No it's not. The basic point that was being quoted (from the NYT comment piece) was quite sensible actually.
The OP author then immediately falls into the semantic trap of "right to express oneself freely" == "First Amendment rights". They're not equivalent. They're overlapping and related obviously -- but nonetheless fundamentally different things.
My expectations that there might be something to this post dropped precipitously at the point, so that's where I stopped reading.
> 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…
Popehat did, I think, an excellent job of it, even though he doesn't believe this is synonymous with cancel culture: > some responses to speech are disproportionate and outside norms of decency
Some are disproportionately harsh. Some are disproportionately lenient. Some are just right. Popehat has discovered that human perception is subjective and imperfect. Wait until he discovers this applies to literally everything.
The counterargument to that, of course, is that a handful of tech companies can't actually make your speech illegal, make their competition illegal, arrest you, imprison you, ban your speech across an entire country, burn your literature or have you and your ethic/religious/political group shot and dumped into shallow graves. I mean, sure... getting banned from Twitter is momentarily annoying but Twitter having far m…
> It's a common argument but I've never really found it a compelling one. You can literally make your own twitter any time you want. My charitable view is that people are actually complaining about a monopoly on attention. It's an interesting subject but doesn't have anything to do with speech.
> You can literally make your own twitter any time you want.
Until cloud companies decide to stop hosting you and registrars refuse to register your domain.
But of course you can also make your own cloud company and your own domain registrar as well.
That's a lot of words to say "people are free to steer clear of people they don't like and always have been". And not much of thought into "what changed that now it is a problem perceived by some?" There has been a fundamental change to our reality over the past couple decades: things you say and do are now by default in public and permanent record. If your not-too-famous grandpa said something outrageous, he ruined…
> If you write an outrageous blog post today, you're hosed. This just isn’t true, and I’m not sure why the discussion around cancel culture is framed like it is true. It’s exceedingly hard to be cancelled if you’re acting genuinely, kindly, and with empathy for the topic you’re discussing. You can say literally anything you want if you can figure out how to be nice when you say it, but you do have to put real effort…
We have no idea what the prevailing norms and taboos will be 20 years from now. Something you write today that is benign and uncontroversial, might be utterly offensive in 20 years, and all someone has to do is dig back in the internet archives and find it. I think back to 20 years ago, and I know I've told some (at the time) harmless, slightly off-color jokes, which today would get me fired instantly. You don't know which way the sensitivity wind will blow in the future, so your only safe play is to limit yourself to Rated-G "genuine, kind, and with empathy" speech, as you put it.
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 yo…
I don't think we should lose sight of just how batshit insane the NYT editorial was. We can continue to talk about Cancel Culture, but the opening assertion of the editorial was that we have a right to, "...speak [our] minds and voice [our] opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned." That's gobsmackingly wrong. It's the kind of sentence that, to me at least, grinds my mental gears to a halt. I just..…
It's not too far off. Any behavior which constitutes assault or harassment is not protected by the first amendment.
Shaming and shunning can easily be considered harassment in the right context, though actually proving it in a court of law gets much trickier.
Cancel culture happens because it works, and it not even be true. Until businesses, universities, and institutions say no to the digital mob, it will continue.
I think it should continue. For a while I was leaning against it, but on reflection I realized that there is no obligation for me to listen to or engage with people that have abhorrent views. Rarely will doing so actually change their mind, or mine. What corporations are allowed to do is one thing, but as an individual I've decided to take cancel culture to heart. When possible, I now just put anyone with awful views…
> For a while I was leaning against it, but on reflection I realized that there is no obligation for me to listen to or engage with people that have abhorrent views. Rarely will doing so actually change their mind, or mine.
I don't think anyone disagrees with that, but your notion has pretty much nothing to with what other people call "cancel culture".
If there is a talk about topic "X", you not showing up is not "canceling" anything and nobody cares.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/worlds-dullest-editorial-launc... Matt Taibbi's great post on this same topic. 'This Times editorial is watered down almost to the level of a public service announcement written for the Cartoon Network, or maybe a fortune cookie (“Free speech is a process, not a destination. Winning numbers 4, 9, 11, 32, 46…”). It made the Harper’s letter read like a bin Laden fatwa, but it’s somehow aro…
Taibbi has mostly torpedoed his credibility with Russian apoligism. Him and Glenn Greenwald.
thats a personal opinion of yours. I put his credibility higher than most major news orgs I can think of.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/worlds-dullest-editorial-launc... Matt Taibbi's great post on this same topic. 'This Times editorial is watered down almost to the level of a public service announcement written for the Cartoon Network, or maybe a fortune cookie (“Free speech is a process, not a destination. Winning numbers 4, 9, 11, 32, 46…”). It made the Harper’s letter read like a bin Laden fatwa, but it’s somehow aro…
Taibbi has mostly torpedoed his credibility with Russian apoligism. Him and Glenn Greenwald.
Strongly disagree. Taibbi & Greenwald along with Michael Tracey (who is currently in Poland on the Ukranian border) are some of the few independent journalists with the cojones to take on the establishment, who spend a huge amount of time smearing and discrediting them because they are impartial and provide invaluable commentary on all sides.