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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

#441

Post by jimbokun »

joshuamorton wrote: post #192
jimbokun wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For people to stop calling it "cancel culture" whenever they face reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others would be a good start. Someone having an opinion different than you does not cause you harm. This is the Big Lie underlying a lot of the rhetoric that has been labeled "cancel culture". The potential harm at shutting down the opportunity to find out you were wrong about something by heari…

How do you draw a distinction between writing an NYT op-ed to, say, support same-sex marriage, voting for a candidate who supports same sex marriage, and signing a bill to allow same-sex marriage? In every case you're "just" writing something down. When does one cross the line from "just" sharing an opinion, to advocacy for that opinion to political action on favor of a policy? Phrased differently, if someone advocat…

Then debate them, run against them or campaign for politicians that will prevent or change those policies.

Which is exactly how same sex marriage came to have such broad support, by the way. Andrew Sullivan in particular tirelessly made the case for same sex marriage, including to exactly the kind of people you describe, and changed many minds.

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

#442

Post by joshuamorton »

Jensson wrote: post #438
joshuamorton wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you draw a distinction between writing an NYT op-ed to, say, support same-sex marriage, voting for a candidate who supports same sex marriage, and signing a bill to allow same-sex marriage? In every case you're "just" writing something down. When does one cross the line from "just" sharing an opinion, to advocacy for that opinion to political action on favor of a policy? Phrased differently, if someone advocat…

> Phrased differently, if someone advocates for a policy that I believe will be harmful, why should I treat that differently than a stated intent to harm me? For the same reason you shouldn't treat someone who wants to raise your taxes and give it to other people as if they intend to steal from you.

Isn't that generally a conservative opinion though, that taxation is theft?

Like the reason I don't object to taxes (in general) is because I think I get value from them, even in the redistribution sense. If someone proposed to raise taxes and give all the proceeds to Jeff Bezos, I would consider that a proposal to steal from me.

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

#443

Post by tptacek »

jimbokun wrote: post #429
tptacek wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure. And there are certainly disproportionate social and economical responses to speech, such as Colin Kaepernick finding himself unable to sign anywhere as a free agent after Donald Trump called for him to be fired for kneeling during the National Anthem, or David Shor losing his job at Civis Analytics after questioning the political effectiveness of violent riots protesting police misconduct. I'm sure if we dig, we can also find economic responses to speech that we'll agree aren't disproportionate.

The point isn't that these processes are never abused, or even that they're rarely abused. The point is that the problem we're trying to nail down isn't "there can be economic consequences for unpopular speech", but rather "there can be disproportionate consequences for speech". People on the right and the left are scrambling to find a simple bright-line rule, such as "speech should never cost you your job". But push to shove, almost nobody really believes that; we can all generally think of viewpoints you can loudly advocate for that will rightly make you difficult to employ.

I could write more, but I'd just be relaying my own personal beliefs about what speech is or isn't OK. Instead, I'll note that Ken White was pretty careful not to do that, or really to try to resolve this dilemma at all. Again: he's just pointing out that the NYT editorial's effort to resolve this was poorly reasoned, and itself a threat to free expression.

As for what I wrote upthread, I'm just pointing out: one major impetus for this debate is people losing their Twitter accounts. That seems germane, since you yourself brought up that one issue at play here is the enormous influence tech companies have on access to audiences for speech. My point was, of course, that the access you're talking about didn't exist at all as recently as 20 years ago. What access there was at the time was governed by... large corporations, who (for example) deplatformed Bill Maher when he questioned the orthodoxy around the moral weight of terrorism compared to US military interventions.

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

#444

Post by Jensson »

joshuamorton wrote: post #442
Jensson wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Phrased differently, if someone advocates for a policy that I believe will be harmful, why should I treat that differently than a stated intent to harm me? For the same reason you shouldn't treat someone who wants to raise your taxes and give it to other people as if they intend to steal from you.

Isn't that generally a conservative opinion though, that taxation is theft? Like the reason I don't object to taxes (in general) is because I think I get value from them, even in the redistribution sense. If someone proposed to raise taxes and give all the proceeds to Jeff Bezos, I would consider that a proposal to steal from me.

> Isn't that generally a conservative opinion though, that taxation is theft?

Yes, but you don't see conservatives fire outspoken democrats for thievery, or give them the ultimatum that either they acknowledge that taxation is theft or get fired. If conservatives did that then I would tell them to stop, say that what they are doing is against free speech ideals and if abuse got too bad I'd advocate for laws against it.

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

#445

Post by tootie »

LegitShady wrote: post #228
tootie wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

thats a personal opinion of yours. I put his credibility higher than most major news orgs I can think of.

He's really not a respectable person and he was dead wrong about Russia when major news orgs were dead on.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/matt-taibbis-not-so-secret-ru...

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

#446

Post by otterley »

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…

I think you're overcomplicating the issue. When you come from an underprivileged group with a lot of baggage to overcome to be as successful as others, having to tolerate mean-spirited jokes at work on top of all of that baggage is just another thing you have to deal with. It's depressing, dispiriting, and disheartening, and can interfere with one's ability to be productive.

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

#447

Post by jimbokun »

gilbetron wrote: post #360
jimbokun wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speech is far more free in the US today than in, say, the 1950s and 1960s. But I would argue less free than, say, the 1990s.

If you were white, straight, cis, and particularly male, then this is true. Everyone else, eh not so much!

“Fight the Power” rap groups were incredibly popular then, and enjoyed a lot of support across races.

The movement for same sex marriage started in earnest then.

Feminism didn’t start in the 2000s.

All of those groups had a lot to say in the 90s, and the norms protecting free speech enabled them to say it, even when it was unpopular.

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

#448

Post by olivermarks »

oh_sigh wrote: post #427
olivermarks wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@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?

A good question to ask - the answer is presumably that some Ukranian neo nazis are jewish

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

#449

Post by russellbeattie »

This whole debate is a result of Putin's 8+ year cyberwar on the US and the West. I re-watched Icarus last night and it all clicked. We've been duped. All of us. You can continue to play along like dopes, or start figuring out how to stamp out misinformation and what we can do to encourage regime change in Russia.

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

#450

Post by otterley »

mbrodersen wrote: post #395
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…

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.

Then how do millions of people manage to accomplish this every single day?

Also, statements like this come across as a justification for not even trying. I hope that's not what you intend.

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