Carmack's comment on the Cultural Revolution was strange. The greatest problem with the Cultural Revolution, its defining characteristic in most people's minds, was all the mass murder. McCarthyism or something might have been a better historical analog to what is happening, but it would have been pretty tricky to jujitsu that example into a slam against the left, or the kids today, or whatever was being attempted there.
The article he linked to was a little peculiar. As someone who's inclined to agree with the author about the First Amendment, the poorly thought out paragraph about racism - using a link to hate crime statistics to demonstrate the low numbers of "actual racists," but then making a remark like The statement “black lives matter” is easy to agree with if you’re a decent human being, which raises some questions about why we all have so many not-decent people (just indecent, not actual racists?) in our social media feeds - distracted from the overall message.
> but then making a remark like The statement “black lives matter” is easy to agree with if you’re a decent human being, which raises some questions about why we all have so many not-decent people (just indecent, not actual racists?) in our social media feeds - distracted from the overall message.
The objection that most have to the phrase "black lives matter" is exactly the same objection that most have to "all lives matter". That is, essentially no-one objects to the sentiment expressed in the words in and of themselves, but they are suspicious of the political motivations of those who use the slogan.
There is a relative minority of people that engage in what is called "vice-signaling". That is, they claim to object to a commonly held moral sentiment that they feel has been co-opted for a partisan political cause. I think it's probably a counter-productive strategy, but I think those people can be reasoned with if you can separate the moral sentiment from the political platform.
>The greatest problem with the Cultural Revolution, its defining characteristic in most people's minds, was all the mass murder.
I'm not sure that's true. Stipulating that it was "the greatest problem", how could it be the defining characteristic considering all the other historical instances of mass murder?
In the case of "black lives matter", part of the point some people are missing is why it's necessary to force people to say something that's as obvious as the nose on our faces. We're being forced to chant a slogan. An empty slogan because of course, black lives matter. No one has ever said differently.
What is “the overall message?” Is it just the plain meaning of the words? Is the idea that we need to reform the police so they stop murdering Black people?
> No doubt, the organization itself was quite radical from the very beginning. Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors described herself and fellow co-founder Alicia Garza as “trained Marxists” in a recently resurfaced video from 2015.
Look at how much the debate has transformed within the last month. It started out with universal condemnation of a murder committed by the police in Minnesota. Now, we are talking about tearing town statues of Abraham Lincoln: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/education/2020/06/26/uw-... (“Students in the UW-Madison's Black student union are calling on university officials to remove the statue of the nation's 16th president.”) My high school, named after Thomas Jefferson, is thinking of renaming itself. We are debating whether the Constitution as a “pro-slavery document.”
I am pro-BLM. To me, it’s a matter of my faith, as well as my personal experience living in places like Baltimore and Philadelphia and realizing that Black people just aren’t getting a fair shake. I think people of every stripe can do something to help finish the job of reconstruction. Libertarians can pitch in to help end police abuse of minorities. Conservatives can help push forward school choice, which the majority of Black people support. Middle of the road people can agree that we need to undo the pro-confederacy monument building that happened during the KKK era.
But I also believe that our country rests on mostly admirable principles and history, and that Marxism is a recipe for suffering while capitalism is uplifting billions of people before our very eyes. I can hardly blame people who are skeptical when they are forced to chant a slogan that was coined by self-avowed Marxists. You can’t blame people for being cautious in their support of a movement that has under the same roof a majority of well-meaning people who simply want to eliminate police brutality and inequality, and a vocal minority of people who view those problems as an indictment of our entire country and it’s institutions. The far left, in characteristic fashion, has taken something most people could agree on, and pushed it further and further until normal people are forced to push back to keep society from crumbling beneath their feet. And that’s a tragedy for everyone, especially people who care about the core concept of fixing policing in America.
The article in question also linked to Scott Adams who recently said and I quote "If Biden is elected, there's a good chance you will be dead within the year. Republicans will be hunted." [1]
So it seems rather ironic to write an article about 'political witchhunts' using someone who is claiming that Republicans are going to be systematically hunted down and murdered. I don't think the article was written in good faith at all.
The broadening circle of people willing to exercise their free speech to condemn Pinker's recurrent and insidious appeals to race-informed genetic determinism is a bright spot, as are the numerous people dunking on Pinker for cosigning an open letter that decries "ostracism and public shaming" as injuries to our culture of free expression, rather than expressions of that culture.
Ken White had some smart things to say about this today, with respect to "the problem of the preferred first speaker". Worth tracking down.
That's not to say there aren't dark spots; David Shor's firing certainly appears to be one of them. But I don't think any of those dark spots put Pinker, the T-1000 version of Charles Murray, above criticism. Which is, of course, what an open letter against "public shaming" purports to do.
It's disappointing to read this thread. Even tptacek, a prominent speaker on Hacker News, exhibits bizarre ignorance regarding this topic.
Generally speaking, it seems to me that much sloppy thinking in the current debate involves the mixture of the following basic errors:
1) Ignorance about biology. Evolutionary biology has been an exceptionally fertile section of science for the last decades, and provided deeper understandings on many biological phenomenon, including human behaviors. The accusers' understanding of biology (e.g. condemning it as "genetic determinism") is at least 50 years behind.
2) Poor understanding of the due process. Calling a random petition to condemn a person publicly is exactly a witch hunt. History proves that it's a very error-prone way to punish someone, and no civilized country accept it as a proper procedure anymore.
As to (2) I'd recommend everyone to read DJB's "The death of due process". It is very important, because it may be you (or your family) to be hung by lynch mobs next time.
I guess I don't see the problem of the preferred first speaker in practice.
Let's take the examples in question: I've never seen either Murray or Pinker come out of the gates swinging with poorly framed appeals to genetic determinism (if they make reference to such things at all it's almost always in response to criticism, and it never seems to be more than very light handed considered speculation). I've also never seen them lob insults, outright support mob justice, or make a targeted cherry-picked attempt to discredit a particular individual (admittedly I'm only so plugged in so it's possible I'm missing something). Yet their critics seem frequently guilty of this.
In other words, I don't think I'm holding them to a lower standard for having spoken first. Am I misunderstanding the argument? Or am I actually doing this and I'm just not aware of it?
Edit: Perhaps it's also worth stating that I do hold these two people in high regard which definitely lowers my defenses when it comes to quickly evaluating their various claims. Mainly based on how they have engaged in good faith. That said, I disagree with both of them a lot. Recently I've put a lot of effort into identifying a group of folks that I disagree with but respect, since it seems like almost nobody does that and it seems like a big problem that people only respect those they agree with.
Of course people should be free to vehemently argue against Steven Pinker's ideas. The problem is that people are instead descending to personal attacks on him, including circulating a petition (with forged signatures, to boot) to get the Linguistic Society of America to strip him of his Fellow status.
>- John Carmack signal boosting[1] Sarah Downey's article "This PC witch-hunt is killing free speech, and we have to fight it"[2]
Is this really a "bright spot"? Expressing a fear (without any reasoning or evidence shown as the basis for that fear) that one's opponents approve of an atrocious campaign orchestrated by a totalitarian regime?
