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What it's like to be cancelled

noahbradley.com

341–350 of 613 posts

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not even sure what “pressure women into sex” is supposed to mean. Clearly some people categorize flirting as this, which is crazy to me.

It was his word choice, not mine. He's been accused of bright-line violations that his apology doesn't mention, for whatever that's worth. For instance: attempting to have sex with someone too intoxicated to give consent isn't merely "pressure"; it's rape. (I only know what everyone else who just found out about this drama today knows, from looking at Twitter threads and Wikipedia.)

If you read the story, it seems pretty clear that he went a little overboard with his self-loathing apology. Hence my comment.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#342

Twitter is vile. I thought that the day the company started, and never created an account; nothing good can come from a platform like Twitter. It's a failure of our laws that there's no recourse to this kind of libel, either against Twitter for basing their business model on it, or the individuals responsible for spreading it. Lives are consistently destroyed and everyone just shrugs their shoulders and goes "aw-shuc…

To be fair, the problem is less about the platform or the medium and the simple concept of optimizing for engagement. Regulate advertising to the point where it's less profitable than letting customers pay for services and suddenly the incentives to promote toxicity for engagement's sake disappears.

The problem absolutely is the platform and the medium, because it makes nuanced impossible by design.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#343

What he's supposed to have done: “I was terrible to women. I preyed on them. I ceaselessly hit on them. I pressured them into sex. I got too drunk and did all manner of dumb things.” None of which is illegal. It's not even a matter for civil litigation. He was not accused of doing this as a boss in an organization. Or in a workplace context. There were apparently no criminal charges. No EEOC complaints filed.[1] No a…

The original complaint claimed that he was a groper. That's sexual harassment. It's illegal. It's incredibly toxic and creepy , and people who do it are out of touch cretins who make everything worse. Citing that no one officially lodged a criminal complaint isn't a counterpoint. Most sexual assault isn't pursued. Serial creeps are plying their trade right now. But yeah, if he's associated with a brand and he's going…

> Citing that no one officially lodged a criminal complaint isn't a counterpoint. Most sexual assault isn't pursued.

Your argument here is that he's guilty until proven innocent.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#344

Earlier this year when Richard Stallman was re-instated to the Board of the FSF, there were a lot of tweets expressing dismay. To one of them, I replied that I personally don't think he has done anything wrong at all - and linked to a well-known article by a woman who defended him better than me. While I found some support among a few people, the amount of hate I received shook me a bit. People started adding me to l…

[flagged]

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was his word choice, not mine. He's been accused of bright-line violations that his apology doesn't mention, for whatever that's worth. For instance: attempting to have sex with someone too intoxicated to give consent isn't merely "pressure"; it's rape. (I only know what everyone else who just found out about this drama today knows, from looking at Twitter threads and Wikipedia.)

If you read the story, it seems pretty clear that he went a little overboard with his self-loathing apology. Hence my comment.

The apology was posted in the context of people accusing him of specific misconduct, which allegations he does not seem to have rebutted at the time. You can be charitable and describe the apology as "self-loathing", but his clients can also take the reasonable interpretation that he's admitting culpabilty.

Happy to have someone else dig into the Twitter threads of the time and refute me on this!

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#346
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Follow the links from his Wikipedia page and you can see Twitter threads where he responded directly to allegations like this with links to the apology.

Not very helpful, even with digging I don't see what you are talking about. Please post the link. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Bradley Live Twitter reference Link https://twitter.com/Blackdeerly/status/1274715678444945412 Dead Twitter reference Links https://twitter.com/noahbradley/status/1274670378296774658 https://twitter.com/abigbat/status/1293860934600003585

You can simply follow the first Wikipedia footnote on "cut all ties", in the opening paragraph of the article.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#347
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely believe that whatever happened to you was totally unreasonable, but try to understand that from another person's point of view, the broad "you must be against freedom of speech" thing is "toxic", just as you have experienced "toxic" behavior from the opposite side of the issue.

I'm not saying being against freedom of speech is toxic. I'm saying getting put on a hate speech list for being pro freedom of speech is. I've had great discussions with friends and family that disagree with me on free speech. On Twitter people don't seem to treat each other as people, but as representatives of a given ideology.

These people are a lost cause. They cannot be convinced the value of free speech through words alone.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter as in the company/software platform, not the group of people who respond to a particular tweet. Twitter's database could show how many people were shown the tweet. It could guess at how many of their users would react in this way. And you could do some surveys to find out what fraction of our cultural spectrum/Overton window Twitter users occupy.

How can you separate Twitter the company from Twitter the results? Serious question without any snark. I don't get this argument. Oh gal, just leave a message if you downvote. I love to learn when I'm wrong, and I guess others as well.

The question is "How many people saw this tweet?"

It should be obvious how twitter the company could provide a good estimate, with their server logs.

It should also be obvious how the twitter userbase has no idea, because that's exactly the problem.

So do you understand the separation now?

If not, then which part is the problem?

And you're getting downvotes because all of this was already explained, and it looks like you initially misunderstood and failed to process the reply you got and then go reread the initial post.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#349

Honestly, the biggest mistake people make is issuing public apologies. So far, we have very few examples of them actually working. On the contrary, any amount of admission seems to show weakness. The "controversy" around Lin-Manuel Miranda seems to have come nearly entirely from his apology to a very small group of disappointed fans. There are even more examples of very publicly terrible people who have skirted worse…

When dealing with irrational mobs, don’t expect rational moves to work.

The proper behavior is not much different than dealing with an angry bear. Showing weakness doesn’t work, ever.

Sad but true.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you separate Twitter the company from Twitter the results? Serious question without any snark. I don't get this argument. Oh gal, just leave a message if you downvote. I love to learn when I'm wrong, and I guess others as well.

Because Twitter the result might look extremely toxic but be a small fraction of the overall Twitter (the company) userbase.

Do you think the outcome matches your opinion?
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