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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

#381

Post by remarkEon »

oh_sigh wrote: post #337
olivermarks wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd suggest that openly discussing the fact that Ukraine has a huge neo nazi problem is responsible reporting. I'm frankly surprised the many BBC and other documentaries on this huge problem from the last few years have not been removed from youtube given the sudden transformation of Ukraine into white hats in the current 'western'. This is why I read Taibbi, because the legacy media has lost so much credibility. (It…

Can you quantify "huge" for me? Is it bigger than the neo-nazi problem in Russia, or the US?

It's "neo-nazi infantry battalion is fully integrated into the state security apparatus" big, or "Hero of Ukraine award given to antisemite and Nazi-collaborator" big.

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

#382

Post by RangerScience »

lliamander wrote: post #262
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..…

I can't find the quote, but Norman Rockwell said that the inspiration for his Freedom of Speech painting was a town hall he attended where a man not much liked by the community was allowed to speak his piece, even when the people did not like what he had to say. I'm not arguing we shouldn't be able to shame or shun (the NYT itself would be my preferred target). I think the idea is that we should aspire to resolving o…

> What we have now

But this isn't a new thing, not even a little bit. The House Unamerican Committee, and anti-abolitionists (as in slavery) are both examples of exactly this from history. Arguably, worse and more extreme because of all the, you know, death and murder.

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

#383

Post by carapace »

In re: "Cancel Culture" I think it's important to remember the context: "cancelling" used to mean getting beaten up or even murdered, not for saying something stupid but just for existing and being, say, black or gay. Now you get fired for saying something stupid. What I'm getting at is, if you stand back and take a broad-minded view of things, today's "cancel culture", as bad as it is, is progress.

The question now is, can we re-assert our common, shared values in re: free speech without backsliding into queer-bashing and lynching? Framed that way it seems kind of a no-brainer, right?

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

#384

Post by dools »

dataangel wrote: post #104
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…

I'm not convinced that history is just repeating itself. There does seem to be something qualitatively different about the possibility that nowadays a non-celebrity can spout an offensive joke or political take and have it be much more likely to be recorded and broadcast to the whole world with permanent consequences for them everywhere they go. Bad decisions are far more likely nowadays to be permanently recorded, a…

> There does seem to be something qualitatively different about the possibility that nowadays a non-celebrity can spout an offensive joke or political take and have it be much more likely to be recorded and broadcast to the whole world with permanent consequences for them everywhere they go

Just don’t do it on Twitter.

Or any social media for that matter. The only difference is that people hadn’t learned yet about vitality and the truth is the statement that “in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”

You can still make all the crass offensive jokes you want around your friends.

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

#385

Post by [deleted] »

throwawaygh wrote: post #251
zdragnar wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Shaming and shunning can easily be considered harassment in the right context Shunning is never harassment. Shaming could be, but not on its own -- it would probably have to be either extraordinarily sustained/egregious and/or paired with credible threats to person or property. Even emergent behavior that has the same effect as blatant harassment isn't harassment. I.e., sending one person 10K letters, some of which…

[deleted]

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

#386

Post by [deleted] »

kibwen wrote: post #375
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 tha…

[deleted]

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

#387

Post by RangerScience »

ouid wrote: post #361
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 sayin…

Do you think the problem arises because of the formalization of the social credit score (it existed prior to this, just in a non-quantified way), and/or the accessibility of that score to people who aren't in your community?

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

#388

Post by coffeemug »

RangerScience wrote: post #379
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…

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 speak…

I don't understand the "first speaker" problem, or why this abstraction is necessary. You shouldn't be thrust into a struggle session at work independent of when you entered the conversation or whether you entered into it at all.

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

#389

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#390

Post by coffeemug »

tptacek wrote: post #363
rayiner wrote: post #287

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? 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"…

Cancellation is primarily a radical leftist domain. For example, pro-abortion speakers don't normally need police escorts to speak at a university. It's not true that both wings engage in the behavior equally. There are many problems with radical right, but canceling people isn't one of them.
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