I was reading about the mob going after Billie Eilish and it made me very sad, because her so-called sins were committed when she was 14. Cancel culture is this monster that has no decency, and no point other than tk ruin peoples lives at the lulz and amusement of the masses. Our most prudent step for the future is to get off social media, and for companies to stop giving in to the mobs. My heart goes out to this guy. I’m not condoning, forgiving, or excusing anything he has done, but when did this country turn its back on forgiveness and redemption?
What it's like to be cancelled
481–490 of 613 posts
Re: What it's like to be cancelled
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
Switzerland is the perfect model for what a direct democracy actually looks like and it is nothing like a twitter mob.
What? This is a totally nonsensical response. Everybody read history knows current Switzerland is a very unique outlier.
Why couldn't other countries just implement the same system? Is there something magical about Swiss people that makes them handle direct democracy responsibly that other populations doesn't have? If you talk about their finances, sure that wont replicate, but there is nothing preventing their model of democracy from working.
Re: What it's like to be cancelled
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The problem is that there is no justice system for things that are not illegal, but are ethically or morally bad. That's not a problem, that's a feature ! After all, do you want to be punished for breaking someone else's moral code? Whether you like it or not, the legal system and the sets of laws is the only moral and ethical yardstick we have gotten society to agree on. If you want your particular set of morals t…
How far do you want to take this argument? Warning people about someone's creepy behavior isn't a punishment, it's a warning that they might violate my moral code and I should probably avoid them. Is me avoiding them punishment? Should I then be punished? not punished? Define punishment...
> Warning people about someone's creepy behavior isn't a punishment,
Until someone goes around warning other people that they think that you act creepy around children?
How do you define creepy? It's completely subjective. That's why the courts are objective.
Making the argument for mobbing and witch-hunts almost never ends well.
Re: What it's like to be cancelled
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
All that happens if you voice your opinion in the opposite direction of an internet mob is you get piled on too. Anyone who has been on the internet must have experienced this more than once. Introducing some facts or measure (which is hard with twitters very tiny character limit that squashes nuance and debate) in a response is just the same thing. The internet mob is a mob and acts like a mob and its best to get ou…
You also have to blame companies/hr for being so reactive and possibly our governments for not taking action to insulate society against the impacts of internet mobs on peoples’ pursuit of happiness. The fact that 100 people on Twitter can get somebody fired just by calling them a rapist with absolutely no proof is a social/societal failure. I highly suspect ending this person’s contracts cost the companies more mone…
This is one of those rare instances I would say there should be a law that prevents a company from firing an employee for something they did not attached to their work.
Re: What it's like to be cancelled
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
Journalists participate in Twitter at a rate probably 10-100x the overall population. Most people don't ever log into Twitter, most journalists do daily. I think you can look at it this way: * For normal people, Twitter is not real life. * For journalists, Twitter is real life. Journalists then become the vector by which BS Twitter drama becomes mainstreamed.
If you know how to play the game, this is a huge asset. Marc Andreessen said in a New Yorker interview that he ignored Twitter until he realized that the media were obssessed with it. Andreessen Horowitz the VC firm started relatively late compared to some others, but it shot to the top of mindshare because of the constant stream of coverage they gave Andreessen and his intentionally outrageous visions of the future.…
That’s because Elon is essentially cancel proof. True freedom is to not have to care what the mob thinks, but sadly they vast majority of us have to answer to someone.
Re: What it's like to be cancelled
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this quote from the article is a good example: >I don’t think I can fully describe the heart-wrenching pain of seeing your life & career crumbling around you and feeling utterly powerless to stop it. I thought I was fast approaching my inevitable and permanent end. I don’t cry often, but I cried a lot that night. The author has harsh words for his previous behavior, but the question I have is about the sentim…
> At the end of the day no one has an obligation to like you. It is not up to the perpetrator to decide what the appropriate restorative process is. We do not need a legal system to give us permission to dislike someone. I agree with this, but here we're not talking about just disliking someone. We're talking about cancellation--someone's livelihood is taken away (he was fired, from multiple jobs). Just disliking som…
I believe he does have legal recourse against false accusations. Slander and libel law is pretty old and well-established. Also, outside of protected classes, we have a legal system that assumes people do not have a right to be hired.