There's a lot of room to criticize "cancel culture" and deplatforming. Comparisons with mass killings and state-orchestrated oppression is an odd choice, and (to take the other side of the fence here) with about the same amount of merit as saying that people critical of BLM have similar opinions of the Nazi regime.
There is a direct line of descent between Maoist agitation in Western countries throughout the late-1960s and 1970s and the current radical left. They have explicitly approved of the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" in the past - often enthusiastically so - and for all we know, they continue to do so. The M.O. is certainly comparable.
> Comparisons with mass killings and state-orchestrated oppression is an odd choice,
Coordinated attempts to ruin peoples ability to earn a living is pretty bad. It also strikes me that such economic terrorism could very well be the precursors to actual killing and state oppression. People who don't respect the right to liberty or property of others probably don't respect their right to life either.
> with about the same amount of merit as saying that people critical of BLM have similar opinions of the Nazi regime.
I agree with the point that our criticism needs to have some proportionality, but I don't think this particular comparison is entirely valid. In both the Cultural Revolution and the current Cancel Culture, the objective is the purging institutions of dissidents and the destruction of all artifacts of the old order (e.g. destruction of statues, including Frederick Douglass for some reason). Whatever the people participating in Cancel Culture believe, they are still following the Cultural Revolution template. Obviously the Cultural Revolution was far more violent, but I think that assuming such mass violence can't or won't happen here is mistaken.
On the other hand, there are plenty of critics of BLM who are quite ardently against abusive policing, but either don't think the racial component is as central to the problem of authoritarian policing as BLM claims, or object to some of the other principles of BLM that have nothing to do with race or policing.
So I didn't read all the links, but Glenn's letter is just absolute projection on his part. He claims the letter sent out to staff and students treated unestablished facts as established and then does nothing to say how they are unestablished. It might be cringey to post the requisite BLM statement, but its not inaccurate. I see a lot of comments on this thread claiming censorship with no evidence or introspection of why certain things are being called out. J.K. Rowling is a terf through and through. I am sorry, but claiming that a letter talks too much about race is one of the most fragile things I have ever seen. This is an uncomfortable moment for lots of white people, but we need to live with it instead of instantly buck against it and hide in "intellectual rigor."
The Sarah Downey article you mention is of really low quality.
She parrots tired cliches (you couldn't make Blazing Saddles today!) in a world where we're realizing that many beloved comedians are sexual predators as well.
She thinks JK Rowling did nothing wrong, she only followed the science! (no mention that she explicitly accuses transwomen of being a danger to ciswomen, she thinks trans rights are brainwashing teenagers into wanting to change their gender, and has a few other obviously transphobic and harmful calls to action).
She accuses the people calling for lockdowns and isolation for Covid19 of not caring about poor people, when the highest voices on this were also calling for relief funds and rent freezes.
She then accuses the BLM protesters of violence and looting, with not one word about the police escalation of violence, nor of white supremacist provocateurs.
And of course, she thinks wanting to join protests for social justice is hypocrisy if yesterday you were encouraging people not to go to clubs and restaurants to avoid the pandemic.
And finally, of course she will defend the right of Holocaust deniers to be heard, but calls for the most powerful celebrities to shut up or change their ways are harrasement and a sign that free speach is dead.
The whole article is a collection of these reactionary hot takes, peppered with self-defenses of how progressive the author is (she is Jewish! And has gay friends! And enjoys RuPaul's drag race!), meant to make it sound like she is one of the people who would support the causes she is actually attacking.
I grew up in a very religious family. It was funny how you could get ostracized from the community for not following the guidelines. This really (REALLY) depended on the individual communities more so than say the religion and the relative power of that religion in that area. (EDIT: from my experience with 4 christian based religions.) For example, in Utah, not being Mormon or even being found out to consume caffeine could get you in all sorts of hot water.
What I from the left has similarities to the religious fervor of my youth. You either believe and are part of the solution. To do that you have to convert everyone, and if you aren't with us then you're against us. It might be that it just evokes a similar emotional response to me as being on the "outs" with my childhood faith.
Many people want to have faith in something. We've torn down religion as fairly corrupt, government has been likewise torn down for many people. Now we have massive leaderless movements that offer the same sort of thing.
My issue with this movement, is it's amplified the worst of our human nature by having social media (which I recognize I'm consuming right now). If you don't want global censoring of opposing ideas we need to have a better way of performing human interactions online. We need more humanization of people through technology not the dehumanization of people through technology.
"[T]hird-wave antiracism is a profoundly religious movement in everything but terminology. The idea that whites are permanently stained by their white privilege, gaining moral absolution only by eternally attesting to it, is the third wave’s version of original sin. The idea of a someday when America will “come to terms with race” is as vaguely specified a guidepost as Judgment Day. Explorations as to whether an opinion is “problematic” are equivalent to explorations of that which may be blasphemous. The social mauling of the person with “problematic” thoughts parallels the excommunication of the heretic. What is called “virtue signaling,” then, channels the impulse that might lead a Christian to an aggressive display of her faith in Jesus."
> My issue with this movement, is it's amplified the worst of our human nature by having social media (which I recognize I'm consuming right now).
What movement do you mean?
> If you don't want global censoring of opposing ideas we need to have a better way of performing human interactions online.
I absolutely agree with this. My experience with online interactions is that they've been filled with polarized sentiment for a long time (I've heard the sentiment "never read the comments" about news articles on the internet for at least 5 years), not just in the last few months.
Movement as in general cultural shift with the advent of social media. Not really a specific movement as in #somemovement.
For example. I'd fucking love to have this conversation with a group of people and instead of getting a ^ or (Insert down arrow) see your expression, you either nodding along, or making a slight facial tweak that lets me know I hurt your feelings so I can see, oh crap, I shouldn't have said "movement" and instead said cultural shift. That real-time feedback that build empathy and makes me not want to piss you off, or makes me walk away thinking, we'll we're never going to see eye to eye.
The movement from me having lunch with friends, to losing them on facebook because they support #somemovement and I have a nuanced opinion about it.
EDIT: I'm also not implying I hurt your feelings with the word movement, I'm creating a narrative specific to this thread to create an example of how in a in person setting I might have picked up on that, but in text I have to be super clear instead of being able to have an easy back and forth to get to the nuance of what I meant.
There are two phases to cultural change: talk and action.
The discussion about whether change is needed has been going on for something between 20 and 40 years, depending on who you ask.
This is an action phase, and action phases demand a certain amount of "with us or against us" structure, because one has to quickly decide which allies can be relied upon, which will flake under pressure, and which are actually in favor of the opposing opinion and trying to lure a group into a trap.
It is scary in that it is not an "anything goes, throw spaghetti at the walls and see what sticks" open forum time, but that's because while one side is throwing spaghetti at the walls, another side is chanting "Jews will not replace us" and "blood and soil" in the streets and driving cars into counter-protests. And, it appears, possibly using their dominance in America's law enforcement structure to kill without consequence, which is the matchpoint for the latest demonstrations and fighting.
Firing people for expressing "distasteful" views publicly is nothing new. In 2003, MSNBC fired the host of their most popular program, Phil Donahue, for expressing his opposition to the Iraq War.
> An internal MSNBC memo warned Donahue was a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war,” providing “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
Fortunately for Phil, he was well-off and probably wasn't relying on the income.
