3561

OK.

But you are talking to someone who doesn’t feel comfortable talking about his own, nowadays pretty centrist, political views in his own non-anonymous social media circles because of a change to the way in which politics is conducted of which cancel culture is a part. Whereby the reaction to someone being “wrong” is not to persuade and argue, but to condemn and ensure that friends know that this person is a bad person. Maybe I am amplifying a couple of events that happened during the election campaign last year, but still I dont think this is a good thing.

There have always been bounds to opinions outside of which you cannot stray without social repercussions, but they have narrowed very very considerably. And I guess that is what I am objecting to, not “cancel culture”, whatever that means.

I guess my perspective is that a substantial, and very loud, portion of the left, as a primary political tactic, seeks to threaten and intimidate those who disagree with them into silence within various spheres. They don’t represent the Democratic party, and as of a couple of months ago they don’t represent the UK Labour party, and they don’t represent the degree of threat to our respective political cultures that the right does; but that doesn’t mean they aren’t problematic and should be ignored.

I realise I’ve kind of being going round in circles on this and expressing a bunch of different reservations as kind of a stream of conciousness. The real world is always going to be messier and there’s no true moral or intellectual purity anywhere in politics. But the degree of self-righteousness scares me. Looking back at history I don’t want people like that to win. I want the modern right to win less, but still.

3562

Thats why they call it a hive mind.

3563

The people who complain about cancel culture, those who defend the right wing, defend the nationalists, those that stand against social justice, who use “progressives” as an insult, getting their knickers in a twist and triggered over people calling Trump and Johnson bad words, you only ever see them upset about the treatment rightfully meted out defending racists, misogynists, etc, you never see them defending the victims of racism, misogyny and oppression. Its only ever defending the oppressors. Its only about their side. They never give a flying fuck for any minority, only the majority.

That’s why i see cancel culture as a good thing. Look who hates it. Do i want to stand with them?

Fuck no.

3564

I guess I’m a little dismissive, but I’m only responding to the world in which we find ourselves.

People on Twitter and other social media are going to do what they do and say what they say. No-one has control over them. They can make whatever accusations they want, and their readers can come to their own conclusions. That’s free speech, for good and ill.

Employers are usually going to respond appropriately to the incentives as they exist; to wit: customers are expensive to attain and hold onto, and employees can be hired and fired at will with little friction.

If we find that balance unjust, then we should change it…make it harder to fire people without just cause. Lower the standards for slander suits, perhaps. Other than that, I’m not sure what remedies you’re hoping for. Make some suggestions of your own, maybe.

3565

A thread:



3566

I’m not sure that complaints about cancel culture are entirely from the right wing.

Indeed, part of the problem is seen in the left eating its own, where more extreme elements demand ideological purity and perfection.

On some level, you saw this with Al Franken. Franken screwed up, and certainly there were people on the right who seized on this and used it against him. But ultimately he was forced out by the left, because to do otherwise would have required admission that not every negative action requires total destruction of an individual.

Franken did some real stupid stuff, and on camera. But I don’t think it was particularly wise for folks on the left to demand he give up his Senate seat. I don’t believe he actually abused women. And he was a good senator who actually put thought into governing.

Similarly, if you take someone like James Gunn. Gunn’s not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t believe you had a lot of conservatives coming to his defense. The folks defending him tended to be the folks who actually worked with him. He said some offensive things, a long time ago, but the attempts to destroy him and end his career over those things was, in my opinion, mistaken. The guy is a talented artist, and it does not appear that he’s a bad person.

He made some tasteless comments. Perhaps he even held beliefs once that you disagree with, but there’s little indication that he holds those beliefs today, if he ever did.

Take an example which the far right likes to bring up a lot, Senator Byrd. The guy was a grand wizard in the KKK. It’s hard to get much worse than that. But at some point, he evolved. He got better. Not only in words, but in deeds. By all accounts, he atoned for his sins and did things that improved the lives of black Americans. When he died, the NAACP publicly mourned his passing.

Should he have been canceled, and had his career ended? Certainly, at some point in the past, I would have almost certainly said, “Yes.” At some point in the past, there was no reason to believe that he would reverse his course. Who the hell makes that kind of reversal, from a KKK wizard to an advocate for minorities? No one. But he did.

