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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

#431

Post by Jensson »

whiddershins wrote: post #398
Jensson wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want a free and open society where people can discuss ideas and those ideas are weighed on their merits and the ridiculous ones (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc) are laughed at. > But that's not what's happened. The Overton Window in the US has dramatically shifted. Any evidence for this? To me it seems like things went in the right direction and never really stopped. That things are getting worse and therefore w…

You miss the concept that gay marriage was controversial. Obama was against it. Therefore if that debate was held in the current environment proponents of gay marriage might be silenced and banned

That is the point, restricting speech isn't a good thing. The poster I replied to argued that restricting speech is a good thing since things are getting worse, even though we can see that things has steadily gotten better. There is no need to restrict speech to make things better, instead things are likely to get much worse by restricting speech as your example shows.

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

#432

Post by oneoff786 »

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 think it’s a strong point. Shunning is an effective social strategy to push out unwanted radical minority views. It’s been used all throughout history. The internet has greatly diminished its power. The guy reaction against ANY canceling is naive and a terrible path. Canceling is not novel or bad at all. That some people have taken it to extremes is a separate issue.

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

#433

Post by jimbokun »

long_time_gone wrote: post #184
jimbokun wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, obviously if I typed it here it would mean I'm comfortable saying it, so it's a Catch-22 isn't it?

If you can't explicitly say it, can you at least describe in what ways it is "less free than, say, the 1990s?" If not, the comment loses value.

In the 90s the culturally most influential people tended to mock censors and championed being “politically incorrect”. Al and Tipper Gore were roundly mocked for the record rating system they championed.

R rated movies were far more successful at the box office, with lots of questionable content by today’s standards.

Pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable to say was considered cool.

Today, the academic and cultural power brokers are the biggest champions of shutting down “objectionable” speech.

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

#434

Post by Forgeties79 »

coffeemug wrote: post #390
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"…

Cancellation is primarily a radical leftist domain. For example, pro-abortion speakers don't normally need police escorts to speak at a university. It's not true that both wings engage in the behavior equally. There are many problems with radical right, but canceling people isn't one of them.

>Cancellation is primarily a radical leftist domain.

Wait, what?

* Kaepernick/the NFL

* “Freedom Fries”

* Dungeons & Dragons

* Heavy metal and rap.

* Starbucks (happy holidays)

I mean you can easily pick out all sorts of attempts at “cancelling” by conservatives from the last 30 years without even having to think too hard about it. It’s an American tradition to virtue signal and cancel, it’s not relegated to the left.

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

#435

Post by [deleted] »

stale2002 wrote: post #150
lrem wrote: post #96

That's a lot of words to say "people are free to steer clear of people they don't like and always have been". And not much of thought into "what changed that now it is a problem perceived by some?" There has been a fundamental change to our reality over the past couple decades: things you say and do are now by default in public and permanent record. If your not-too-famous grandpa said something outrageous, he ruined…

> I think that's a problem. But it cannot be solved by laws. I actually think that there is a solution that not many people have mentioned. What we can do is actually fund enforcement of the actual really bad stuff that people do during these hate/harrassement type situations. And by that I mean, when people make death threats against someone, or harassment or target them in a similar way, then you have a government…

[deleted]

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

#436

Post by jimbokun »

tptacek wrote: post #145
jimbokun wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The extent to which a society aspires to this norm has a great effect on the extent to which that society flourishes and prospers.

Then we've clearly flourished throughout the 20th century in spit of it and not because of it.

The countries that better practiced this norm in the 20th century flourished more than those who practiced it less.

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

#437

Post by jimbokun »

dtjb wrote: post #159
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…

Nobody is getting cancelled for having a different opinion on tax rates or foreign policy. There are very specific and narrow types of speech that lead to 'cancellation,' and it's almost always speech that attacks people's identity, race, and sexuality. Historically that type of speech has been equated with harm.

Nah, someone just needs to claim you are attacking someone’s identity. It doesn’t have to be true.

Commonly it’s someone attacking some progressive policy, and then progressives claiming it is an attack on identity, even when many people of the identity supposedly under attack share the same views.

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

#438

Post by Jensson »

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…

> 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.

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

#439

Post by tootie »

olivermarks wrote: post #255
tootie wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's still posting Ukrainian Nazi tweets. He owned up to the thing he was incontrovertibly wrong about but doesn't seem to be rethinking his approach.

I'd suggest that openly discussing the fact that Ukraine has a huge neo nazi problem is responsible reporting. I'm frankly surprised the many BBC and other documentaries on this huge problem from the last few years have not been removed from youtube given the sudden transformation of Ukraine into white hats in the current 'western'. This is why I read Taibbi, because the legacy media has lost so much credibility. (It…

Ukraine has a small and irrelevant Nazi problem. Far right parties barely mustered 2% of the last election. Less than the US. Reporting on it now only serves Putin's propaganda machine. And making some sort of academic argument about journalistic freedom is maybe technically true but you can't just ignore the reality of the world. The legacy media has been doing a far better job than the agenda-driven substackers.

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

#440

Post by jimbokun »

Latty wrote: post #149
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…

I said "for actions they take that harm others", and you jumped to some trivial difference of opinion. If the difference of opinion is supporting policy that hurts me or people I care about, then yes, of course it can harm me. You are saying that someone can use freedom of expression to say people I care about should not have human rights, but I can't say those people shouldn't be employed by some company. Freedom of…

Don’t yell fire in a crowded theatre. Do not libel or slander people. Do not advocate for violence.

Those kinds of speech can directly harm people.

But that is a very small part of the kinds of speech involved in what’s commonly called “cancel culture”.

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