With at-will employment, companies have enormous leverage over their workers' freedom of expression and it's disappointing to see this letter with some ostensibly "left" signatures attached leave that consideration untouched.
On a related note: arguably one of the biggest "cancellings" of the post-9/11 era was that of the Dixie Chicks [1].
"Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas."
The above comment (made by the lead singer at a concert in England) was all it took for them to receive death threats and get blacklisted by thousands of radio stations in the US.
They were hardly cancelled though, they were more feted after the controversy. They went from the CMA to winning album of the year at the Grammys, got on the cover of Rolling Stone, etc. In many ways they vaulted from the country music backwater into the mainstream.
Interestingly enough, they changed their name to “The Chicks” 2 weeks ago.
> Firing people for expressing "distasteful" views publicly is nothing new.
I don't think that is a correct synopsis of the concern. The concern is that there is no space to discuss the definition of "distasteful". There are also a bunch of amorphous terms being thrown around and any attempt to clarify those terms in general or to challenge how a person is using those terms or to explore the ramification of those terms; those efforts are themselves labeled "distasteful".
I'm hesitant to even list the terms that I don't think are well defined in our public discourse for this very reason. I anticipate that I will be immediately labeled as persona-non-grata for trying to clarify what the heck we are talking about.
> The concern is that there is no space to discuss the definition of "distasteful".
What do you mean by this? What kind of space is missing? Was that fact that being anti-war is distasteful something that was discussed and agreed upon in 2003, so that firing was alright?
I'm very on board with ending at-will employment, but it would only address a small subset of the issues they're describing. Employment protections won't prevent books from being withdrawn, journalists and professors from being censured, or leaders from being forced to resign.
Right, nor should it. The same protections that would keep a person from being forced to step down when someone discovers they were pro-Iraq war would be used to protect them from being forced to step down when someone discovers they're a Klan leader.
I think this comes down to a lack of trust in good-faith debate. People don't trust that someone "from the other side" will actually have the empathy and generosity required to have a good-faith discussion on a topic.
Also, I believe that we're constantly hearing so many voices trying to convince us one way or another, that our own discussions on those topics end up being attempts to convince others. That would explain "safe spaces" to some degree -- people don't want the pressure of having someone else try to convince them of something they don't agree with.
Some of it just the two-party system. The points don't matter, just which side of the line each person is on. I wonder if more parties would help depolarize the situation. I'm really not sure.
> That would explain "safe spaces" to some degree -- people don't want the pressure of having someone else try to convince them of something they don't agree with.
In my experience, it's more that people don't try to convince. Hell, the people who need safe-spaces, and the people they're trying to be "safe" from, don't even share the underlying epistemic assumptions that would allow them to "convince" each-other of anything less clearly observable than the sky being blue. The latter group, the people who other people need to be "safe" from, usually just scream, berate, harass, and often resort to violence.
(Note that I've avoided identifying "which side" is which. The answer is: it depends which side is dominant in your particular area. Boston and San Francisco and Brooklyn are left-dominant. Middle America is right-dominant.)
No place in the US is left-dominant (this is true of most of Europe as well). There are right-dominant areas and centrist-dominant areas. Left discourse (think Chomsky) is extremely rare and almost never accepted in the media.
It's also experiential - people reaching out in good faith for debate have consistently had their hand chewed up in return; and then a whole audience that sees that exchange and cements their opinions further. I'd argue the problem is often the choice of venue, and the expectation that internet strangers are truly going to come to a debate in good faith, but it still sets a consistent tone.
> The points don't matter, just which side of the line each person is on
That's because it isn't just about ideas, it's about power. Politics and government now are not about coming to consensus solutions that everyone, or at least everyone but a small minority who just wants to game the system, can live with. Politics and government now are about imposing on everyone whichever set of ideas gets a slim 51% majority. That isn't the way it was supposed to work.
I personally would like to see a Constitutional amendment that would require a 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress to pass any legislation, and a 3/4 majority required to override a Presidential veto. That would at least require some amount of bipartisan consensus, and therefore some amount of actually somewhat reasonable debate instead of just shouting back and forth, before a public policy was imposed on everyone.
A) a 2/3 requirement would mean nothing gets passed, benefitting the only party that gains by obstructing legislation, the Republican Party
B) it doesn’t matter how high the bar is set when one side refuses to do their half of bipartisan responsibility (see impeachment)
When people are strictly divided, the barrier to pass something should be lower so that elections change things again. A government that can’t act might as well not exist. There’s no point in holding elections if legislators never pass any change. The liberal values that make the West free depend on civic engagement.
I think a big part of it is the public space. Let's say I'm on X side of a debate. I can, in good faith, try to talk to someone from side Y. I might find some such person, or even several.
The problem is, if we're talking in a public forum, anyone can come up (from side X, side Y, or both) and jump in not in good faith. And so I get, as Fellshard said, my hand chewed off, not by the person I was talking to, but by a bunch of drive-by conversation-killers.
Under current conditions, I don't think a real conversation can happen in public (which includes social media).
I think what we're seeing is the solidification of identity in such strong and unyielding terms that anything that threatens that identity immediately triggers a basic survival instinct. At that point, rational discourse is not possible.
Correct. Rational discourse has already happened, for decades. We appear on the cusp of a structural shift, and in that span of time rational discourse isn't welcome.
People talked about whether the US should enter World War I for years before the German navy targeted US merchant vessels. After the decision to enter, speaking out against the militarization was grounds for arrest. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fiery-socialist-chall...
We have more parties than the US and are less polarised[1]. I recommend more parties, but don't see any incremental way the US could get them.
[1] but then again, we had a mid-nineteenth century religiously-motivated civil war and it only killed a few hundred people. So maybe we support a plurality of parties because we're less polarisable, and not the other way around?
(rather than having a fabric of society, prone to ripping, having a dense irregular felt of society, of tocquevillean overlapping voluntary associations, FTW?)
handwave I think it's more "disempower," in general. There's nearly no doing open shooting, but people out in the streets are extremely disinterested in a conversation about "Maybe cops aren't so bad, you guys."
People not willing to venture out their echo chambers is bad, but much better than being hell bent on taking away the livelihood of others for bad tweets.
I find it weird that so many people seem to think that "attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity" (I guess this is a fancy way of saying cancel culture?) is a big problem, because frankly I have no idea how big a problem it is. Where are the statistics on this? How many are actually impacted by it? There are many articles citing examples and saying how dangerous it is (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/25/online-shaming-d...), and yes there are certainly such examples, but are these just outliers? Is this like air travel, where really for the most part it's ok for people to speak their minds and people get overly freaked out because of rare events?
Actually curious to hear what people on here think about this.
If you'd like to see how big of a problem it is, post "males are not females" or "males do not have periods" or "all lives matter" or "we should not be giving hormone blockers to children" to your Twitter or Facebook accounts. Go right ahead. If you feel even the slightest bit of trepidation over publicly stating any of those things, then you will see first hand how big of a problem it is.
If I were to post one of these things, I would certainly get some side-eye, but I very much doubt I would be fired or the like. And since when is feeling some trepidation over saying something controversial (because people might dislike you for it) unnatural? I mean, is your stance "it should be ok for me to say whatever I like publicly"?