Our entire criminal justice system, the GOOD part at least, is based on the idea that people can in fact make up for crimes and become better. My girlfriend worked for ages with troubled youth, and there was a time when I honestly thought that it was a waste of time for some of these kids. They had committed all kinds of crimes, and been in tons of trouble. I probably would have discounted them and said they were a lost cause. But she worked with them, and she turned countless lives around. She saved the lives of these kids, largely because she believed that they could be better than they had been in the past. And she was right. And not only did she save the lives of those kids, but those kids became good people. They made the world better. And thus, her giving them a chance, and helping them become better, made the world better.

People can get better. But you gotta give them a chance. If I had been the one making the call, instead of her, those kids wouldn’t have gotten better. They would have continued down the path their early mistakes had laid out for them. Probably would have just gotten stuck in the revolving door of the criminal justice system forever. And there was a time where I thought that was just how it was. Some people were bad. Honestly, in my heart, part of me still holds onto that idea. But I also know that it’s not quite as true as I once thought. I was wrong, and she made me see that people can get better. But not if you throw them in a pit.

I’m not sure how I can reconcile this with my gut instinct that nazis are trash that need to be excised from the human race. But I do feel the need to question even that sometimes, because you can see someone like Senator Byrd. He was basically a Nazi. But he did better.

3567

Well quite. Scott asked a couple of times upthread, fruitlessly, what those complaining about Cancel Culture actually wanted. And it’s no surprise that no one answered, because depending on who you ask cancel culture seems to consist of some combination of:

  • Abuse and harrassment
  • Protest and advocacy
  • People engaging in economic boycotts of businesses
  • Businesses responding to public pressure

I think most would be happy to see harsher penalties for those engaging in the first item. But what to do with the others…? What limits should be imposed on these?

3568

Indeed, I was tempted to ask yesterday about the Selma bus boycott. Was it cancel culture, a case of a mob unfairly targeting and going after a bus company for simply obeying the law?

3569

Actually this is probably the problem with “cancel culture”, whatever that means - that you see this as an existential fight of good vs evil, of the good guys vs the bad guys. And when there are counter examples of, perhaps, moments when you should take pause, you ask “is it wrong to mob and ruin people you don’t like? (because those people are horrible and deserve it)”

But, like many culture war issues, there is an element of generational divide. Younger people (or people who side with younger people) just don’t see any reason to hold back because there’s no reason to hold back, because the people they’re attacking are horrible and deserve it. I mean even the link above “proving” JK Rowling as a monster above, if you read the tweets, is her trying to argue - sort of like watching someone that nobody likes on some forum to go off on their hill to die - in a very inflammatory way about things which, really, shouldn’t be the death of conversation.

I say there’s a generational divide because Harper’s just published a “We’re tired of the intolerance against intolerance” that is the essence of cancel culture.

and signed by the usual suspects like Dahlia Lithwick, Matthew Yglesias, and Emily Yoffe, but also Steven Pinker, Fareed Zakaria, Garry Kasparov, Malcom Gladwell, and others of the same generational “group”.

I’m not “against” Cancel Culture, but I recognize the mob element of it, the willingness to misinterpret, the lack of critical self reflection when wrong, and the desire to punish those that deserve it by the circular logic of if they weren’t bad they wouldn’t have made us mad.

3570

Actually the problem here is that you assume I see all mob actions as good vs. evil. In fact, I’m asking the question how do you stop ‘cancel culture’ without also stopping things like the Selma bus boycott?

3571

Do you think Cancel Culture is something other than mob action? I mean, mobs aren’t always wrong, but when a large number of people are rapidly inflamed and angered by something very out of context they’ve read about online, is it useful to descend into the labyrinth of language to find a more precise description when the generalization is useful enough?

The better question is how can you distinguish the differences between the Selma bus boycott and someone getting fired because of a picture someone tricked them into making?

