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

#391

Post by lliamander » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:10 AM UTC

rootusrootus wrote: post #340

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…

> that power has arguably been gone That must be situational. In my circle of family and friends, religion is still extremely powerful . Even to the point where I demur when the topic of religion even looks like it could be discussed. I "pray" right along with everyone else at the dinner table at family gatherings. And even on a national stage -- how many politicians will admit to being non-religious? There is still…

> That must be situational. In my circle of family and friends, religion is still extremely powerful. Even to the point where I demur when the topic of religion even looks like it could be discussed. I "pray" right along with everyone else at the dinner table at family gatherings

You sound like me with my Woke extended family :)

Of course the influence of one's community will always be powerful. What's novel about the present situation is how much a bunch of randos on the internet can ruin your life.

> And even on a national stage -- how many politicians will admit to being non-religious? There is still a tremendous amount of social power from the right.

So perhaps not totally gone, but it's influence is greatly diminished from where it was a generation ago.

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

#392

Post by tptacek » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:11 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…

Y'all, he's on to us: https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1506430395847307265

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

#393

Post by librish » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:11 AM UTC

akhmatova wrote: post #365

ashtonkem wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Quoted post unavailable.

It was a fine argument that you completely avoided responding to.

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

#394

Post by tptacek » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:12 AM UTC

coffeemug wrote: post #390

tptacek wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it's obviously not. The abortion example is especially funny, seeing as how people at abortion clinics frequently need armed guards to go to work.

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

#395

Post by mbrodersen » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:12 AM UTC

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…

What you are suggesting is impossible in practice. It is impossible to not accidentally upset somebody no matter what you say. Unless what you say is so meaningless and vanilla that you might as well not have said anything. We would have to ban all jokes, all political opinions, all scientific discoveries (because religious people might be upset), all expressions of art etc. That is impossible.

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

#396

Post by mbrodersen » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:15 AM UTC

It is impossible to not accidentally upset somebody no matter what you say. Unless what you say is so meaningless and vanilla that you might as well not have said anything. We would have to ban all jokes, all political opinions, all scientific discoveries (because some religious people might be upset), all religions, all expressions of art etc. That is impossible to do in practice.

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

#397

Post by ouid » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:16 AM UTC

RangerScience wrote: post #387

ouid wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not the formalization, because it isn't formalized, but definitely the consolidation, and the emphasis on linking all of your accounts.

For my own part, I have deleted every reddit account that I have ever made in which I felt that I had become attached to my karma. I just rebuild from scratch when that happens. I hate being afraid of saying things. It helps a lot, but I also don't participate in any of the real identity emphasized social media outlets.

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

#398

Post by whiddershins » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:16 AM UTC

Jensson wrote: post #249

cgrealy wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> narrowing of speech will come for those who believe themselves immune. True, but on other hand, history has shown us the Paradox of Tolerance. "Liberals" have learned this lesson. When I was growing up, people who I would consider socially liberal generally supported the "I disagree with what you say, but will defend your right to say it" position. These days, the same people are less confident. I'm one of them. I…

> I want a free and open society where people can discuss ideas and those ideas are weighed on their merits and the ridiculous ones (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc) are laughed at. > But that's not what's happened. The Overton Window in the US has dramatically shifted. Any evidence for this? To me it seems like things went in the right direction and never really stopped. That things are getting worse and therefore w…

You miss the concept that gay marriage was controversial. Obama was against it. Therefore if that debate was held in the current environment proponents of gay marriage might be silenced and banned

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

#399

Post by gjm11 » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:18 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #279

jollybean wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Steven Pinker (it's Steven, not Stephen) wrote a letter that helped obtain for Jeffrey Epstein an 18-month sentence for child sex trafficking in which his cell was kept unlocked and he was allowed to leave the prison for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, to work from his own office. My point here being: maybe Pinker isn't the example you want to call out here; maybe we can argue about somebody with perhaps fewer reasons…

Alan Dershowitz wrote to Pinker asking "do you reckon this statute means X or Y?" and Pinker said "It obviously means X". So far as I can tell, (1) Pinker didn't know that this was specifically about the Epstein case, (2) Pinker gave an honest answer to the question, and (3) Pinker's answer was in fact obviously correct.

Epstein was an awful person who did awful things and should have spent the rest of his life in prison. But that doesn't mean that every specific attempt to put him in prison was legally sound, and it doesn't mean that anyone whose actions contributed to that specific attempt's failure is somehow complicit in Epstein's evils.

It seems to me that it's a positively good thing that when someone is accused of something awful, they can still get vigorous legal representation, and that the people providing that vigorous legal representation can solicit opinions from experts that they hope will back them up. Because 1. sometimes people who are accused of awful things turn out not to have done them, and 2. when they did do them we want the legal proceedings establishing that they did to be as watertight as possible.

In this particular case, the issue wasn't "did Epstein do X or not?" but "are the things Epstein did covered by this specific law or not?". It seems that they weren't. Again, I think it's a positively good thing that when someone is accused of something awful we only get to use a law against them if that law really covers what they did. Because if there isn't a general principle that you only get punished for things that are actually against the actual law then what we have isn't laws, it's excuses for the powerful to punish whoever they feel like punishing.

To be clear, it looks as fishy as all hell to me that Epstein didn't get a much harsher sentence in the 2006-2008 case. It looks, in fact, like some sort of corruption or cover-up. But in that case, I don't see how Pinker's letter had anything much to do with it. And, again, so far as I can tell what Pinker wrote was simply correct, and when he wrote it he didn't know it was for Epstein's case.

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

#400

Post by tptacek » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 1:18 AM UTC

coffeemug wrote: post #388

RangerScience wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps you should spend some time thinking about the distinction he's making before trying to take the piece apart based on an abstraction he's not talking about.