I guess you think these are all examples of perfectly rational things to say that cannot be disputed, but let's just take "all lives matter". Sure, no one can disagree that "all lives matter", but saying this implies that you think this in response to "black lives matter" , and Pinker himself articulates the issue with this well:
"Linguists, of all people, should understand the difference between a trope or collocation, such as the slogan “All lives matter,” and the proposition that all lives matter. (Is someone prepared to argue that some lives don’t matter?) And linguists, of all people, should understand the difference between a turn in the context of a conversational exchange and a sentence that expresses an idea. It’s true that if someone were to retort “All lives matter” in direct response to “Black lives matter,’ they’d be making a statement that downplays the racism and other harms suffered by African Americans."
At least 1/10 of the posts on my Facebook feed at any given time say one of those things or something similar. The people making these posts are not being cancelled, fired, or really even called out.
In my filter bubble the people posting things like 'Black Lives Matter', suggesting that we use people's chosen pronouns, or indicating that maybe our current justice system is anything other than absolutely upstanding and unchangeable are the ones being called out. They're still not being fired for their opinions, though.
I could see myself getting fired from my company for stating one of these views. Even as I write this, I feel it's important for me to state the following.
I think the "all lives matter" is a anti-slogan to something important so I wouldn't say that. I think the first two are based on sex, which is not really disputed. You can gender identify how you'd like though.
I think the hormone blockers is a complex issue and I'll leave it at that.
But I recognize that if I held radical ideas (which the ones you pointed out are either on the edge or beyond it), I very well might get fired for expressing them in a public forum if someone showed that to my companies HR. To deny that is just me being blind.
To be clear, I took my job with that explicit knowledge that, any public information on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, or here would be scrutinized. I don't like it, but I also went into that with my eyes wide open.
Feeling trepidation before posting sentiments that have complex and potentially problematic histories within public discourse does not equate to being targeted by cancel culture.
If I post "the Republic party interfered with Donald Trump's impeachment investigation by not allowing witnesses to testify before Congress" on my social media I'm sure I would get some backlash; that does not mean that I have been cancelled. It means that I've chosen to post decisively about an issue that might not be as black and white as I consider it to be.
> Where are the statistics on this? How many are actually impacted by it?
It's a real problem, but mostly just for the sort of people who might sign on to a letter such as this: elite think tankers, academics, and columnists, who would love nothing more than to be able to continue spouting unsubstantiated nonsense with impunity.
If your livelihood is throwing opinions into the Internet wind, then of course cancel culture is an existential threat. As these sorts of people now tend to be extremely online, every little barb and retort pains them disproportionally, too.
For most of us, it's just a distraction. If you're not famous on the Internet, you can't be canceled to begin with.
I'm not sure how you'd go about collecting statistics on the question. You can go poll employers on how many people they've fired for ideological nonconformity, but they're all going to report 0 regardless of whether it's true. Anecdotes might be the best evidence available.
I suspect that employers would not admit to firing people for ideological nonconformity, even if they did so. There would be some platitude instead, and you'd have to decode whether the platitude meant that or not.
Yes, something along those lines. It's not like it's impossible to categorize and quantify and catalogue 'cancel culture' events -- even if the result is somewhat subjective , it's better than just this vague belief based on rare examples. I mean honestly, is this 'cancel culture' really a thing, or it is mostly celebrities sometimes being criticized (at times rightly by sensible progressives, at times wrongly by overly woke people) that somehow has many on HN and a whole lot of people so anxious?
I think this framing of the issue is pretty interesting. There are a decent number of articles that talk about how cancel culture affects celebrities, but I do think it would be pretty hard to quantify the effects of cancel culture. It seems hard to define.
Personally, I'm not totally sold by the letter from Harper's. But I don't have data one way or another to support my bias. I don't believe at face value that cancel culture is the root cause (or even a root cause) of the problems folks see with American public discourse. I wonder how to quantify something like this.
I think most of the people being able to speak against the mob opinion have many things in common. They are rich, famous, and are generally hard to cancel. Carmack, JKRowling and maybe even pinker are in this category. For example, one writer got fired just for tweeting "I stand with JK Rowling". (https://www.scotsman.com/news/people/scots-author-sacked-bac...) . Many professors have been suspended just for not speaking tone in tone with the popular opinion. If Pinker wasn't this famous, he might have been fired by now.
The problem with JKR in particular, is that she is "speaking out" against a group of people who are extremely oppressed, and using outdated / debunked info to do so.
Because of who she is, and her massive audience, this does real damage.
A person's right to even exist in society shouldn't be up for debate.
> A person's right to even exist in society shouldn't be up for debate.
But she isn't saying anything like that. No where has she ever said that trans people don't have a right to exist.
> Because of who she is, and her massive audience, this does real damage.
But this is the only reason she is able to speak at all. Another author got fired just for tweeting that she supported JKR. If JKR wasn't so famous, she would have been fired and cancelled long ago.
> against a group of people who are extremely oppressed, and using outdated / debunked info to do so
I have no expertise on the information JKR and her opponents are tweeting, but I agree she might be incorrect in several. But is it so wrong for her as a woman to say that she doesn't feel comfortable if any man who self identifies as a woman is allowed access to women spaces, because this is what a lot of her opponents reply with. Please note that women also have been oppressed for not centuries, but millennium.
With seeing more letters like this recently, I wonder if they can really have much of an effect. They seem to just ask kindly that people act more kind, which often doesn't do a whole ton. What is needed is to change the way communication is occurring away from viral algorithms promoting the most viral content (outragebait), which only certain companies and people can do.
I really like the term "outragebait", I think it fits perfectly.
One tactic i think is pretty clever is changing neutral to mean against. You can be vehemently for a topic or vehemently against a topic or you can just keep your mouth shut and live your life as you see fit.
I guess too many people were doing that because now those people are being positioned as part of the opposition. Now, not only are you suppose to be outraged at the other side you're suppose to be outraged at everyone not outraged or on the other side.
> What is needed is to change the way communication is occurring away from viral algorithms promoting the most viral content (outragebait), which only certain companies and people can do.
Exactly. Articles like this are fine and all, but they're generally preaching to the choir; the audience they really need to reach is indifferent to the arguments, and like it or not, calling for someone to be cancelled is also an exercise of their free speech rights.
Social networks don't want to change anything, because culture wars drive engagement (even if they slowly make the platforms uninhabitable).
I don't know what's to be done except to move away from social networks into smaller communities (Slack groups, etc.) that have their own norms of discourse.
> Social networks don't want to change anything, because culture wars drive engagement
Is there any public evidence that outrage-driven engagement is profitable? It's a statement that is frequently repeated, but I haven't seen any evidence for it.
FWIW getting server errors on this did make me chuckle, because the publisher of Harper's Magazine has had a reputation for being a neo-Luddite when it comes to web publishing [0]:
> He described being trapped in a corridor in the early 2000s “by a small mob of what I can’t help but refer to as ‘young people.’ ” Those youths, he wrote, demanded that he open the magazine to online readers. What he told them was “essentially, forget it.” The web, to him, “wasn’t much more than a gigantic Xerox machine” designed to rob publishers and writers.
One of the most fascinating things to me about the 1960s has always been the fashion in which power was transferred from the old left of the day, to what was then known as the "New Left" - Tom Hayden's crowd. I've always wondered what it would look like to see something like that happen in real time.
