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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

#311

Post by fleddr »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #9

Cancel culture happens because it works, and it not even be true. Until businesses, universities, and institutions say no to the digital mob, it will continue.

You got downvoted, but I think it's an excellent insight that gets to the heart of the matter.

You can't stop mobs from forming or trying to do damage, but for sure we can attempt to shield society from it.

Businesses should learn to not panic when a mob calls for the firing of an employee. Often it's done in a blackmail scenario: I will stop using your products if you don't comply.

They didn't use your products in the first place, and if they did, they won't stop using them in numbers. The economic threat is a bluff. Call the bluff. Nothing happens. Then, just wait out the mob as they get impatient and move on to the next target. Stand like an oak, not like a twig in the wind. Don't let a bunch of weird anime avatars tell you how to run your business.

As this return of sanity will not magically happen, I would support legislation to offer employees some reasonable protection from mob terminations.

Universities are perhaps the hardest to fix. Students needs to be taught to be resilient, open to opposing points of view, understand the concept of a zeitgeist and stop seeing being offended as the end of the world.

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

#312

Post by lliamander »

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, early in our history America ostracized the Mormons, but could you imagine doing it now? And they're not even close to a majority.

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

#313

Post by _-david-_ »

WesternWind wrote: post #289
rayiner wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think both you and Ken and the New York Times are getting tripped up by the phrase "free speech." What the New York Times is actually talking about is "ideological pluralism." When elderly Millennials like me were growing up, you could have--at least in educated circles--a broad range of heterodox opinions without anyone getting too upset about what you said. And that's just not true anymore. I've got in trouble wi…

The thing is, we do carefully scrutinize refugees, very carefully. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kyleblaine/some-things-... Saying we need to do so very carefully is implicitly suggesting that that's not currently the case, and that does absolutely feed into racism against MENA/South Asian people and Islamophobia.

The person you are responding to was talking about the Afghan refugees from the Afghanistan pull out. Those refugees do not appear to have been carefully scrutinized, at least not at the same level has past Middle Eastern refugees.

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

#314

Post by rootusrootus »

mrjangles wrote: post #259
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..…

Yeah that's a good point. There is not a single person complaining about cancel culture today that wouldn't immediately join the snarling mob and try to cancel someone that argued something like "we should rape 1 year olds" or something like that, for example. If we kept the arguments to "It is wrong to hate people just for holding the same opinion as 50% of the population", or "Hating someone for making a joke is wr…

> there are a large body of people who literally hate and want to destroy the lives of half the people

The worst part, of course, is that 'large body' is pretty close to 100%. It's mutually assured destruction, and working.

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

#315

Post by analog31 »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #290
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…

>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. But doesn't this cut both way…

The surface area isn't always all that big. The student's essay, cited in the article, had to do with comments she made within the walls of a college classroom. And I think that essay (if I didn't mix it up with another one) talked about students getting lambasted on social media for their comments in class.

I think among the action items that TFA suggests for discussion, another could be: "What happens in class stays in class." If a student needs to be called out for egregious behavior, that can be handled by the teacher.

Also, things like electronically submitted essays and papers need to be deleted from any kind of server or database once the class is finished.

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

#317

Post by baud147258 »

> employees often express fears [...] that it’s easy to win a sexual harassment case, both propaganda-driven perceptions that are demonstrably untrue.

I don't think winning or loosing the case is what [males] employees are worried about, more about getting fired and blacklisted by an entire industry at the first rumor "something" happened

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

#318

Post by [deleted] »

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..…

[deleted]

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

#319

Post by otterley »

rootusrootus wrote: post #305
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…

> unnecessarily upsetting them That's just the first half good advice. Don't be a jerk when you talk, don't be a jerk when you listen. Don't try to offend people unnecessarily, and don't be offended unnecessarily. As soon as you decided that the only metric which matters is when someone is unnecessarily upset, offended, or whatever, everything was lost. In that case nobody can say anything .

That unfairly burdens the target of the joke. And if you take pains not to offend your work colleagues, then the "don't be offended unnecessarily" half is far less likely to be an issue.

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

#320

Post by temp8964 »

This is a stupid essay. Yes, we never had such legal right, but when we say “right(s)” it rarely means in exact legal terms, unless the article is published on a legal journal.

There are problems with the NYT essay, but this is not one.

In a good faith discussion, we should assume the other side’s statement can be interpreted in a common sense way, not a radically ridiculous way.

Ever heard of someone says “you have no right to talk to me like this!” Do you think this person is making a legal argument?

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