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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

#421

Post by tptacek »

gjm11 wrote: post #399
tptacek wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

I'm not interested in rehabilitating Pinker, who appeared in Epstein's flight logs and has been photographed socializing with him. My point is simply that he tends to be a bad example when brought up in these kinds of discussions. He's treated as if he's simply a celebrity scientist caught in the limelight over political tweets. But he's not just that.

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

#422

Post by tptacek »

rayiner wrote: post #418
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"…

“Right-wing cancel culture” is a well understood, world-wide phenomenon. To use the example in your other post, people try to blockade abortion clinics because certain religious people understand those clinics to be engaged in mass murder. Or to use another example people freak out over cartoons of Mohammad because it’s a grave offense in Islam. That is what it is. I talk about left-wing cancel culture because it’s a…

Sure. But all we're establishing here is that everybody is hostile to ideological pluralism. That shouldn't surprise us. We live in a hyperpolarized society (and that's not the fault of "cancel culture", but rather preceded it by over 50 years, surviving multiple zeitgeist shifts in the interim, from the defeated cynicism of the post-Nixon 70s through the Reagan years and the post-9/11 culture of nationalism that got the Dixie Chicks and Bill Maher cancelled.) In a hyperpolarized society, countervailing ideologies are perceived as threatening. That's just human nature, isn't it?

So where does that leave us? Is your point that it's disappointing to you that the left is now as responsible for ideological hostility as the right? Because the left has always been just as hostile as the right.

(I was frustrated with your previous comment, but am not with this one; I'm just responding to it because you took the time to write it.)

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

#424

Post by coffeecat »

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.

> The window of what is considered beyond the pale has grown quite a big larger than it was in the past.

I'd say it's worse than that. Our information diets are so heterogeneous, that with respect to certain topics, it's plausible that two people might have non-overlapping windows of what they consider reasonable/plausible, and of what they consider totally bat-shit insane. e.g., your uncle's views on climate change fall into your bat-shit insane window, and your views on climate change fall into your uncle's bat-shit insane window.

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

#425

Post by RangerScience »

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.

> But I certainly have the right to point out that transgender biological males aren't

I... don't think you do, actually. I would argue that you should be able to start a conversation about the differences between trans women and cis women without that fear, but that's a) rather different than "pointing out" and b) highly dependent on how you go about that (and c), not a right, legally or morally).

It's akin to me going "your comment shows you to be an asshole" and me going "hey I'd like to talk to you about how you said that so you can say it without pissing people off."

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

#426

Post by coffeemug »

tptacek wrote: post #400
coffeemug wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did, and I still don't understand why it's a necessary abstraction. As I said, 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. That's the whole point of liberal order-- equal justice under the law.

Nobody is trying to get responders to shut up. They're trying to stop responders from shutting up the initiators. The distinction between the two is that the latter is usually qualitatively escalatory.

Alice makes a joke on Twitter, but rather than respond on Twitter Bob calls her employer. Alice schedules a talk at a university, but rather than scheduling a rebuttal Bob calls the university demanding to cancel the talk. Alice writes an op-ed, Bob publishes her address.

Both are speech, but a cultural norm of escalation makes the culture a pretty awful place to live.

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

#427

Post by oh_sigh »

olivermarks wrote: post #405
remarkEon wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

@oh_sigh It's completely irrelevant whether other nation states have a 'huge' or small far right wing neo nazi problem. The Ukranian oligarch Kolomoyskyi is behind the current Ukranian leader's media and political rise and is also a major funder of neo nazi 'battalions'. The Ukranian media was just 'unified' to be one voice (ie far right autocrats now control all their state media). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ihor…

Why is a Jew giving neo Nazis money, and why are neo Nazis taking Jewish money? Do they not hate Jews as a central tenet now? Shouldn't be be afraid they'll just kill him?

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

#428

Post by RangerScience »

coffeemug wrote: post #426
tptacek wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did, and I still don't understand why it's a necessary abstraction. As I said, 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. That's the whole point of liberal order-- equal justice under the law. Nobody is trying to get responders to shut up. They're trying to stop responders from shutting up the initiators. The distin…

Ken's idea of "First Speaker Problem" is that you're giving Alice additional rights/consideration/privileges when you apply the abstraction of "initiator" and "responder", rather apply the "speaker" abstraction equally to everyone, and that that different is a Problem.

FSP isn't an abstraction, it's a named bug.

Everything else you're saying is just Ken's point about proportionate response.

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

#429

Post by jimbokun »

tptacek wrote: post #209
noduerme wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was, for many of us, our ability to be heard . Our ability to speak was not hindered by fear of having our lives ruined for holding an unpopular opinion or asking an incorrectly phrased question.

The most common battlefield on which these "cancellation" debates happen is people's access to Twitter, a service that did not exist in the 1990s (you could, obviously, get banned off a BBS for any or no reason). You see it in this very thread: people writing appeals to the amount of control tech companies have over speech, and how unprecedented that is.

Another commonly cited consequence of cancel culture is losing your job or ability to earn money.

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

#430

Post by tootie »

olivermarks wrote: post #229
tootie wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taibbi has mostly torpedoed his credibility with Russian apoligism. Him and Glenn Greenwald.

Strongly disagree. Taibbi & Greenwald along with Michael Tracey (who is currently in Poland on the Ukranian border) are some of the few independent journalists with the cojones to take on the establishment, who spend a huge amount of time smearing and discrediting them because they are impartial and provide invaluable commentary on all sides.

They exist to be contrarian. Taking on the MSM is an end into itself and when the MSM is exactly right they'll just go be wrong. There's no shortage of fact-based independent journalism. Try emptywheel on Twitter.
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