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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

#371

Post by tptacek »

da39a3ee wrote: post #366
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 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.

If you say repulsive things, lots of very qualified, valuable engineers are going to exercise their right to free association to avoid working with you. There is no cure for that problem that doesn't eliminate the right to free association (or worse). If you're odious, you can't make people work with you. And you don't get to decide what other people find odious.

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

#372

Post by [deleted] »

lliamander wrote: post #312
Gimpei wrote: post #129

The problem with the debate on "cancel culture" is a lack of specificity. The fact is that there are certain occasions where "canceling" seems fine, and others, where it does not. And I think a problem with the progressive argument is the refusal to acknowledge that there can ever be any excesses. For example, there is the case of Dorian Abbot, who was disinvited from an MIT lecture after he wrote an op-ed criticizin…

> I think it's also significant that 73% of the US population agrees with Abbot I think that's an essential part of the problem: the fact that the views being penalized are (generally) widely held. From a purely practical standpoint it seems foolish. It's possible to ostracize a group of people for their beliefs when the group is small, but completely impractical if that belief gains any sort of traction. I mean, ear…

[deleted]

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

#373

Post by refurb »

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..…

You’re taking the use of the word “right” to literally in this instance.

The editorial is using it in the sense when someone says “i have the right to not have my house egged by teens”. It’s more the a reference to the ideal world than some right codified in the Constitution.

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

#374

Post by tptacek »

rayiner wrote: post #364
coffeecat wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's your point, Rayiner? What are we meant to do with the observation that Indian Americans generally feel like racism is not a major problem?

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

#375

Post by kibwen »

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…

> at worst, what you're asking for is totally incoherent.

It was an eye-opening experience to realize that I was taken egalitarianism as a given. I, too, couldn't help but see people who were simultaneously demanding the right to speak while also demanding that others should be denied the right to speak out against their original speech. I dismissed these people as irrational hypocrites. But eventually I realized that they weren't hypocrites, their philosophy is entirely consistent. I was implicitly assuming that they valued egalitarianism, but this was a mistake on my part. When these people beat the drum of free speech, they're referring only to their own rights. They aren't interested in granting rights to others. With such people, any appeal to "natural rights" is not intended to be reciprocal: you should be obligated to give them rights, but they should not be obligated to give you rights. They have managed to solve the ethical dilemma of "if people have the freedom to swing their fist and the freedom to not be punched in the face, what happens when someone swings their fist into your face?"; rather than arriving at the egalitarian solution of making some freedoms subservient to other freedoms, they have arrived at the classist solution of making some people subservient to other people. It's entirely coherent. Terrible, but coherent.

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

#376

Post by refurb »

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.

It was never about race, it was always about politics and power.

If you can shut down your political opponents under the guise of social justice all the better.

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

#378

Post by Banana699 »

TameAntelope wrote: post #358
Banana699 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

>You are not any less capable of writing quality software if you are prohibited from using specific programming languages

Are you implying that it's possible to write an efficient OS in a language other than the likes of C/C++/Rust? Do mention an example.

>what idea is not expressable except in a way that results in effective cancellation?

- A lot of Transgender people are teenagers with mental health adopting the identity for attention and validation, with gross bodily harm as a result

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

#379

Post by RangerScience »

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, I think your points are well made and articulated. I particularly like your term "struggle session".

Second, I think you're missing what Ken called the "First Speaker Problem" (which IMHO is one of the most important parts of Ken's thinking)

> "We want to live in a culture where a joke on the internet doesn't lead to a struggle session at work"

The implication I'm hearing in those word is that the "first speaker" shouldn't be thrust into a struggle session at work for their speech; what I'm not hearing (although your literal words would cover this situation, so maybe I'm mishearing) is consideration into if the joke (or other statement) thrusts someone else into a struggle session at work.

IMHO, to re-use your words; it isn't batshit insane, it isn't gobsmackingly wrong, and it isn't that difficult to understand - whatever principles you want to apply to the responders to the apparent "First Speaker" should also be applied to the "First Speaker" as if they are themselves a responder. (If only because, I'd argue, they are meaningfully actually a responder themselves)

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

#380

Post by akhmatova »

hexane360 wrote: post #351
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.

As for a) - "nuance".

As or b) - I don't see that there's some kind of grand superposition of opposites at play here like you do, so I'll largely pass. But more broadly: it seems beyond dispute that the the broader climate of public discourse has become more constrained and fear-driven in recent years. Not as bad as it's ever been, or compared to what certain groups have gone through. But compared to 20 or 30 years ago -- the mainstream climate has definitely deteriorated.

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