3582

This. “Cancel Culture” is a manufactured term designed as political propaganda. Is there a real issue where people go overboard with internet shaming, sure. But that has been happening as long as there’s been an internet.

Is anyone here cheering on innocent people getting doxed? Or egregious examples of some minor thing from 30 years ago screwing someone’s career? I haven’t seen it. But somehow not denouncing the political propaganda construct of “cancel culture” seems to mean you support the most egregious abuses of internet shaming.

It’s all a BS argument. I mean if there were some actual organization, the cancel culture institute, which had policies of relentlessly doxing anyone it deemed wrong that would be a great thing to rail against. But there is no such thing. There’s only the attempt to label others with a “culture” of desiring to ruin good people’s lives for not being, to use a similar bullshit term, “politically correct” enough.

3583

Considering the technological aspects of this, i’ll disagree.

3584

Just to quote the Harper’s article (note i’m not necessarily endorsing this). Like a lot of things on the internet people refuse to back down so making what should be pretty small things loom larger than they are. We can talk all day about this topic but it isn’t exactly the most pressing concern in the world by any stretch. To be honest forums have gone through this phase of “social evolution” a lot longer ago.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

Anyway, after the Troubles I’ve made a personal vow not to give in to the temptation to keep arguments brewing or have the last word on issues and I’ve said all about this topic I feel compelled to. Have at it otherwise!

3585

Holy shit…that letter is hilarious. It’s just so goddamn unfair that center-right “thought leaders” are judged on the quality of their thoughts.

Talk about the coddling of the American mind.

3586

I felt like it had more to do with determination to preserve the moral high ground over Republicans who would otherwise accuse them of hypocrisy (as they have done anyway with, e.g., Christine Blaisey Ford vs. Tara Reade). I’m not a Congressional mind reader though.

3587

I don’t really get how you can ignore the long, long, long human history of mob violence which played out before the internet, or the practice of shunning that existed in many societies, or the practice of establishing in- and out- groups that has existed in virtually every society. This is one reason I find it so hard to take hysteria about ‘cancel culture’ so seriously: that it isn’t actually lynching, no matter how much some people want to pretend that it is.

Yes. “How dare you quote me and point out the meaning and implications of what I said!”

3588

Someone mentioned Franken.

He was a great, effective Senator. Best we’ve sent since Wellstone (RIP). I was extremely happy to have him representing me.

He did the contrition thing. His offenses were both old and venal. But that one picture sunk him. After that came out, the party leadership clearly informed him that he would be resigning.

I still miss Senator Franken. They were right to do so.

We can lose Al Franken in the Senate. He can find other ways to contribute, and we thank him for his service.

We cannot lose the energy of a resurgent civil rights movement who would be rightly disgusted that another old rich white (well, Jewish, but we all know how fraught that discussion is) guy got to skate.

And hey, getting a centrist-ish woman in the seat who looks likely to cruise to reelection is far from the end of the world.

Franken lost his political career. He’s not in jail, he hasn’t been hounded into hiding or been assaulted in the streets. Seems the punishment fits the transgression to me.

Just because the Democrats are occasionally run by what appear to sometimes be responsible adults doesn’t mean “the left is eating itself!” or whatever fever dream a Sober Conservative Voice is trying to project onto the occasion.

3589

Some interesting thoughts on what I think is pretty much cancel culture and cooking shows.

3590

Bleh. Notable academics, journalists, and public opinionators (which is who has signed that letter) are notoriously prickly about reputational damage and also are the most obvious targets of social media “mobs.” They’re like cops who see criminals everywhere because it’s their job to interact with criminals or doctors who see disease everywhere because it’s their job to diagnose and treat it. It’s far less widespread and problematic than they, who are often the easy targets of social media disapprobation, perceive.

Also too:

The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.

What the fuck do they think this looks like? A Twitter “mob” is a whole bunch of speech and only speech. No sticks or stones are being employed. The forces of the state aren’t being mobilized to arrest racists and sexists (quite the contrary.) I’m sure that every single signatory of that document agrees there are actually things that an editor should be fired for allowing to appear in print. They just want to be able to define and police the boundaries themselves rather than letting the vulgar mob do it.

3591

As to the Culture Wars. Just remember which Culture is being preserved by them:

3592

That’s a great article, thanks for sharing. I mean, duh to literally everything in it, but clearly more people need to be exposed to these truths.

3593

The Montgomery boycotts were also about changing a policy or law rather than attempting to punish an individual. Their goal was to make a positive change and to right a wrong rather than exact retribution. I don’t think that anyone is arguing that boycotting is bad as a concept.

And I suspect that the retributive nature of many of these cases is what bothers reasonable folks.
Almost all the cases cited in this thread have been about enacting vengeance and punishing a transgression. That’s not so terrible on its face, as fear of public shaming isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a society.

But the false positives like the poor bike-commuter the other month are terrible due to the sheer size of the platform. In this case, the bad guy was caught and received what was likely righteous comeuppance for his transgressions… but not before two other innocents also had their lives and jobs threatened. More below.

You’re doubtless correct that the same impetus that drives tribal shunning is the same that drives an modern “Cancel Event”, but scale matters.

Shaming a tribal member and giving him or her a smack-down to accentuate the tribe’s majority opinion works pretty well for small groups with few secrets. It falls down pretty hard when you start dealing with big towns or cities – mob justice has a bad rap because of how easy it was to whip the crowd into a murderous rage over comparatively small transgressions or have the mob hijacked by folks with less-than-pure goals. That’s why we developed legal systems.

The Internet is kind of at the core of this debate, regardless of whether the base instincts predated it or not. Getting literally millions of people spun up about something is trivial with the reach of Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. And the enforcement of the Internet mob’s desires are often instantaneous and permanent, even if the charge is later found to be without merit or the punishment is far out of proportion to the “crime”.

Do I have an answer? No, I do not.

Lines need to be drawn somewhere, and the Internet HATES lines, especially fuzzy ones. A politician is presented with a picture of him in blackface. Should he resign in disgrace? Well, if the picture was from last week, yeah he should. If the picture was back from when he was four years old, then no he should not. Somewhere between those extremes is the “right” answer.

The problem is that the Internet will almost always draw that line too far to the retributive side and it’s hard for most people to weather the resulting storm… unless they are the Governor of Virginia.

3594

Nobody has lost their job because of a picture taken when they were four years old.

How do you know it’s drawn too far? Maybe the Internet is right to be outraged, and you’re too apathetic.

3595


3596

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with public shaming. Indeed, I think it’s required. In some cases, some of society’s problems stem from a lack of shame felt by folks when they really should.

I think that in some cases though, forgiveness is warranted. Certainly not always, and not without actual change and actions taken by the shamed. But there should be room for forgiveness, to allow people who do bad things to become better.

If we just destroy them and never offer forgiveness, then there’s no ability for those people to become better. They become permanent enemies of the good.

3597

Yeah, the site looks interesting. I have some more reading ahead of me.

3598

Yes… QED.

I guess. Is that your contention?

3599

More or less. The argument that “The Internet has gone too far” is indistinguishable from “We know better than the average person what is appropriate and what isn’t”. Which is a dubious claim, especially from those who haven’t experienced the effects of racism, sexism, and other inappropriate behavior.

I mean, how can you demand that one person forgive another?

3600

The only help you need these days is from the internet.

The above podcast series is a good listen if you’d like to know how our youth (along with every other demographic) are being radicalized online.

3601

More apropos, what does it even mean for Twitter to forgive someone? What does that look like? How would you know when it happens?