361–370 of 613 posts
And it makes discourse online as a whole worse as more people start to realize this and we stop having conversations and instead just start talking over one another online.
"Be a super hero online. Do not use your real name. Do not show your face." -- Dad's Rule #1 of the internet
Actual opsec is a lot harder than that.
>If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. -Cardinal Richelieu If some people want to use the internet to destroy your reputation, they will, and there's very little that you can do about it. You can't prove anything to anyone, and once people smell blood, they frenzy on you, regardless of the truth.
Funny enough, I read today that one of Richelieu posthumous historian - which was an important European scholar connected with Newton and others - got banned of Paris by the roy in the 1700s for about six lines put in the wrong context They were quite true (1) but misleading in the context presented.
(1) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion:%C3%89tienne_Baluze
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…
Good for you for doing the right thing. Let me ask you - did you feel like the hate thrown at you on Twitter was completely organic? Was there anything that made you question the motives of the involved Twits? I ask because the whole smear job vs Stallman felt quite manufactured to me; from the initial Vice article horrifically misquoting him, to the weirdly rabid hate towards anyone defending him on forums like this…
In fairness those are both very common features of cancellations. Another that comes to mind is Damore, who never wrote what most people attributed to him. I've had perfectly clear for a long time that even smart people will misunderstand the clearest statement if it's what it's socially expected from them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
If you read the comments in this topic by him, it’s clear that the accusations do not line up with what he felt he did wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
'Bradley’s statement came the morning after concept artist Betty Jiang posted accusations on Twitter about a “bald headed crusty assed ‘well known’ artist who went around groping female devs,” saying that she hoped “to never see you and your shitty v-neck shirts at any workshops or conventions.”'
He apologized for a lot of things, but I don't see him admitting to or apologizing for groping anyone.
https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2020/06/noah-bradley-admi...
I've fortunately never been cancelled (I don't think I even have enough of a footprint or visibility for that to happen). From everything I've observed, the absolute worst thing you can do is apologize to the people attempting to cancel you. It's just pouring gasoline on the fire. These people will never say "oh, you learned from your mistakes, I guess I'll back off" . Most of them don't really care about the truth,…
It seems it's better to stay away entirely from certain sensitive topics. No matter your intentions, no matter what you actually think, it just takes a bit of misunderstanding or bad faith and the whole thing explode.
That is their intention. To shutdown discourse and shift the Overton window. This flows onto preference falsification.
The social liberals are the 3rd political group who used it, i'd say at least as efficiently as the far right (first group that used internet to shift the Overton window) and more efficiently than the libertarian/fiscal liberals (second group).
But as social liberals are far more numerous than the far right, the impact is magnified. I find it hypocrite that members of the first two group trying to open the overton window are calling them out on this.
It seems it's better to stay away entirely from certain sensitive topics. No matter your intentions, no matter what you actually think, it just takes a bit of misunderstanding or bad faith and the whole thing explode.
This is exactly why cancel culture is so toxic (and to lessor extent all "political correctness"). It is oppression, repression and censorship. It is mob rule, happy only when they get a lynching, no matter the guilt or innocence.
I agree that it's overboard on a lot of things, especially in the past couple years, but I think it's important to remember the "cancel culture" started as a way to hold certain people to account who were exhibiting socially unacceptable behavior, but were not being socially punished.
All societies have social norms, and all societies have informal (i.e. not through the legal system) means of enforcing those norms. There was a pretty significant gap in U.S. society's ability to enforce social norms against certain types of people, and social media filled that gap.
Now some people have taken that tool farther than can reasonably be justified, but the best way to fight back against that excess is not to say "cancel culture is oppression!" because it DID fill a need in our society, it DID punish people who deserved to be punished, and I don't think we can get the cat back in the bag. So, don't fight the tool, fight the people using it where it isn't justified.
(Who gets to decide when it's "justified" you ask? Well, we do. As a society. Together, online. We're going to have to figure it out. But if we go into a discussion about cancel culture assuming the other side is only interested in opression, repression, and censorship, it's not going to go well.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Serial creeps are plying their trade right now. Actually it is a counterpoint. If someone accuses me of a crime, then refuses to pursue any prosecution of that crime, and then expects me to suffer consequences for that crime, that's a gross injustice. That's why we have a justice system.
Society in the US and in much of the western world has agreed that the only official punishments due for anything are when laws are broken. No law broken, no punishment. This is actually a weakness of our society when the lawmaking bodies choose to sit on the sidelines when the ethical or moral values of the society change, but the laws do not.
This is not to say that I endorse lots of new laws to accommodate punishments for people that break moral or ethical values that our society holds, but that without a system that can handle these problems in any capacity, society picks up the slack using whatever tools necessary. As of right now, our society has picked up and run with the idea of ostracism.
Trying to guide how our society treats people who break moral or ethical values is a right we have mostly all agreed that lawmaking bodies are in charge of. Unfortunately, most lawmaking bodies in the US, and maybe other parts of the world, are too concerned with outrage-farming for trying to win re-election. I wish I had a good answer here, but honestly, our society has a lot of social problems we are dealing with poorly right now, and this seems like a low-priority one, unfortunately.