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Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

popehat.substack.com

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

#91

Post by noduerme »

kritiko wrote: post #46
noduerme wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you point out, while boycotting someone based on your perception of their opinion is not new , the modality of mass mob boycotts of individuals over things potentially taken out of context is entirely new, and that's exactly what "cancel culture" refers to. The underlying mechanism of Twitter is what gave birth to the term, regardless of whether it's used by haters to justify hate speech. One other thing that's ne…

>One other thing that's new, in America, is the idea that speech is less important than people's feelings. Lenny Bruce was convicted of obscenity less than 60 years ago. The civil liberties around speech went through a series of challenges and expansions very recently. The ACLU used to defend nazis. Now they prefer not to, to the chagrin or dismay of more traditional civil libertarians.

The one thing that's remained constant from times when civil rights activists were imprisoned for "offending" people to now when right wingers are canceled for offending people seems to be that the bulk of the population is incapable of, or unwilling to, set the principle of speech over their own feelings about that speech. I think it's because most people just can't imagine themselves being on the wrong end of a censorship regime (civil, corporate, or otherwise).

This is why the ACLU was so important; that was the entire point of it. It was started by a Jew. I'm a Jew, and I contributed to it. Not because I like nazis or think for a moment that they'd give me the same chance to speak. But because inevitably, narrowing of speech will come for those who believe themselves immune. We will have a far-right government again, and whatever liberties we allow to erode now because it suits us will be used against us. Only the very young and those with very short memories think that silencing opinions they don't like is a winning strategy in the long run.

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

#92

Post by krapp »

jimbokun wrote: post #79
commandlinefan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the modality of mass mob boycotts I was watching the news this morning and they were talking about the latest company that's boycotting Russia in response to the social media storm. It occurred to me that governments are becoming increasingly irrelevant. They don't have to impose sanctions (and their own rules make it difficult to do so) - the Twitter mob is deciding who to banish. It's a form of democracy, I guess…

A handful of tech companies arguably have far more power to regulate speech than any government.

The counterargument to that, of course, is that a handful of tech companies can't actually make your speech illegal, make their competition illegal, arrest you, imprison you, ban your speech across an entire country, burn your literature or have you and your ethic/religious/political group shot and dumped into shallow graves.

I mean, sure... getting banned from Twitter is momentarily annoying but Twitter having far more power to regulate speech than the entity that writes the laws that define Twitter's existence, that claims a monopoly on violence, and that in many cases directly controls the media and censors the internet? No.

It's a common argument but I've never really found it a compelling one.

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

#93

Post by biorach »

egberts1 wrote: post #70

I got blocked by Sacramento Bee (a California newspaper) Editorial from their Facebook page. Pretty sure that they didn’t like the different facts that I have pointed out over several different times as rebuttal to their dated opinions … with using each of their own website pages as counter-citations. But hey, Editorial folks reserve the rights to cancel me for their own idiocy of their own makings. It’s just the sli…

being blocked from a facebook page is not being cancelled

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

#94

Post by ssully »

jimbokun wrote: post #82
ashtonkem wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As you point out, while boycotting someone based on your perception of their opinion is not new, the modality of mass mob boycotts of individuals over things potentially taken out of context is entirely new. … One other thing that's new, in America, is the idea that speech is less important than people's feelings. They used to kill people for advocating for integration and civil rights. Actual mobs used to assemble…

Speech is far more free in the US today than in, say, the 1950s and 1960s. But I would argue less free than, say, the 1990s.

What are things that you would say in the 1990's that you wouldn't feel comfortable saying today?

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

#95

Post by lazide »

jimbokun wrote: post #82
ashtonkem wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As you point out, while boycotting someone based on your perception of their opinion is not new, the modality of mass mob boycotts of individuals over things potentially taken out of context is entirely new. … One other thing that's new, in America, is the idea that speech is less important than people's feelings. They used to kill people for advocating for integration and civil rights. Actual mobs used to assemble…

Speech is far more free in the US today than in, say, the 1950s and 1960s. But I would argue less free than, say, the 1990s.