One might hope to see the then-"New Left", now both physically and ideologically very much the old left, face their supersedure with greater equanimity than their own predecessors, to whom they offered no more kindness than they are receiving now. They, too, had their little lists, back when they were young. To bleat about having earned a place on others' lists now fails to favorably impress, for all that it's unsurprising.
Mob justice over what people said years ago is very dangerous. And due to the global nature of the internet, it is very hard to get the mob off your back. It seems many students have been denied their college admissions due to stuff they tweeted as a teenager. It seems in the modern world felons deserve redemption, but bad tweeters do not. Not to mention that cancelling people over what they said in the past is so stupid, that if applied consistently, will lead to funny scenarios. For example, if teenagers should be punished for their past tweets, why shouldn't be Joe Biden for saying on the record that he doesn't support same.sex marriage in the 2008 VP debates. This is not even counting what opinions biden held in the 20th century.
It seems that we have come to a point where you simply can't speak on certain topics, neither in the affirmative nor in the negative, and so most people end up saying what will keep the mob at bay. Case in point, all the people attacking JK Rowling do not want to say that any man who self ids as a woman should have access to women's private spaces.
What do you see in the world that leads you to this?
Edit: I mean, I think they definitely deserve redemption. I don't society doing a good job of realizing this. If you're convinced otherwise, I'd like to be presented with the ideas / experiences that convinced you, so that they have the opportunity to change my mind, as well.
> you simply can't speak on certain topics
You know... that's actually correct, I think, and actually... it's reasonable. What business is it of mine to tell you what your life was like, or who you are, or who you should be? These are things I should shut up and listen about, instead of saying anything at all.
Nobody is universally "owed" anything but we do a lot of good and prudent things anyway because it's entirely within our capacity to execute good and prudent acts and we're sometimes better off for it. And yes we sometimes do bad and despicable things because sometimes impulse overrides reason, but that too is in our capacity to put a handle on and reign in, so we do, or at least we ought to.
So maybe there's a better way to articulate this dichotomy than the lazy argument of "You're not owed $thing"-which doesn't solve anything for anyone except the speaker's own ego.
I'm not sure if it's crafty or cowardly that the first section co-opts support by attacking Donald Trump and "right-wing demagogues".
Whatever their faults (and the historical right-wing witch-hunt parallels like McCarthyism), Trump and conservatives are not the enemies here - this modern censorship and cancel-culture trend is entirely an attack from (and problem of) the Left.
It is shameful, illiberal and will only be stopped if we are crystal clear where the blame lies.
TD is not far right. 4chan is "far right". 8chan is "far right". But there are regular far left threads on chans advocating for all kinds of radicalism (including violence) as well as making legitimate talking points - no one gets banned, even though the sites primarily lean right.
The only "side" interested in actual free speech currently is the "far right", unlike left leaning forums and media outlets which explicitly censor one particular point of view, regardless of whether it is backed by legitimate science which should be open to discussion.
Censorship has undeniably become a leftist problem, if you insist on reducing the high dimensional space of political leanings to a single myopic dimension. Unbelievable that in 2020 people are shamed for going to the last places on the internet where discourse is unrestricted.
Not my experience. Back when it was a going concern, The_Donald moderators were incredibly quick to ban anyone who was not a 100% full-throated supporter of Trump. I know because I was banned repeatedly for trying to engage in nuanced, good faith discussions. r/Conservative is extremely quick on the ban trigger as well.
I find that a desire for safe-spaces and monoculture spans both sides of the aisle and seems to be a broader trend in our culture today. Perhaps this desire always existed and the Internet's ability to cater to the long tail has simply enabled it.
There are discussion websites other than reddit...
Also calling the_donald "far right" really indicates the bias of discourse online. Which is part of the problem - people are deliberately loose with language and netizens (at least on reddit) truly believe that Nazis have taken over the Republican party...
> resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting.
I get it. This is aimed at left-wing people who think their side can do no evil and thus proceed to censor any disagreement. But it's still funny to me that this whole thing needs to be preceded with 'the right is bad, but believe it or not, people on the left might do some bad things too', as if any side has a monopoly on virtue and goodness.
It is being exploited though. It's literally part of the strategy:
"The longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the Left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats." -Steve Bannon
Sure, but it was Bannon and Trump who brought that sort of thing into electoral politics. Barack Obama was constantly telling college students and "cancel culture" that they'd gone too far and needed more civic spirit and respect for others' liberties.
And yet, Biden was a 'tough on crime' guy back in the 1980s and 1990s - his stances have contributed significantly to the institutional racism problem we all face today. Trump has a way better record on criminal justice reform. Don't fall for the hype. E.g. see https://www.politico.com/interactives/2020/justice-reform-bi...
I agree that it looks funny here. But I think it's more of a strategic thing: it reveals the target audience they're addressing, and trying to show "hey, we're one of you" before saying anything more controversial that follows (that it's at all controversial is more sad than funny however).
That wasn't the question. If cancer is the deadliest disease, that doesn't mean we can't talk about the obesity epidemic(or vice versa depending on the actual stats, I'm just making a general point).
Imagine if, every time someone wanted to talk about helping end the obesity epidemic, many other people chimed in about how dare you talk about obesity when cancer still exists. And the only way you could make a point about obesity is to put a disclaimer that cancer is totally worse than obesity.
One of these sides and the problem they represent just grew a huge amount in the last month. If it continues to grow at this rate, it will become the number one problem very shortly, and the time to speak out is now.
Entertain? Sure. But you're also talking about "mainstream media". If we had an unbiased media outlet making this accusation, I think it might make sense. But any person center or right-of-center makes no bones about the fact that all of the major media outlets are left and getting "more lefter" all the time.
I'm not aware of anyone on the right advocating that words are acts of violence. It might be possible, but I _know_ it comes from the left.
That said, that conservatives don't speak up more about this type of stuff is concerning. They are, after all, supposed to be about the business of "conserving" things.
That said, that they even published this letter is at least a breath of fresh air. Regardless of the view, I'm glad that there is a call to examine this.
What would be the left-wing analogy to President Trump rallying against the attacks on Confederate symbols (e.g. flag ban at NASCAR, taking down of statues) and using it as a purported example of liberal hypocrisy regarding tolerance and freedom of speech?
edit: This is a genuine question, not whataboutism. The letter is obviously very keyed to the current situation, rather than just a broad defense of free expression. Many of the signatories are presumably worried that backlash to perceived unchecked movements on the left will lead to the Trump administration retaining power. The parent commenter suggests that this kind of letter would be written in a vacuum, and I disagree.
This is a bit rich considering Harper’s has fired multiple editors over the last couple of decades because John MacArthur didn’t like their liberal views. How is that not “being cancelled”?
It's disappointing that, while they name DJT and the "radical right", they don't explicitly call out the "radical left" (it's assumed within the article, but it would be nice to call it out).
One of my favorite internet apologists has a saying that people who don't have good arguments have to resort to bad tactics, and for many people that I've had conversations with (especially among the left, but also among the right) this has often been very, very true.
