and the Left feel completely powerless in 21st Century America, and don’t feel as if their voices are heard. It’s one of the reasons why there is a segment which is completely all-in on Trump. Ditto for the Bernie-Bros on the Sanders side of the Left. Congress being run as a tool of maximum partisanship encourages this (to the benefit of those with actual power), by not exercising power.

  2. The rise of social media and a corresponding mob mentality seeking to punish the powerful (in part due to above). The frustrations from #1 above get shoved to social media, where there is a voice. It completely lacks nuance and foresight and devolves into a mob, but rage against the machine can do that.

3539

The concern isn’t about edgelords like Milo though. Indeed, it’s not really about professional politicians at all. If they enjoy any real public support then attacking them in this way generally strengthens their dedicated support.

It’s about respected establishment journalists lying about an interview on twitter in order to get the subject fired, and openly celebrating when they succeed, and not getting fired by their left-wing employer when their lies are exposed.

It’s about a culture where its clear that even questioning someone advocating for woke causes can cause you to recieve vile misogynistic abuse and death threats, and utter silence from the left about this conduct - because it’s helpful to them.

It’s about if you are on the far left, and claim someone is using their past sexual abuse as a “justification for discriminating” - all you have to do is apologise and the mob will leave you alone. Because you are on their side really.

It’s about making people who are not in the club afraid to contradict those who are. It’s about power, and showing, very publically and destructively, that you have it and your opponents don’t, because you control the mob and the state cannot stop them.

I mean, the idea of using control of the mob(*) to denounce and intimidate those who oppose you, in a situation where the state is unable to protect people from the mob for whatever reason is hardly original. The refinement for the social media world has been surprisingly effective. But is that the playbook you really want to be reading from?

This sounds pretty alarmist. We’re still at the early stage. Relatively few people have been successfully targetted. There are other, greater, concerns - toxic politicians of the right who have got further and faster than we could ever have dreamed a decade ago. But - why give these methods a foothold? Trust me, you don’t need them, and though they make the base feel good the idea of keeping the centre in line through fear is a self-defeating strategy if you actually want to live in a democracy.

(*: Which does not represent a majority, but a sufficiently numerous and angry minority that they are willing to contravene the norms of society in order to harm the targets you nominate)

3540

I like this take a lot, because it makes it less a pathology of the left as I have been describing it, and more about systemtic failings of the democratic contract, combined with the effects of social media and the actions of demagogues that exist in every political clade.

One point I will make is that on social media it is easy to believe that most people agree with you, when in fact very few do (to the point that this has become a meme in the UK). This exaggerates the effect because it further drives people to believe that traditional power structures are not upholding the democratic contract.