Eh, ‘it depends’ - plenty of people got harassed, sent to jail, or outright killed for being openly gay during that time, among many other things. Not everywhere, but a great many places in the US.

Anti-obscenity laws were also going nuts around that time.

The internet was relatively mellow on that front, but that was because it was mostly unknown and super niche.

society was still trying to apply it’s rules to it, it was just far less competent at doing so.

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

#96

Post by lrem »

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 the relationship with the people that heard it and the people they talked to. In the worst case it went into a filler column of the local newspaper. He had a limited number of people to apologise to. And in the worst case could move to another town and start fresh.

If you write an outrageous blog post today, you're hosed. Even if you're not famous, or in any other way a "public figure". But just because your outrageous writing (or second-hand - someone else writing about a thing you said) is in public record today, you will find that some people in the far future will get offended by it. You get hired in 20 years as a VP of a large company in another country? Well, someone will dig up that post and before you know it you're out of a job. Saying sorry and that you're wiser now, than when you were a teenager, is likely not going to help. Bonus points if what you wrote is within the mainstream today, but the cultural norms move in the following decades.

I think that's a problem. But it cannot be solved by laws. Right to be forgotten won't work well enough (just a hunch, but international enforcement of soft issues like this doesn't have a reassuring track record). Nor by telling people they have to listen to jerks. That's what the OP deconstructs as obviously absurd. What we need is to build into our culture and understanding that people do change and can reach redemption.

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

#97

Post by kbelder »

jimbokun wrote: post #82
ashtonkem wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As you point out, while boycotting someone based on your perception of their opinion is not new, the modality of mass mob boycotts of individuals over things potentially taken out of context is entirely new. … One other thing that's new, in America, is the idea that speech is less important than people's feelings. They used to kill people for advocating for integration and civil rights. Actual mobs used to assemble…

Speech is far more free in the US today than in, say, the 1950s and 1960s. But I would argue less free than, say, the 1990s.

I'd agree.

I'd also say race relations are on the same trajectory, and that's probably not a coincidence.

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

#98

Post by iosono88 »

noduerme wrote: post #91
kritiko wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>One other thing that's new, in America, is the idea that speech is less important than people's feelings. Lenny Bruce was convicted of obscenity less than 60 years ago. The civil liberties around speech went through a series of challenges and expansions very recently. The ACLU used to defend nazis. Now they prefer not to, to the chagrin or dismay of more traditional civil libertarians.

The one thing that's remained constant from times when civil rights activists were imprisoned for "offending" people to now when right wingers are canceled for offending people seems to be that the bulk of the population is incapable of, or unwilling to, set the principle of speech over their own feelings about that speech. I think it's because most people just can't imagine themselves being on the wrong end of a cen…

No post body was provided.

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

#99

Post by BitwiseFool »

oh_sigh wrote: post #57
legitster wrote: post #45

> Our failure to have a serious discussion about defining “cancel culture” encourages this. Can we please just define it so we can move on as a society? I'm equally tired of this game where snarky writers try to pretend it doesn't exist. The first amendment doesn't protect against secret blacklists or mobs but we can still agree they are "bad things" and could agree on at least some new set of common courtesy. All so…

Popehat did, I think, an excellent job of it, even though he doesn't believe this is synonymous with cancel culture: > some responses to speech are disproportionate and outside norms of decency

I feel like he just kicked the can down the road and introduced additional ambiguities by invoking the concepts of norms and decency. Both of which are very contextual and highly variable.

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

#100

Post by TameAntelope »

His “First Speaker Problem” is exactly why I’ve hated these discussions thus far; why is the speech of one person sacred, but speech in response to that person not? The idea that the First Speaker is, themself, responding to yet someone else is a great follow up that I hadn’t considered.

I also have very low expectations for this community’s ability to discuss this reasonably. So far is seems like folks are posting responses to the topic, rather than the article, and that hardly bodes well.

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