Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

This a hypocritical Isolated Demand For Rigor[1], or in this case for Niceness. Many people doing the cancelling don't have to be and don't bother with civility or politeness, they are entirely ok with the worst slurs if it came from mouths they support. The kindness they demand is a thin wrapper over ideological conformity, and the demands are demonstrably done in bad faith to silence the discussion not to shape it.

It also, rather naively and hilariously, imagines potential cancellers as ideal rational censors who will read all of your words before arriving at a fair judgment. This is in stark contrast with what actually happens, where cancellers read a headline and then reach a red 100 Celsius before reading a single additional word. The off-the-top-of-my-head example is a whole ironic saga of twitter cancelling a trans scifi author[2] because a pro-trans story just so happened to have an "offensive" title (that turned out to be literally true in the world of the story.)

>Getting canceled isn’t a landmine, it’s a tar pit

Both are public dangers that civilised societies hunt and eradicate.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_At...

This is the cortisone rush that tptacek was referring to. You need to let it go through you (or past you) until you feel your mental gears loosen up again. Then step back and look at the bigger picture.

What the editorial author meant was not some kind of absolute freedom from the threat of being shamed or shunned. But that, once upon a time, and it wasn't too long ago, there was a thing known as "civil discourse" in this country. In which (and granted the boundaries are fuzzy hear) -- in itself the mere fact of having an unpopular (or difficult) opinion on the state of the world ... did not run such an alarmingly and dysfunctional risk of getting you shut down in form or another as it does today.

Note that this don't mean "unpopular or difficult" in the anything-goes sense. Spouting sheer idiocy can (and should) get you shunned and shamed, along with threats of implications of violence, and a whole lot of other things I don't need to mention.

But taking unpopular / difficult (or even simply naïve) stances within the boundaries of plausibility and reason, by themselves, should not merit such a reaction. And yet increasingly they do. That is what is meant by a breakdown in the standards of civil discourse. And it this breakdown of standards -- and the creeping climate of "better hold your tongue" that has taken over this country -- that is the main concern of the editorial piece. Not absolutist notions of freedom or freedom-from.

Nuance. That's the key takeaway here.

> Americans don’t have, and have never had, any right to be free of shaming or shunning. The First Amendment protects our right to speak free of government interference. It does not protect us from other people saying mean things in response to our speech.

First, the term "free speech" is overloaded-- it means a legal right to speak free of government interference, and it also means a cultural environment of pluralism where opposing views are welcomed and debate is encouraged. Here Ken conflates the two meanings.

Second, unlike legal norms, cultural norms are continuous rather than discrete. There are maybe 3-5 definitions of murder (premeditated, involuntary, etc.), but saying mean things is a continuum. You can live in a society like Soviet Union c 1930 where your coworker who wants your position calls for "the people's court" because of a joke you made-- a completely informal struggle session that doesn't involve the government. Or you can live in a society where you can express anything whatsoever and not get fired. Or at a million points in between.

Third, legal norms follow cultural norms. See gay marriage.

When people talk about cancel culture they talk about cultural norms shifting toward struggle sessions (the word "culture" is in the term!), and concerns that some day legal norms may follow this cultural shift. In this context the word "right" is used colloquially. Obviously nobody has a legal right to speak without fear of shaming.

We want to live in a culture where a joke on the internet doesn't lead to a struggle session at work. It isn't batshit insane, it isn't gobsmackingly wrong, and it isn't that difficult to understand.

The “insult my boss” is a good thought experiment because it reveals that motivation. Is it really about “free speech” vs. “feelings”, or is there something else going on?