While I don't support BLM/M4BL (the hashtag, not the sentence), I do think that several valid points have come up. And even though I disagree on their conclusions and sometimes their methods, it has at least caused me to think critically about how I understand the situation and what should be done about it.
I hope that the future can continue to be a place where we don't think of ideas as either "safe" or "unsafe". Any view we come across that challenges us can frighten/scare us away. Maybe it causes us to change our views, maybe it doesn't, but the introspection is valuable. I feel that's what a lot of people who want to silence debate are missing. Perhaps they don't want the introspection. Maybe they just want an echo chamber.
Regardless, let's fight for a world where ideas aren't crimes, and that people are strong/wise enough to debate and engage them in a way that makes everyone better.
"An open mind is like a fortress with its gates left unguarded".
Thing of it is, there ARE safe and unsafe ideas (or, more commonly, safe and unsafe presentation of ideas). And it's critical thinking skills that render you capable of safely handling unsafe ideas / presentations.
You're right that the introspection is valuable, and that encountering "unsafe" ideas should lead to it; so I'm going to suggest: it's a person's attitude towards introspection that realizes the risk posed by an idea.
> who want to silence debate
IMO these people are just very badly communicating the idea "stop talking about other people's lives, and have those people speak instead" (plus layers of baggage and trauma). Halle Berry's recent controversy over a trans role is a good example of this; people talked about how she should't play the role (and some other issues), what they meant was "someone who lived this story should tell this story".
> people are strong/wise enough
Yes. Do you support massively more funding for education? Or do you see something else as a means to fight for this?
A nit to pick: The consequences of ideas can be safe and unsafe. The words "The police are racist" can be questioned, examined, and judged accordingly. The _result_ of the ideas and how you process them are the issue here. Gasoline is perfectly safe if left alone. But thrown in a live fire it will cause major damage.
Discarding ideas simply because others might abuse them isn't the right way to go about this.
> "someone who lived this story should tell this story"
I feel that there is a danger to this argument. It is in the same vein as what I have encountered before: a refusal to hold any sort of meaningful conversation due to an intersectional party who claims that their point is "more valid" because of lived-experience. And they would not allow anyone else to say anything because they were not <insert intersectional crossroads here>.
This promotion, if left unchecked, can mean that the person lives within an echo chamber and can be very unhealthy. They are unwilling to have other people influence them. It can be very detrimental.
> Do you support massively more funding for education?
We homeschool, so I'm not really a proponent of state-run education. However, as a parent just talking to our children and fostering good relationships with everyone around us should be a priority. I'm for the idea that this concept starts within the home and then extends out. Kids mirror what they see at home.
I think it's important to consider the primary audience here. If this were a Wikipedia article, a neutral perspective would be important, yes. But this isn't a Wikipedia article. It's a persuasion piece aimed at the members of the left, and writing from the perspective of the left (or at least not from blatantly outside that perspective) makes it more effective.
I agree and would go even farther. This article would be 0% effective if written in a neutral style. When you're trying to reach people stuck in an "us vs them" mentality, you have to identify yourself as "us" before you start criticizing "us". Otherwise the criticism will be seen as identifying yourself as "them" and people will start railing, not against what you're saying, but against all the other arguments associated with "them".
Can you point to an example of where an idea has become a crime? Specifically, an idea or action that has not already been criminalized? I am not in full support of this, but all I see are people losing their jobs in private companies for at best being stupid and at worst bring harmful to their co-workers and creating a toxic oppressive atmosphere at work.
Lets inspect these ideas that are being deemed unsafe and why they are and then make a judgement.
Every time I dig into this subject it just turns out to be a bunch of a privilaged people bemoaning an inability to keep spouting their ALREADY DISPROVEN ideas like they are some novel creation.
> While I don't support BLM/M4BL, (the hashtag, not the sentence
This is a bullshit take. You either think black people are human and their lives matter. Or you don't. There's no "not the hashtag" -- the hashtag is the literal "black lives matter." The entire point of the political movement is to recognize that black people are people too and that western institutions of power * do not * recognize this truth.
> You either think black people are human and their lives matter.
You are making a false equivalence here. I can (and do) believe that black people are fully human and their lives matter.
I can also agree with certain points of the BLM movement, again, disagreeing with their reasoning, but supporting some the overarching ideas.
> The entire point of the political movement is to recognize that black people are people too
Based upon their website[0], they seem to have a much broader idea of "what matters" that goes far beyond "black people are people to" that will, undoubtedly, cause many people to shy away from the hashtag (but not the sentence).
Again, I think the George Floyd's killing, underscores a massive problem that needs to be justified, but you don't have to agree with BLM to want to see that problem solved.
> [...] the hashtag is the literal "black lives matter."
No, it's not, that's exactly the point. Otherwise #WhiteLivesMatter is completely valid too. After all, literally "white lives matter" is true, right?
This is exactly the bad faith argumentation that the GP and TFA are about. "You either support our hashtag or you do not think black people are people too."
> The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.
Unregulated markets have had near a century of exposure and yet here we are. So I think maybe we also need reform to stop the wealthiest just buying good press coverage of ideas which they find convenient.
Some bright spots I've noticed in the past month or so in this area, for those who care both about justice and open debate:
- John Carmack signal boosting[1] Sarah Downey's article "This PC witch-hunt is killing free speech, and we have to fight it"[2]
- The critical comments on the obligatory "BLM" post in r/askscience[3]
- Glenn Loury's response[4] to Brown University's letter to faculty/alumni about racial justice.
- The failure[5] of a group of folks to cancel Steven Pinker over accusations of racial insensitivity.
[1] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1279105937404579841
[2] https://medium.com/@sarahadowney/this-politically-correct-wi...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gvc7k9/black_li...
[4] https://www.city-journal.org/brown-university-letter-racism
[5] https://mobile.twitter.com/sapinker/status/12799365902367907...
Carmack's comment on the Cultural Revolution was strange. The greatest problem with the Cultural Revolution, its defining characteristic in most people's minds, was all the mass murder. McCarthyism or something might have been a better historical analog to what is happening, but it would have been pretty tricky to jujitsu that example into a slam against the left, or the kids today, or whatever was being attempted there.
The article he linked to was a little peculiar. As someone who's inclined to agree with the author about the First Amendment, the poorly thought out paragraph about racism - using a link to hate crime statistics to demonstrate the low numbers of "actual racists," but then making a remark like The statement “black lives matter” is easy to agree with if you’re a decent human being, which raises some questions about why we all have so many not-decent people (just indecent, not actual racists?) in our social media feeds - distracted from the overall message.
> but then making a remark like The statement “black lives matter” is easy to agree with if you’re a decent human being, which raises some questions about why we all have so many not-decent people (just indecent, not actual racists?) in our social media feeds - distracted from the overall message.
The objection that most have to the phrase "black lives matter" is exactly the same objection that most have to "all lives matter". That is, essentially no-one objects to the sentiment expressed in the words in and of themselves, but they are suspicious of the political motivations of those who use the slogan.
There is a relative minority of people that engage in what is called "vice-signaling". That is, they claim to object to a commonly held moral sentiment that they feel has been co-opted for a partisan political cause. I think it's probably a counter-productive strategy, but I think those people can be reasoned with if you can separate the moral sentiment from the political platform.
>The greatest problem with the Cultural Revolution, its defining characteristic in most people's minds, was all the mass murder.
