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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

#351

Post by hexane360 »

akhmatova wrote: post #221

This is sheer nonsense from the jump. 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 mig…

For it to not be nonsense, you need to explain:

a) How it's possible, even hypothetically for citizens to simultaneously have both "the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public" and "without fear of being shamed or shunned". The two are contradictory.

b) How that superposition is "a fundamental right as citizens of a free country", which Americans once had but are losing.

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

#352

Post by BurningFrog »

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…

In reality, it's not the poor unprivileged who rise up and cancel people who broke some norm.

It's by and large highly educated white people, attacking other highly educated white people.

Which looks a lot a cutthroat social status game among highly educated white people.

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

#353

Post by refurb »

jandrese wrote: post #306
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…

> Spouting sheer idiocy can (and should) get you shunned and shamed This is where the modern world has an issue. The window of what is considered beyond the pale has grown quite a big larger than it was in the past. In the old days you would never hear the President of the US repeating obviously fabricated insane conspiracy theories.

In the old days you would never hear the President of the US repeating obviously fabricated insane conspiracy theories.

You must be a youngster because yeah, that did happened in the old days.

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

#354

Post by Natsu »

tptacek wrote: post #282
Natsu wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That... sounds a lot like feuding to me, but whatever. I'm not going to defend Clark.

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

#355

Post by krapp »

Banana699 wrote: post #270
krapp wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Donald Trump? Although that depends on what you mean by "successfully" cancelled. Plenty of politicians and celebrities have been cancelled for racist, sexist and otherwise abusive behavior, but I don't know what your line for "genuinely" powerful is, either.

>Donald Trump Trump was banned from twitter after he already lost the presidency, and banning from a mediocre low-IQ forum is not how most cancel culture opponents define it, the dominant conception has an essential material aspect to it, such as firing from a job, harassment or extra-legal violence. >Plenty of politicians and celebrities have been cancelled for racist, sexist and otherwise abusive behavior, but I do…

>Trump was banned from twitter after he already lost the presidency, and banning from a mediocre low-IQ forum is not how most cancel culture opponents define it, the dominant conception has an essential material aspect to it, such as firing from a job, harassment or extra-legal violence.

Opponents of cancel culture absolutely considered Donald Trump to be a victim of it. They still hold him up as an example of cancel culture being more powerful than the sovereignty of states, arbitrarily able to remove the political power of even a sitting President at a whim, because they also argue that social media companies hold monopoly control over the majority of human communication, so being banned from them is equivalent to being erased from modern society.

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

#356

Post by civilized »

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 like the thrust of your and Ken's post overall, but I think this misses the mark:

> To be free of shame or shunning is to be free of other people's speech. If you're saying something provocative, you are almost certainly responding in a sense to something someone else said; if you think you have the right to speak without shame or shunning, so does the person you're effectively responding to.

While it's true that almost anything you might say contradicts something that someone else has said before, it's not the case that anything you might say, even something provocative, encourages shaming or shunning of that previous speaker, or really harms or threatens them in any way.*

No one is advocating for the "right" to speak without any response. They're advocating for the liberal norm that one can speak freely without disproportionate shaming and ostracism.

*And there's the rub. Anyone can claim to have been horribly harmed, shamed, or excluded by something a speaker said, which then justifies retaliatory harm, shame, or exclusion against that speaker. We can't get away from adjudicating these claims of harm if we want to have a healthy culture. No abstract system of rules and rights will suffice.

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

#357

Post by Misdicorl »

lliamander wrote: post #336
Misdicorl wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even left wing dominated cities have large numbers of right wing constituents. There are more registered Republicans in NYC than live in the entire state of Wyoming. Right wing cancel culture are lynch mobs and the literal bombing of an American city and the imprisonment of an unconscionable number of black males. While I agree the power is waning, saying that it isn't on par with a few people losing their jobs due t…

> Even left wing dominated cities have large numbers of right wing constituents. To think this is the cause of police brutality is a stretch to put it mildly. > Right wing cancel culture are lynch mobs and the literal bombing of an American city and the imprisonment of an unconscionable number of black males. Again with the random grab of different grievances. None of these are relevant to this conversation, but expl…

Sure. Explain selective enforcement of drug policy and the subsequent imprisonment of a huge fraction of Americans who happen to be black on those charges. How does that not fall under "silencing people the right do not like".

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

#358

Post by TameAntelope »

Banana699 wrote: post #339
TameAntelope wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any sufficiently selective style guide is indistinguishable from a censor. Completely disagree. Censorship is the prohibition of the expression of certain ideas, not the prohibition of the expression of specific language. > "You can say whatever you like, just in ways we like (which will sometimes include you shutting up entirely)" The parenthetical is a strawman, and not what I said, nor is it true.

>Censorship is the prohibition of the expression of certain ideas, not the prohibition of the expression of specific language You completely missed the point, the "selective" part is doing most of the work. By having a vague and ill-defined rulebook that nobody but an ideologically homogeneous group of people can invoke and enforce, this group acts as a censor that selectively switches on and off certain expressions…

You are not any less capable of writing quality software if you are prohibited from using specific programming languages, I don’t think that analogy helps you as much as you think.

Let’s stop being abstract; what idea is not expressable except in a way that results in effective cancellation?

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

#359

Post by vorpalhex »

BurningFrog wrote: post #352
otterley wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In reality, it's not the poor unprivileged who rise up and cancel people who broke some norm. It's by and large highly educated white people, attacking other highly educated white people. Which looks a lot a cutthroat social status game among highly educated white people.

This is the answer.

The cut throat cancel culture group can be divided into three categories. The people who use it as a tool for control, the people who embrace it as a form of group identity, and the well-meaning folks supporting the above two.

The group identity, dominance fighting group is probably the largest group. The well-meaning folk seem to either graduate up or wash out.

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

#360

Post by gilbetron »

jimbokun wrote: post #82
ashtonkem wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As you point out, while boycotting someone based on your perception of their opinion is not new, the modality of mass mob boycotts of individuals over things potentially taken out of context is entirely new. … One other thing that's new, in America, is the idea that speech is less important than people's feelings. They used to kill people for advocating for integration and civil rights. Actual mobs used to assemble…

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.

If you were white, straight, cis, and particularly male, then this is true. Everyone else, eh not so much!
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