Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

Of course, it depends on what you view as harmful, and who's opinions you agree with. There is no obvious right answer. Pretending we can say "so this should never happen" is absurd in my view, it implies people have to give their money to people that will use that money to fund harm.

The core of free speech is that even abhorrent views should not face censorship by the government, because democracy requires it. If this is true, surely the right to not support people who's views you disagree with is just as necessary? (If not, is every Republican cancelling the Democratic party by not donating to them?) The answer, as with democracy and freedom of speech, is to make the better argument, get people to agree with you, and then use that to support the things you think are right.

We don't have a better answer than that.

I think there are obvious cases we can personally make better choices: seek context and clarity, don't jump to conclusions and pile on just because others say something without checking it is valid and proportionate, but again, that's never the "anti-cancel culture" argument.

>For people to stop calling it "cancel culture"

Accountability Culture.

> Popehat seems to be falling into the trap of thinking the precisely defining something will lead to clarity. It rarely, if ever, does. Each one of us has our own conception of a term - wordfeel, if you will - and virtually no one actually knows or holds to the literal dictionary definition.

I really disagree, I think he addresses this very specifically at the end of the article, where he writes, "I believe more specificity — action items — is the answer":

> Pointing to specific instances of “cancellation” and debating why they are inside or outside of our norms is a productive action item. Saying “colleges shouldn’t disinvite speakers because of controversy” is a good specific action item; we can debate it. Saying “Ken, stop piling on 20-follower Twitter accounts when they say stupid things” is an action item; I can debate it. [Shan’t.] Saying “stop demanding that businesses fire people for what they say off the job” is an action item. I might not agree but we can discuss it.

He's not at all falling into a definition trap! I think that misses the point of the article, which is one of the most coherent articles I've ever encountered on the subject.

At the risk of outing myself as a skeptic of certain orthodoxies, I also found the Times op-ed in question to have a rather un-serious tone. However, I think there were different things I latched onto than the author of this critique. I didn't find the lack of clear distinction between the legal definition of free speech and the common definition to be particularly problematic. As the author mentions, a lot of people felt it was reasonably clear that the Times was referring to the common notion of free speech. But I noticed passages such as this one from the Times op-ed:

"Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech. Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms."

For the supposed paper of record, I found the choice to use the decidedly contemptuous language to refer to the right wing (that I italicized above) very telling. There were a handful of other telling moments in the Times article where the authors clearly revealed their bias and intellectual stake on certain issues. Even if I mostly share those views, I found the overall article to be rather ineffective at encouraging any but the most sympathetic readers to reconsider their rhetoric. On some level, the Times authors seemed to want to continue to cling to a sense of righteousness that must actually be at the root of the problem in question.

> defining something will lead to clarity. It rarely, if ever, does

US politics is full of ambiguities, word games, and of course attacks that exploit these clarity gaps. See a list [0] of them below.

Of course slogans are useful, and trying to hold hypocrites to account by using their slogan against them, yet at the same time it seems the political discourse is extremely low signal-to-noise, and there's almost no general need/demand for clarity. For example the both the "rich people pay no taxes" and the usual "XY corp last year paid 3.50 in taxes" memes are just that, catchy memes.

And all of this puts a brutally counter productive shouting at the late night game feeling on politics. (Sure, there's a reason why political discourse is like this... we probably have to go through the catchy meme arms race.)

[0] BLM, defund the police, liberal and classical liberal, gender/sex, socialism, recently critical race theory, equality vs equity (equal outcome, equal opportunity), free speech vs. selective publishing/hosting of content free from government interference; safe space vs. safe space from certain ideas/trigger vs. safe space for expressing ideas free of consequences, and maybe also "no child left behind" too. (Of course a few of them are proper slogans, but then due to the ambiguity in semantics folks try to use these as concrete promises.)