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Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

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

#181

Post by lliamander »

I think his notion of "disproportionate response to to speech" is a good start, but is too generic to help us understand why this has become an issue of discussion over the past decade.

When I think of cancel culture, my primary thought is of private individuals facing meaningful harms (mainly economic) as a result of public outcry over the individuals (perfectly legal) speech or actions that signal the individual is "on the wrong team".

It's not a simple definition, but captures both why people are afraid of it, and why it is happening now (social media made it possible to make a private individual's speech and actions public, even if that individual wasn't a user of that platform).

Public figures losing speaking engagements or whatever is bad, but the targeting of private individuals in this manner is an escalation of political conflict that is very alarming.

Lastly, I will add that while this evil is not exclusively committed by the Left, there is absolutely an asymmetry. The Left has generally been far more likely to cancel people than the reverse. There are a number of possible causes (people on the left are more politically active, will be amplified by a left -leaning media industry, etc)

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

#182

Post by thrashh »

Cancel culture is just a symptom.

As I see it, the Internet has created two problems:

(1) Everyone now has a voice -- yeah that's cool but society isn't handling it too well yet

(2) It's now easy to associate with people who think like you -- cool but absolutely terrible

What happens is that now a bulk of the things you hear come from your own circle (which is self affirming!) and then when you hear something from outside your circle, it feels so far off that it causes you to react violently (a.k.a. you want to cancel them).

The problem is: you can't get rid of that violent reaction. It's natural and human to dislike things that you're unfamiliar with. (Actually I think every living thing is like that -- being wary of unfamiliar things is essential to survival.)

So the only thing you can do is desensitize yourself by hanging out with a diverse set of people. I don't know how we can make society as a whole do that more, but the Internet is allowing some people to do it a lot less.

To make matters worse, before when it didn't matter if Jane or Frank were totally clueless, it matters now because because Jane and Frank both have a voice and can tweet about it.

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

#183

Post by cgrealy »

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…

> narrowing of speech will come for those who believe themselves immune.

True, but on other hand, history has shown us the Paradox of Tolerance.

"Liberals" have learned this lesson. When I was growing up, people who I would consider socially liberal generally supported the "I disagree with what you say, but will defend your right to say it" position. These days, the same people are less confident. I'm one of them.

I want a free and open society where people can discuss ideas and those ideas are weighed on their merits and the ridiculous ones (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc) are laughed at.

But that's not what's happened. The Overton Window in the US has dramatically shifted.

I don't know how to fix this. I don't even know that there is a fix for this. But I can certainly understand the mindset that says "maybe we don't need to defend nazis?"

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

#184

Post by long_time_gone »

jimbokun wrote: post #144
ssully wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are things that you would say in the 1990's that you wouldn't feel comfortable saying today?

Lol, obviously if I typed it here it would mean I'm comfortable saying it, so it's a Catch-22 isn't it?

If you can't explicitly say it, can you at least describe in what ways it is "less free than, say, the 1990s?"

If not, the comment loses value.

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

#185

Post by Latty »

tines wrote: post #153
Latty wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have a right to expression, but not a right to a platform. Not everyone can go on TV every day to talk about what they believe, so it must be curated, and that curation is an expression in and of itself. Should we try and be proportional and fair in our responses to people personally? Of course. Should we as a society try to limit people's responses? No. There used to be literal lynching, and clearly active vi…

What do you think of the argument that the nature of boycotting has changed? In your example, people might boycott a restaurant they didn't like, but there were a ton of small restaurants, no one restaurant was very big. Now, we have a handful of websites that like 90% of all written human communication goes through, and people aren't boycotting a Twitter handle, they're boycotting Twitter itself (so to speak) to for…

This seems like an argument to have better "public squares" and better regulations against monopolies, rather than enforcing private entities to platform others.

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

#186

Post by bloaf »

legitster wrote: post #45

> Our failure to have a serious discussion about defining “cancel culture” encourages this. Can we please just define it so we can move on as a society? I'm equally tired of this game where snarky writers try to pretend it doesn't exist. The first amendment doesn't protect against secret blacklists or mobs but we can still agree they are "bad things" and could agree on at least some new set of common courtesy. All so…

In my mind it's just a colloquialism for a certain kind of illiberalism:

> "Cancel culture" is the belief that certain beliefs about race, gender, and equality are so utterly indefensible that anyone holding them is necessarily acting in bad faith and consequently deserving of punishment.

In practice, this means moral condemnation in place of consideration and argumentation, which is precisely illiberalism.

What distinguishes "cancel culture" from, say, the conservative hatred of communism, is the whiff of hypocrisy that comes from the use of mob rule to enforce what are ostensibly academic positions, and the frequent reference to inclusivity as a justification of social exclusion.

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

#187

Post by tines »

whatshisface wrote: post #173
tines wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, that's annoying.

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

#188

Post by noduerme »

tptacek wrote: post #133
jimbokun wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speech is far more free in the US today than in, say, the 1950s and 1960s. But I would argue less free than, say, the 1990s.

In the 1990s, my ability to speak was restricted to high school essays, zines that 12 people read, and FIDONet BBS boards.

That was, for many of us, our ability to be heard. Our ability to speak was not hindered by fear of having our lives ruined for holding an unpopular opinion or asking an incorrectly phrased question.

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

#189

Post by diffeomorphism »

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

Matter of taste/notation. Both definitions 0,1,2,... and 1,2,3,... are very, very common.

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

#190

Post by krapp »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #151
jimbokun wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you start increasing the power to censor "false" ideas, who do you really trust to make those decisions and not abuse that authority?

Please note I never advocated for censorship. I’m only saying the ideal solution won’t work. I don’t want censorship either, but also I don’t believe simply more speech is the solution. I don’t know what the solution is.

If you define anything other than "simply more speech" as censorship, as many seem to nowadays, then a solution either cannot exist or must involve censorship.
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