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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

#281

Post by fleddr »

rilezg wrote: post #220

Do we need more time and space in our society for measured discussion about current events? Absolutely, but such discussion is anathema to engagement-algorithm-driven social/traditional media. If you take the time to think things through, then by the time you are ready to speak the world will have already moved along and the post you are replying to is as good as dead. Instead we reward only the hottest, most emotion…

Good points. The speed of the conversations basically ensures there is no conversation. You may attempt to add some reasonable counter points to a controversial point but it's all in vain.

This dramatic promotion of the most unreasonable takes is creating a massive divide between the online world and the offline world. Quite a few takes on Twitter when expressed in the real world, may make you wake up in the hospital.

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

#282

Post by tptacek »

Natsu wrote: post #257
tptacek wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which podcast in particular? It ran for 3 years, and 18 USC 1001 was a recurring character. I don't think discussing Clark is going to do any favors for your arguments.

Not going to defend Clark here, just using that as a point of time reference and possible explanation for the notes of bitterness, since that was an ugly feud for former friends. I was thinking of All the President's Lawyers in particular during the end of the trial (e.g. between dismissal & pardon).

What feud? He was removed from a moribund group blog, and then spent the next several years launching attacks on White's mental health and the propriety of his having adopted children from Asia. Are we sure any of us are better off digging into this? I think we're not.

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

#283

Post by gnicholas »

zdragnar wrote: post #226
TameAntelope wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Any behavior which constitutes assault or harassment is not protected by the first amendment.

What definition of harassment are you using, and what 1A case are you thinking shows it to be unprotected speech?

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

#284

Post by danShumway »

Natsu wrote: post #266
danShumway wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely hard for me to imagine how anyone who's read or listened to a lot of Ken's commentary could walk away thinking that he was suddenly in favor of 18 USC 1001 just because of the existence of the Trump administration. He regularly criticizes the statute. I don't know, I really just don't see it. ---- Also, quick sidenote on the heckler's veto: > We talked about chilling effects and heckler's vetoes, but n…

Oh, he hates the statute normally. He just failed to even express mild criticism of it when it was abused and he was discussing the trial, which stood out when he was literally discussing the merits of a trial centered on one. Maybe he made up for it on some episode I didn't listen to, there are a lot of them and there's no way I heard them all, but I was kinda surprised to see him fail to mention a hobby horse of hi…

> He just failed to even express mild criticism of it when it was abused and he was discussing the trial

I don't know if I need to dig through however many X podcasts exist here to find examples, but for whatever it's worth I know that Ken criticized criminalization of lying to the FBI during the Trump investigation. You can believe me or not about that, short of digging through a bunch of transcripts I'm not sure what else to say about it other than I didn't notice the silence you're talking about.

> You say that as if nothing got shut down or forced to pay huge security fees due to other people being moved to violence against the speakers, but there were and have been lawsuits over the same.

Ah, first of all there's a difference between private companies doing this and public forums doing this. Not to say that it's never a bad thing if private forums do this, but it's not a heckler's veto in the legal sense. Second of all, it's still improper to characterize things like shouting down a speaker as a heckler's veto, because regardless of whether or not public forums violate that standard and are guilty of allowing a heckler's veto, it's still the case that actual heckling is not a heckler's veto.

But regardless, this is something that Ken criticizes regularly, so I just don't get what the point is. I have seen Ken criticize shouting down speakers and threatening them even when he doesn't like the speakers.

----

Edit: Okay, I did do a real quick 3-minute search online and not only do I see multiple instances of Popehat criticizing 18 USC 1001, I also see multiple instances of Left-leaning readers accusing him of being too critical of the statute when it's applied to Conservatives (https://nitter.42l.fr/Popehat/status/966388695505952768#m). Again, take from that whatever you'd like. I even (since you brought up the word) found a pretty recent example of him literally calling it chickenshit (https://nitter.42l.fr/Popehat/status/1486410486258102273#m)

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

#285

Post by lliamander »

zeruch wrote: post #253
tptacek wrote: post #180

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…

Your is so far the only comment that seems to have actually read and understood the piece. Bravo.

