Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by ouid » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 12:32 AM UTC

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 that the problem is cancel culture per se. The problem is how internet identity works. If you attach a real identity to the things you say online, you have a social credit score. Hell, even if you don't attach a real identity to these things, you will very likely not say things that you think are correct, but unpopular, even if you are prepared to defend you position ad nauseam. And you will avoid saying them out of fear of downvotes.

The problem gets much worse if your karma is a thing that you are obligated to attach to your real identity to.

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

#362

Post by pram » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 12:32 AM UTC

DangitBobby wrote: post #302

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…

I think religious beliefs largely underly payment processors' refusal to do business with porn websites, wouldn't you agree? If it weren't for Christian beliefs, advertisers wouldn't be worried about being associated with porn and payment processors wouldn't either. That's the first example that came to my head, but I'm sure there are many, many such examples of the right having true social power to eliminate speech…

Merchants don’t like porn because it’s high risk: tons of fraud and chargebacks

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

#363

Post by tptacek » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 12:32 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #287

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…

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),…

I don't understand why you're so fixated on the partisan angle here. Both right-wing and left-wing Twitter engages, viciously, in "cancellation" behavior. How is it helping us understand the phenomenon to digress into whether liberals are paternalistic towards working class people? The thread you're writing on is rooted in a comment saying that Ken White doesn't purport to have figured out the whole "cancel culture" problem, but rather simply rebuts an NYT editorial that you yourself think is sloppy and poorly written. Nevertheless, here you are, proposing what seems to be a unified field theory of toxic political behavior: it's "paternalism", apparently.

This is weak. You have stuff to say. Say it, don't just barb people.

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

#364

Post by rayiner » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 12:34 AM UTC

coffeecat wrote: post #332

enraged_camel wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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? ... 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. As another "brown guy" who has been in the US for decades, I can on…

What are some examples of jokes/bullying that you've encountered?

I'm sure you meant this out of genuine curiosity, but it comes across as a bit "prove it." The fact is that people have a broad range of experiences. Speaking of "brown people," 10% of e.g. Indian Americans say that racism is a "major problem" in America: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/16/miss-americ....

But 48% think it's a "minor problem" and 38% who think it's "not a problem at all." At the end of the day our social norms around race have to be broadly workable. Gearing our social norms around the 10% are not cost-free. The folks directly affected those norms may well be more worried about stifling friendships and interactions than about racism. It's like having your immune system--too sensitive isn't good either.

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

#365

Post by akhmatova » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 12:36 AM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #343

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…

> 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. This is so disconnected with…

No post body was provided.

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

#366

Post by da39a3ee » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 12:36 AM UTC

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..…

It depends on the subject. I don't have the right to deny racial equality without fear of being shamed or shunned. But I certainly have the right to point out that transgender biological males aren't women in the normal sense and don't match many people's definitions of the word "woman" without fear of being shamed or shunned.

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

#367

Post by slibhb » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 12:40 AM UTC

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..…

If someone said "we have a right to food and housing," would you call them "batshit insane"? While I agree that we don't have a right "speak [our] minds and voice [our] opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned," you (and the author) are adopting a style of argument where certain positions are subjected to intense scrutiny. The first paragraph of the NYT op-ed doesn't stand up under that scrutiny but the rest of it does, more or less.

The blog just gets weird:

> It’s good that the Times is worried about speech-suppressing laws promoted by some conservatives, but it’s terrible that the Times is gullibly accepting the Right’s deeply dishonest assertion that it doesn’t engage in the sort of behavior it calls “cancel culture.” There is no serious argument that conservatives refrain from “cancel culture.”

Which part of the following quote from the op-ed claims that conservatives "refrain from cancel culture"?

> How has this happened? In large part, it’s because the political left and the right are caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture. Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech. Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.

None of it! It says that conservatives have taken cancel culture further.

The author is worried that agreeing that cancel culture is a problem will help the right. But he does agree, so he does his agreeing in a roundabout way while heaping scorn on the op-ed. The overall effect is unpleasant.

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

#368

Post by akhmatova » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 12:42 AM UTC

refurb wrote: post #353

jandrese wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Scale matters. And in terms of sheer magnitude of insanity and frequency of its emission -- no one who has held that office can hold a candle to number 45.

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

#369

Post by Banana699 » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 12:42 AM UTC

krapp wrote: post #355

Banana699 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>Opponents of cancel culture absolutely considered Donald Trump to be a victim of it.

I have no doubt you can find some opponents of cancel culture who believe that to be true, the point is whether this is a meaningful or influential subset next to the vast majority that believes that it's the material harm of mob action that makes the practice barbaric and harmful.

>they also argue that social media companies hold monopoly control over the majority of human communication

This is an objective fact by all reasonable measures of the words "monopoly" and "majority". Are you saying this to support their argument or to contradict it?

>being banned from them is equivalent to being erased from modern society.

"Erased" is a bit of a strong word, being banned from social media is probably for the better interests of the banned person's mental health and IQ. But it does amount to silencing, the oft-repeated example here is how telephony companies and mobile providers can't censor or degrade the service according to the content that users share across their networks. I have never seen a convincing argument for why social media is any different than mobile phones such that this doesn't hold.

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

#370

Post by tptacek » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 12:43 AM UTC

slibhb wrote: post #367

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..…

If someone said "we have a right to food and housing," would you call them "batshit insane"? While I agree that we don't have a right "speak [our] minds and voice [our] opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned," you (and the author) are adopting a style of argument where certain positions are subjected to intense scrutiny. The first paragraph of the NYT op-ed doesn't stand up under that scrutiny but…

You don't in fact have a right to food and housing. But a right to food and housing would be a coherent proposition; you could design such a right (within obvious limits). You can't do that with the proposition that people have a right to speech without fear of shame or shunning; like, the logic itself literally doesn't work. You could simply shut down anyone's objectionable political speech by saying that it is shaming or shunning; they could respond in kind. Again: this is what White is saying with his "First Speaker Problem".

I don't think you've very effectively rebutted his argument here.