I'm not sure that's true. Stipulating that it was "the greatest problem", how could it be the defining characteristic considering all the other historical instances of mass murder?
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In the case of "black lives matter", part of the point some people are missing is why it's necessary to force people to say something that's as obvious as the nose on our faces. We're being forced to chant a slogan. An empty slogan because of course, black lives matter. No one has ever said differently.
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What is “the overall message?” Is it just the plain meaning of the words? Is the idea that we need to reform the police so they stop murdering Black people?
Or is it the New York Times’ claim that “nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery?” https://mobile.twitter.com/maragay/status/116140196616729805....
Or is it that we need to “disrupt the western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” as BLM’s website claims? https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/
Or is it that “institutions of white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism” are all equivalent evils that must be “abolished,” as BLM’s DC chapter proclaims? https://fee.org/articles/is-black-lives-matter-marxist-no-an...
Or is it—as the 1619 project claims and which is now being taught in schools—the supposed historical fact that capitalism is an outgrowth of plantation slavery? https://www.city-journal.org/1619-project-conspiracy-theory
Or is it applied Marxism?
> No doubt, the organization itself was quite radical from the very beginning. Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors described herself and fellow co-founder Alicia Garza as “trained Marxists” in a recently resurfaced video from 2015.
Look at how much the debate has transformed within the last month. It started out with universal condemnation of a murder committed by the police in Minnesota. Now, we are talking about tearing town statues of Abraham Lincoln: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/education/2020/06/26/uw-... (“Students in the UW-Madison's Black student union are calling on university officials to remove the statue of the nation's 16th president.”) My high school, named after Thomas Jefferson, is thinking of renaming itself. We are debating whether the Constitution as a “pro-slavery document.”
I am pro-BLM. To me, it’s a matter of my faith, as well as my personal experience living in places like Baltimore and Philadelphia and realizing that Black people just aren’t getting a fair shake. I think people of every stripe can do something to help finish the job of reconstruction. Libertarians can pitch in to help end police abuse of minorities. Conservatives can help push forward school choice, which the majority of Black people support. Middle of the road people can agree that we need to undo the pro-confederacy monument building that happened during the KKK era.
But I also believe that our country rests on mostly admirable principles and history, and that Marxism is a recipe for suffering while capitalism is uplifting billions of people before our very eyes. I can hardly blame people who are skeptical when they are forced to chant a slogan that was coined by self-avowed Marxists. You can’t blame people for being cautious in their support of a movement that has under the same roof a majority of well-meaning people who simply want to eliminate police brutality and inequality, and a vocal minority of people who view those problems as an indictment of our entire country and it’s institutions. The far left, in characteristic fashion, has taken something most people could agree on, and pushed it further and further until normal people are forced to push back to keep society from crumbling beneath their feet. And that’s a tragedy for everyone, especially people who care about the core concept of fixing policing in America.
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[flagged]
The article in question also linked to Scott Adams who recently said and I quote "If Biden is elected, there's a good chance you will be dead within the year. Republicans will be hunted." [1]
So it seems rather ironic to write an article about 'political witchhunts' using someone who is claiming that Republicans are going to be systematically hunted down and murdered. I don't think the article was written in good faith at all.
[1] https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/127830983545328435...
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To follow up on [4], here's Ain terries with Glenn Loury in Vox from 2016: https://www.vox.com/2016/9/20/12915036/race-criminal-justice....
Also an interview done with him a few weeks ago: https://www.city-journal.org/racism-is-an-empty-thesis
The broadening circle of people willing to exercise their free speech to condemn Pinker's recurrent and insidious appeals to race-informed genetic determinism is a bright spot, as are the numerous people dunking on Pinker for cosigning an open letter that decries "ostracism and public shaming" as injuries to our culture of free expression, rather than expressions of that culture.
Ken White had some smart things to say about this today, with respect to "the problem of the preferred first speaker". Worth tracking down.
That's not to say there aren't dark spots; David Shor's firing certainly appears to be one of them. But I don't think any of those dark spots put Pinker, the T-1000 version of Charles Murray, above criticism. Which is, of course, what an open letter against "public shaming" purports to do.
It's disappointing to read this thread. Even tptacek, a prominent speaker on Hacker News, exhibits bizarre ignorance regarding this topic.
Generally speaking, it seems to me that much sloppy thinking in the current debate involves the mixture of the following basic errors:
1) Ignorance about biology. Evolutionary biology has been an exceptionally fertile section of science for the last decades, and provided deeper understandings on many biological phenomenon, including human behaviors. The accusers' understanding of biology (e.g. condemning it as "genetic determinism") is at least 50 years behind.
2) Poor understanding of the due process. Calling a random petition to condemn a person publicly is exactly a witch hunt. History proves that it's a very error-prone way to punish someone, and no civilized country accept it as a proper procedure anymore.
As to (2) I'd recommend everyone to read DJB's "The death of due process". It is very important, because it may be you (or your family) to be hung by lynch mobs next time.
https://blog.cr.yp.to/20160607-dueprocess.html
I guess I don't see the problem of the preferred first speaker in practice.
Let's take the examples in question: I've never seen either Murray or Pinker come out of the gates swinging with poorly framed appeals to genetic determinism (if they make reference to such things at all it's almost always in response to criticism, and it never seems to be more than very light handed considered speculation). I've also never seen them lob insults, outright support mob justice, or make a targeted cherry-picked attempt to discredit a particular individual (admittedly I'm only so plugged in so it's possible I'm missing something). Yet their critics seem frequently guilty of this.
In other words, I don't think I'm holding them to a lower standard for having spoken first. Am I misunderstanding the argument? Or am I actually doing this and I'm just not aware of it?
Edit: Perhaps it's also worth stating that I do hold these two people in high regard which definitely lowers my defenses when it comes to quickly evaluating their various claims. Mainly based on how they have engaged in good faith. That said, I disagree with both of them a lot. Recently I've put a lot of effort into identifying a group of folks that I disagree with but respect, since it seems like almost nobody does that and it seems like a big problem that people only respect those they agree with.
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Of course people should be free to vehemently argue against Steven Pinker's ideas. The problem is that people are instead descending to personal attacks on him, including circulating a petition (with forged signatures, to boot) to get the Linguistic Society of America to strip him of his Fellow status.
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>- John Carmack signal boosting[1] Sarah Downey's article "This PC witch-hunt is killing free speech, and we have to fight it"[2]
Is this really a "bright spot"? Expressing a fear (without any reasoning or evidence shown as the basis for that fear) that one's opponents approve of an atrocious campaign orchestrated by a totalitarian regime?
There's a lot of room to criticize "cancel culture" and deplatforming. Comparisons with mass killings and state-orchestrated oppression is an odd choice, and (to take the other side of the fence here) with about the same amount of merit as saying that people critical of BLM have similar opinions of the Nazi regime.
There is a direct line of descent between Maoist agitation in Western countries throughout the late-1960s and 1970s and the current radical left. They have explicitly approved of the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" in the past - often enthusiastically so - and for all we know, they continue to do so. The M.O. is certainly comparable.