Well, he was the one who shared the post, so I should hope so.

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

#286

Post by dmix »

lliamander wrote: post #238
Misdicorl wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) I think this is more neatly described by the right having more mainstream and surreptitious avenues of "cancelling" people they don't like. Gang lists, credit scores, police intimidation/brutali…

That grab-bag of issues suggests you have a confused notion of what constitutes "the right". For instance, how is police brutality a example of "right-wing cancel culture" when some of our most salient examples occurred in left-wing dominated cities? Not everything you disagree with is a political weapon used by your enemies. I will concede (though you didn't make this point explicitly) that the religious right has h…

It's pretty common in the New Left ideology to view any power structure as the opposition to progress and therefore the enemy (this was a big theme particularity from 1960s-1970s that heavily influenced progressives today). So any strong authority system like police and big companies are immediately 'right-wing'.

This of course misses all the nuance in the spectrum of authoritarianismliberty found not only in right wing people but just as much among left-wing people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left (note how they used to be the leaders in pro-free speech, which makes sense if you're opposed to authority, but that value has of course been lost on social media - to the dismay of many from the old-school left who fought hard for it)

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

#287

Post by rayiner »

otterley wrote: post #252
coffeemug wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From TFA: > 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 o…

> We want to live in a culture where a joke on the internet doesn't lead to a struggle session at work. Everyone wants to do that, until they find themselves the target of a joke while struggling to have a good career, live in a nice place, and raise a family as a member of an unprivileged group with a lot of adverse baggage to overcome. Not everyone thinks such jokes are funny, and they have just as much a right to…

Are you a "member of an unprivileged group?" If not, what exactly do you think life is like for us that we can't take a joke? Sticks and stones and whatnot: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rP0nqe...

> Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness.

In 30+ years of being a "brown guy" in the U.S., the only thing that's ever really gotten under my skin is the self-righteous paternalism of white liberals when it comes to the social norms related to race and identity. It really gives me an understanding of what working class people (another target of liberal paternalism) must have felt like all these decades...

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

#288

Post by coffeemug »

tptacek wrote: post #256
coffeemug wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From TFA: > 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 o…

Ken White agrees with you that there are disproportionate responses to speech on the Internet and, if you follow him, isn't any more amenable to struggle sessions than you are (see: his years-long advocacy of what Lukianoff is doing at FIRE). The problem is that the NYT here managed to articulate a different, and stupid, problem: the eroding of our supposed right to speak without shame or shunning. The NYT's argument…

I didn't interpret the editorial this way. I saw it as articulating a very real problem of eroding cultural norms that welcome and promote pluralism. I don't know why you say "supposed right". It's not a legal right, obviously, but in a sense people have a human right to give a talk at a university without needing a police escort.

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

#289

Post by WesternWind »

rayiner wrote: post #268
tptacek wrote: post #180

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 think both you and Ken and the New York Times are getting tripped up by the phrase "free speech." What the New York Times is actually talking about is "ideological pluralism." When elderly Millennials like me were growing up, you could have--at least in educated circles--a broad range of heterodox opinions without anyone getting too upset about what you said. And that's just not true anymore. I've got in trouble wi…

The thing is, we do carefully scrutinize refugees, very carefully.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kyleblaine/some-things-...

Saying we need to do so very carefully is implicitly suggesting that that's not currently the case, and that does absolutely feed into racism against MENA/South Asian people and Islamophobia.

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

#290

Post by ProfessorLayton »

akhmatova wrote: post #244
TameAntelope wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the kind of sentence that, to me at least, grinds my mental gears to a halt. 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…

>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.

But doesn't this cut both ways? Once upon a time it wasn't possible to spout whatever's in one's head to countless people at once. The surface area is much larger today, and so are the consequences.

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