I think each employer would need to make their own decision. There is nothing in his account that would make me uncomfortable working with him. But, I think your critique really points away from 'cancel culture' and towards a more robust set of employment protections. I favor those, but they aren't really related to 'cancelling' people.
Re: What it's like to be cancelled
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never said that criminal prosecution is the only way there can be repercussions, it was just the obvious factor in the examples OP gave. Aside from civil prosecution, it is perfectly reasonable for companies, schools, etc. to enforce their own rules - so long as they are made clear from the outset and enforced as evenly as possible across the applicable population. The problem with social media justice is how unpre…
Whoa, try reading my comment a little more generously, please. I specifically said the current iteration of cancel culture is going overboard. I was not praising cancel culture. My main point was that cancel culture arose because of a real gap in our society's ability to handle certain types of people doing certain types of awful things... you mentioned that a lot of it could be handled by the legal system, but the r…
Yeah sorry, I know you were saying it has gone overboard, I didn't mean to present your comment as praising cancel culture in its entirety. But I did read it as praising some aspects of what these mobs can do, which the person I was replying to claimed wasn't a thing at all. More to your point, I get that there have been some positive applications, but I'm just not sure it is possible to avoid much of the bad (which IMO outweighs the good). At least not without fundamental changes to how the call outs are currently done.
Re: What it's like to be cancelled
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I guess I think you can coherently believe that without somehow implicating the justice system. People have different thresholds for this stuff. So why are their thresholds more important than others'? This is literally why we have a justice system - people have different ideas about what is wrong and what is right. The justice system, with its set of laws, is the final arbiter o right and wrong. If you cannot get…
It doesn't have to be universally moral. People are free to retain professional connections with this person. In effect, what people seem to be arguing on this thread is that people should be enjoined from exercising their own freedom of association when someone is deemed to be unfairly targeted online. I think you can coherently argue that, but I don't think you can reasonably argue it. What's muddying the discussio…
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Re: What it's like to be cancelled
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I guess I think you can coherently believe that without somehow implicating the justice system. People have different thresholds for this stuff. So why are their thresholds more important than others'? This is literally why we have a justice system - people have different ideas about what is wrong and what is right. The justice system, with its set of laws, is the final arbiter o right and wrong. If you cannot get…
It doesn't have to be universally moral. People are free to retain professional connections with this person. In effect, what people seem to be arguing on this thread is that people should be enjoined from exercising their own freedom of association when someone is deemed to be unfairly targeted online. I think you can coherently argue that, but I don't think you can reasonably argue it. What's muddying the discussio…
> People are free to retain professional connections with this person.
Only if they want to also be mobbed. I did say earlier that the mob ensures ostracization via fear.
There is nothing redeeming or respectable about being in a mob, but the current cancel culture is attempting to overturn generations of social norms by trying to portray mobbing and witch-hunting as the moral high-ground.
Believe me, no matter how many big words are used to philosophize about the moral superiority of mobbing, at the end of the day the mobbers are no different to any other mobbers.
> But because sexual assault is in fact a crime, people move the goalposts: now, for someone to face social and commercial consequences, they need to first be found guilty in a court of law.
Well, yes. It's much more serious to be a criminal than a non-criminal. You are equivocating non-criminal acts with actual criminal acts and then appear surprised that for accusations of actual criminal acts people require evidence.
It's not shades of gray - there's a thick and visible line between "He's a criminal" and "he has different opinions to me".
You're damn right - for someone to face serious consequences, there had better be evidence that convinces a court that the person committed the crime of which they are accused.
Re: What it's like to be cancelled
#490My life ended on June 21, 2020 Who wrote this post then? I know you go on much later to say that not everyone gets a chance to start over again but I have , so do you have some perspective. At a high level, you got fired from your job, lost some friends, got depressed, but found light at the end of the tunnel and are working again, a year later (a year where a lot of people found themselves out of work for many reaso…
Rarely do I read remarks so condescending, callous and cruel. Even instrumentalizing the tragic deaths of Shepard and Floyd to dismiss the hurt of another person on its own is absolutely sickening.
I'd like to think that this cruelty is backed up by a good motivation. Maybe the author hurt you or someone you know. Maybe you sympathize greatly with the victims and you're motivated by righteous indignation. But no matter what, I'd really ask you to reflect on whether this kind of unempathetic approach makes the world better or worse. Because this is exactly the sort of incredibly tasteless comment a bully would write.