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Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

popehat.substack.com

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Re: Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

#171

Post by Latty »

noduerme wrote: post #91
kritiko wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>One other thing that's new, in America, is the idea that speech is less important than people's feelings. Lenny Bruce was convicted of obscenity less than 60 years ago. The civil liberties around speech went through a series of challenges and expansions very recently. The ACLU used to defend nazis. Now they prefer not to, to the chagrin or dismay of more traditional civil libertarians.

The one thing that's remained constant from times when civil rights activists were imprisoned for "offending" people to now when right wingers are canceled for offending people seems to be that the bulk of the population is incapable of, or unwilling to, set the principle of speech over their own feelings about that speech. I think it's because most people just can't imagine themselves being on the wrong end of a cen…

You are equating government imprisonment with public cancellation here because they both have a chilling effect, but we very quickly run into the paradox of tolerance: do you restrict the expression of "cancelling" to protect other speech?

Those Nazis you use an example of abhorrent speech that must be allowed were calling for communists to be rounded up and killed for their views. Surely that is partaking in cancellation?

Who cancels the cancellers?

Re: Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

#172

Post by lazide »

egberts1 wrote: post #70

I got blocked by Sacramento Bee (a California newspaper) Editorial from their Facebook page. Pretty sure that they didn’t like the different facts that I have pointed out over several different times as rebuttal to their dated opinions … with using each of their own website pages as counter-citations. But hey, Editorial folks reserve the rights to cancel me for their own idiocy of their own makings. It’s just the sli…

I don’t know of any definition of cancel culture that would fit. That’s moderation.

Cancel culture would be if they put your profile or picture on the front page as an example of being a terrible person who has done things every right thinking person should not, and no one should think of employing or working with you - because they didn’t like your comments.

Re: Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

#173

Post by whatshisface »

tines wrote: post #107
galimaufry wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard it called a "non-central example". That has a negative connotation though, I wish there was a more neutral term. The statement "all natural numbers are greater than 1" is false, and it's not helpful to object that 0 and 1 are noncentral examples. (It's not a motte-and-bailey, that's about a particular sort of shifting goalposts)

Nitpick, I don't think 0 is a natural number

Zero is sometimes a natural number and sometimes not. N is written as N_+ or N_0 sometimes to indicate which one is being used.

Re: Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

#174

Post by [deleted] »

noduerme wrote: post #21
Latty wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know what Popehat actually wants here. For people to stop calling it "cancel culture" whenever they face reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others would be a good start. People not wanting to patronize or associate with you when you cause harm to people they care about is really not a bad thing, and it's not new either, and yet it is what gets called "cancel culture" by a lot of people.…

As you point out, while boycotting someone based on your perception of their opinion is not new , the modality of mass mob boycotts of individuals over things potentially taken out of context is entirely new, and that's exactly what "cancel culture" refers to. The underlying mechanism of Twitter is what gave birth to the term, regardless of whether it's used by haters to justify hate speech. One other thing that's ne…

[deleted]

Re: Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

#175

Post by lazide »

egberts1 wrote: post #90
hraedon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you suffer any sort of consequence for your responses beyond being deprived of the ability to continue accessing their Facebook page? If not, you're really straining even the most generous definition of "cancel culture" beyond the point of even minimal usefulness.

sure, they’re rallying people at the behest of the governor against the middle-class. sure enough, they got what they wanted and we are paying dearly for it to this day.

Sounds like a vague political harm, not a focused individual one - which seems to be the complaint around cancel culture abuses?

Re: Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

#176

Post by guelo »

noduerme wrote: post #21
Latty wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know what Popehat actually wants here. For people to stop calling it "cancel culture" whenever they face reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others would be a good start. People not wanting to patronize or associate with you when you cause harm to people they care about is really not a bad thing, and it's not new either, and yet it is what gets called "cancel culture" by a lot of people.…

As you point out, while boycotting someone based on your perception of their opinion is not new , the modality of mass mob boycotts of individuals over things potentially taken out of context is entirely new, and that's exactly what "cancel culture" refers to. The underlying mechanism of Twitter is what gave birth to the term, regardless of whether it's used by haters to justify hate speech. One other thing that's ne…

Consumer boycotts are not new. They have a long history including the Boston Tea Party that kicked off America.

Re: Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

#177

Post by TameAntelope »

cowuser666 wrote: post #161
TameAntelope wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sufficiently talented communicators more or less only have these "cancel culture" problems through choice, not through inability to express themselves. Which is honestly why I have little sympathy for the "cancelled", in many cases. Occasionally, I do feel a pang of empathy for people like Gina Carano, for example, who genuinely don't seem to know how to say what they want to, and may not have intentionally wanted to…

no chilling effects here..

My point is cancel culture is not very chilling if you're a competent speaker/writer, and it ought to be even less chilling than it is (possibly not chilling at all).

If you believe you're entering a conversation with positive intent, a genuine point of view, and empathy for others, you are more or less immune to being cancelled.

Re: Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

#178

Post by croes »

TameAntelope wrote: post #100

His “First Speaker Problem” is exactly why I’ve hated these discussions thus far; why is the speech of one person sacred, but speech in response to that person not? The idea that the First Speaker is, themself, responding to yet someone else is a great follow up that I hadn’t considered. I also have very low expectations for this community’s ability to discuss this reasonably. So far is seems like folks are posting r…

If you say something and someone calls you an idiot it's free speech but if hundreds do it at the same time it's bullying.

Re: Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

#180

Post by tptacek »

The comments on this thread seem to be quite wildly missing White's point. Many of the arguments taking place here seem premised on the idea that Ken White has attempted to solve, once and for all, the "cancel culture" problem --- or somehow write a dispositive argument that "cancel culture" isn't real.

He's not doing any of these things. He's responding to a specific NYT staff editorial.

White agrees with many of you that disproportionate responses to speech happen, are harmful, and are occurring regularly. He cites several instances, from both sides of the American political spectrum. You don't have to come up with an elaborate argument about how White is wrong about how harmful "cancel culture" is; White almost certainly agrees with you (at least in a general sense; maybe not in your particulars).

His point is that you have to discuss something more particular than "the right to speak your mind without fear of shame or shunning". You've never had that right. You can't have it. To be free of shame or shunning is to be free of other people's speech. If you're saying something provocative, you are almost certainly responding in a sense to something someone else said; if you think you have the right to speak without shame or shunning, so does the person you're effectively responding to. At best, you're arguing for what White has in the past mockingly referred to as a "replevin of feels"; at worst, what you're asking for is totally incoherent.

This Substack post would be bigger news if Ken White had, Solomonically, worked out the whole problem of disproportionate responses to speech. He has not, and I think he's probably much too smart to try. He's just critiquing someone else's bad argument. That's all you really have to engage with here; you don't have to let cortisol trick you into believing this is an amassing of the forces of "cancel culture isn't real" that you must mobilize against.

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