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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

#291

Post by bko »

TameAntelope wrote: post #201
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 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..…

I don't know if I have a definition of "cancel culture" but consider the time NY Times ran an entire article about a single person from Goldman Sachs that donated to the wrong political candidate in 2016, which they publicly named.

> Records show just one Goldman employee, a financial adviser in the wealth management division, has donated to Mr. Trump — $534.58, to be precise.

The Times also did some research on him and found he was selling MAGA style hats. Running a side hustle while working at GS is a big no-no and it got him fired.

Can we all agree that whatever the hell that is is wrong? One of the largest newspapers in the world combing through public donations, finding a private individual that happened to donate a small amount to a politician that would go on to win the presidency, and feel the need to name that person publicly.

Or if you're more sympathetic to the other side, how about the woman that gave Trump the middle finger? She lost her job as a government contractor, but she won political office off of the debaucle.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/nyregion/donald-trump-nyc...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/06/juli-briskma...

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

#292

Post by ericmay »

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…

Do you have to be part of an unprivileged group to find a joke offensive and deserving of a severe reaction? And does this only apply in America? Like if I go to Germany and they make fun of Americans for being fat I can get really mad and shame them and stuff right?

———-

Though in my own personal experience of being the butt of many jokes, I find it’s easiest to just disarm them by laughing and then trying to take the person out for a beer. Then we can laugh at my expense together. I’ve never found being angry to be a long-term solution TBH. But that’s my experience.

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

#293

Post by dekhn »

l33t2328 wrote: post #280
akhmatova wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> cortisone rush This is such an outstanding term. Sometimes I’ll see a comment of someone arguing with me or insulting me and I’ll get a spike of anger and literally feel my eyes twitch for a split second and I’ve never really thought about it but that’s exactly what it is.

https://xkcd.com/386/

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

#294

Post by tptacek »

coffeemug wrote: post #288
tptacek wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ken White agrees with you that you shouldn't need a police escort to give a talk at a university, and said so in this response.

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

#295

Post by zozbot234 »

dmix wrote: post #286
lliamander wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 authoritarianism liberty found not only in right…

> It's pretty common in the New Left ideology to view any power structure as the opposition to progress and therefore the enemy

That was the old New Left. The New New Left is even more authoritarian than the Right used to be.

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

#296

Post by joe_the_user »

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…

Somehow write a dispositive argument that "cancel culture" isn't real.

With so many things defined as cancel culture, with so many qualities ascribed to cancel culture, with cancel culture having committed so many crimes and offended so many people, how indeed could it not be real? How preposterous! So many now are lying in the gutter with ruined lives, so many have ruined careers, what thing could have done this if not cancel culture? How could it not be real?

True, cancel culture might have some contradictions in it's definition. But I propose we iron those out those straight away and define cancel culture as American culture and then clearly, we can say, as Doonesbury author Garry Trudeau said, "we have me the enemy and he is us".

Edit: More seriously, the phrase "cancel culture" is poor way to way to deal with something with a raft of only semi-related explosions of anger against things that used to be OK. If someone doesn't like what's happening, they need to deal constructive with what's happening, not imagine that the genie will go back into the bottle by condemnation of this "cancel culture".

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

#297

Post by paganel »

> Vladimir Putin claims that the West is trying to “cancel” Russia merely for invading a sovereign nation

I will not go into the merits or demerits of Russia invading Ukraine, but that cancelling process of Russian culture did most certainly happen (and is still happening). Where I live (Romania) they even cancelled an Eugene Onegin [1] opera show because it was, well, Russian. Both Chaikovsky, the composer, and Pushkin (the author of Onegin) have been long dead, they most certainly don't have anything to do with the current invasion. And that was not an isolated incident, at least according to what I could read on the net.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Onegin_(opera)

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

#298

Post by Meekro »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #223
gopher_space wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> But of course you can also make your own cloud company and your own domain registrar as well.

Until your upstream network provider decides to drop you (this happened to Epik, temporarily killing the whole company until they dropped 8chan).

But of course you could also make your own backbone ISP.

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

#299

Post by krisoft »

jollybean wrote: post #261
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…

"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" This is a bit flawed, essentially 'straw man' argument in the grand scheme. While there might be good reason to critique the NYT article, the response I think missed the bigger point. Nobody is really making the argument that speech isn't going to have co…

> People lament that 'she's a billionaire and can't be cancelled' again which is not true.

She has enough money that if she wants to be heard she can literally print her opinion and pay people to stuff it in everyones postbox. If she as much as posts a long form article on her blog millions will read it. Her voice is not supressed in any way. If she wants to publish a book, she rings up a publishing house and they will publish it for her. This is what people mean when they say that she “cannot be canceled”.

> The amount of front page sardonic vitriol about her by ostensibly 'respectable' publications is very directly translated into hesitancy on every popular front

That is one reading. The other reading is that she used her considerable reach to clearly, and articulately express reprehensible thoughts. People have seen and read these thoughts and decided that they don’t want to be associated with her. As it is their right.

How do you know that your reading is right and mine is wrong?

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

#300

Post by mjlawson »

coffeemug wrote: post #246
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..…

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…

> 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.

Wait, what? No he doesn't. "Free speech" isn't in the quote you pulled from, nor was it in the quote that Ken was responding to. The Times started by saying that there was a "fundamental right" to speak your mind without fear of reprisal. That's pure hogwash.

As I understand the history of the United States, I can't recall a single time where the cultural environment you've described existed. It might be an ideal, but we've never even been close to it. There's always been public backlash for unpopular opinions.

But again, we're getting distracted from the larger point, which is that was a _horrible_ piece by The Times.

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