3572

I think ‘cancel culture’ is largely a fantasy of the right, to the extent that it is anything. I think people in outgroups have paid the price for voicing their non-consensus opinions for pretty much all of my life and nobody ever called that ‘cancel culture’, and it is only when white male elites starting paying the price that anyone invented ‘cancel culture’. I think, as I said, that ‘cancel culture’ is just a rebranding of ‘political correctness’.

If the entirety of cancel culture is your one example of a person who got tricked into making a picture, what the heck are you even talking about?

Also: you didn’t answer the question. What ought we to do about cancel culture, and what does that mean for activism?

3573

Every time you’re presented with an example of cancel culture you explain how that one doesn’t count, and besides if it were real there would be more examples.

3574

To my mind, the most important post in that Tom Nichols thread is this one:

For all the talk of nuance, a lot of people who claim to worry about the menace of “cancel culture” throw nuance out the window at the first opportunity.

Many will happily ignore the difference between punching up - some ordinary person on Twitter asking others to boycott Facebook or JK Rowling or whatever - and punching down - the President of the United States demanding that the New York Times or CNN be destroyed. Many also eagerly conflate thoughtful people who say “this person is full of shit, let me list the reasons why,” with ordinary but lazy people who merely say “this person is a monster!!!1” without further context, with extremists who issue death threats. This allows them to argue both sides are the same when it’s perfectly possible one side is saying “Here is my critique” and the other is saying “I will kill anyone who disagrees.”

(And if you’re looking for examples of this, look no further than, as Nichols indicates, Bret “I was a Karen before it was cool” Stephens.)

3575

I call that the Libertarian Polka. Maybe he only believes in small-c cancel culture?

3576

I mean on one level there’s nothing anyone can do, because you can’t force people’s directions, motivations or reactions. The superficial response is for institutions to take a breath and investigate the accusations (if necessary, obviously there are instances that are more clear cut), before jumping to a conclusion.

The longer tail answer is going into dialog with younger people and making sure that this kind of behavior is what they really want, with all the moral hazard that it entails. But to a great extent this is facilitated if not necessitated by social media software itself - cancel culture is literally related to how social media software makes certain topics viral over their whole platforms. Just go back 15 years and it would be hard to see how cancel culture could even happen in a local-forum based world.

What i’m not saying is that there’s literally no activism possible, nobody should be able to do anything, sit down and let racism go unnoticed. Which you seem to be implying by asserting, more or less, that there’s no alternative to cancel culture.

3577

People are often mean to other people and have always been so. ‘Cancel culture’ is more than that; it’s an allegation that there is a sickness or a conspiracy on the left to unfairly attack people on the right or in the center, for the purposes of marginalizing or destroying those people. If you want to prove it, you’re going to have to do something more than offer up isolated examples that 1) don’t show any sickness particular to those on the left and 2) don’t show any conspiracy by large numbers of people on the left.

3578

No, I’m asserting there’s no cancel culture. There is just normal human behavior.

3579

Yup. People who think modern “cancel culture” is either new or especially harsh have never read up on the history of lynchings 130 years ago. Or for that matter, the dynamics of life in a small village a thousand years ago, where challenging the local norms could get you outcast to starve to death in the snow.

3581

This is where I am at.

The extent to which ‘cancel culture’ exists at all is only in response to the fact that previously the abuses and transgressions were ignored, or actively protected. The Harvey Weinsteins, the woman in Central Park who called the cops to come kill a man for telling her to leash a dog, the business owners who are racist.

These things all happened before, and were ignored. Or worse, reporting them to try and remedy the issue through the legal system lead to further harassment and danger for the victim.

Enter social media.

And now we have the potential for overcorrection. But it is a potential that exists because previous ignored abuse. And in addition many of the examples of ‘cancel’ culture are because it is consumers voting with their wallets.

In the purview of Fuck the NYT here, the fact people cancel their subscriptions when they pay someone to promulgate their rancid racist views may be an example of ‘cancel culture’. But it is also people saying ‘we do not support giving platform to racists and white supremacists, and so are taking our dollars elsewhere’. It is the very definition of the free market in action.

So while there are unjust victims, it is also a corrective to abuses too long unchecked. It is consumers saying that it may be legal for the business owner to be a white supremacist, they get none of my money.