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> Comparisons with mass killings and state-orchestrated oppression is an odd choice,
Coordinated attempts to ruin peoples ability to earn a living is pretty bad. It also strikes me that such economic terrorism could very well be the precursors to actual killing and state oppression. People who don't respect the right to liberty or property of others probably don't respect their right to life either.
> with about the same amount of merit as saying that people critical of BLM have similar opinions of the Nazi regime.
I agree with the point that our criticism needs to have some proportionality, but I don't think this particular comparison is entirely valid. In both the Cultural Revolution and the current Cancel Culture, the objective is the purging institutions of dissidents and the destruction of all artifacts of the old order (e.g. destruction of statues, including Frederick Douglass for some reason). Whatever the people participating in Cancel Culture believe, they are still following the Cultural Revolution template. Obviously the Cultural Revolution was far more violent, but I think that assuming such mass violence can't or won't happen here is mistaken.
On the other hand, there are plenty of critics of BLM who are quite ardently against abusive policing, but either don't think the racial component is as central to the problem of authoritarian policing as BLM claims, or object to some of the other principles of BLM that have nothing to do with race or policing.
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So I didn't read all the links, but Glenn's letter is just absolute projection on his part. He claims the letter sent out to staff and students treated unestablished facts as established and then does nothing to say how they are unestablished. It might be cringey to post the requisite BLM statement, but its not inaccurate. I see a lot of comments on this thread claiming censorship with no evidence or introspection of why certain things are being called out. J.K. Rowling is a terf through and through. I am sorry, but claiming that a letter talks too much about race is one of the most fragile things I have ever seen. This is an uncomfortable moment for lots of white people, but we need to live with it instead of instantly buck against it and hide in "intellectual rigor."
The Sarah Downey article you mention is of really low quality.
She parrots tired cliches (you couldn't make Blazing Saddles today!) in a world where we're realizing that many beloved comedians are sexual predators as well.
She thinks JK Rowling did nothing wrong, she only followed the science! (no mention that she explicitly accuses transwomen of being a danger to ciswomen, she thinks trans rights are brainwashing teenagers into wanting to change their gender, and has a few other obviously transphobic and harmful calls to action).
She accuses the people calling for lockdowns and isolation for Covid19 of not caring about poor people, when the highest voices on this were also calling for relief funds and rent freezes.
She then accuses the BLM protesters of violence and looting, with not one word about the police escalation of violence, nor of white supremacist provocateurs.
And of course, she thinks wanting to join protests for social justice is hypocrisy if yesterday you were encouraging people not to go to clubs and restaurants to avoid the pandemic.
And finally, of course she will defend the right of Holocaust deniers to be heard, but calls for the most powerful celebrities to shut up or change their ways are harrasement and a sign that free speach is dead.
The whole article is a collection of these reactionary hot takes, peppered with self-defenses of how progressive the author is (she is Jewish! And has gay friends! And enjoys RuPaul's drag race!), meant to make it sound like she is one of the people who would support the causes she is actually attacking.
I grew up in a very religious family. It was funny how you could get ostracized from the community for not following the guidelines. This really (REALLY) depended on the individual communities more so than say the religion and the relative power of that religion in that area. (EDIT: from my experience with 4 christian based religions.) For example, in Utah, not being Mormon or even being found out to consume caffeine could get you in all sorts of hot water.
What I from the left has similarities to the religious fervor of my youth. You either believe and are part of the solution. To do that you have to convert everyone, and if you aren't with us then you're against us. It might be that it just evokes a similar emotional response to me as being on the "outs" with my childhood faith.
Many people want to have faith in something. We've torn down religion as fairly corrupt, government has been likewise torn down for many people. Now we have massive leaderless movements that offer the same sort of thing.
My issue with this movement, is it's amplified the worst of our human nature by having social media (which I recognize I'm consuming right now). If you don't want global censoring of opposing ideas we need to have a better way of performing human interactions online. We need more humanization of people through technology not the dehumanization of people through technology.
"[T]hird-wave antiracism is a profoundly religious movement in everything but terminology. The idea that whites are permanently stained by their white privilege, gaining moral absolution only by eternally attesting to it, is the third wave’s version of original sin. The idea of a someday when America will “come to terms with race” is as vaguely specified a guidepost as Judgment Day. Explorations as to whether an opinion is “problematic” are equivalent to explorations of that which may be blasphemous. The social mauling of the person with “problematic” thoughts parallels the excommunication of the heretic. What is called “virtue signaling,” then, channels the impulse that might lead a Christian to an aggressive display of her faith in Jesus."
https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/america-is-in-the-grip...
It very much feels like a secular religion/cult to some folks I see. Faith based beliefs that attack data/science, chanting, martyrs, blasphemy, etc.
> My issue with this movement, is it's amplified the worst of our human nature by having social media (which I recognize I'm consuming right now).
What movement do you mean?
> If you don't want global censoring of opposing ideas we need to have a better way of performing human interactions online.
I absolutely agree with this. My experience with online interactions is that they've been filled with polarized sentiment for a long time (I've heard the sentiment "never read the comments" about news articles on the internet for at least 5 years), not just in the last few months.
Movement as in general cultural shift with the advent of social media. Not really a specific movement as in #somemovement.
For example. I'd fucking love to have this conversation with a group of people and instead of getting a ^ or (Insert down arrow) see your expression, you either nodding along, or making a slight facial tweak that lets me know I hurt your feelings so I can see, oh crap, I shouldn't have said "movement" and instead said cultural shift. That real-time feedback that build empathy and makes me not want to piss you off, or makes me walk away thinking, we'll we're never going to see eye to eye.
The movement from me having lunch with friends, to losing them on facebook because they support #somemovement and I have a nuanced opinion about it.
EDIT: I'm also not implying I hurt your feelings with the word movement, I'm creating a narrative specific to this thread to create an example of how in a in person setting I might have picked up on that, but in text I have to be super clear instead of being able to have an easy back and forth to get to the nuance of what I meant.
There are two phases to cultural change: talk and action.
The discussion about whether change is needed has been going on for something between 20 and 40 years, depending on who you ask.
This is an action phase, and action phases demand a certain amount of "with us or against us" structure, because one has to quickly decide which allies can be relied upon, which will flake under pressure, and which are actually in favor of the opposing opinion and trying to lure a group into a trap.
It is scary in that it is not an "anything goes, throw spaghetti at the walls and see what sticks" open forum time, but that's because while one side is throwing spaghetti at the walls, another side is chanting "Jews will not replace us" and "blood and soil" in the streets and driving cars into counter-protests. And, it appears, possibly using their dominance in America's law enforcement structure to kill without consequence, which is the matchpoint for the latest demonstrations and fighting.
Firing people for expressing "distasteful" views publicly is nothing new. In 2003, MSNBC fired the host of their most popular program, Phil Donahue, for expressing his opposition to the Iraq War.
> An internal MSNBC memo warned Donahue was a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war,” providing “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
Fortunately for Phil, he was well-off and probably wasn't relying on the income.
With at-will employment, companies have enormous leverage over their workers' freedom of expression and it's disappointing to see this letter with some ostensibly "left" signatures attached leave that consideration untouched.
On a related note: arguably one of the biggest "cancellings" of the post-9/11 era was that of the Dixie Chicks [1].
"Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas."
The above comment (made by the lead singer at a concert in England) was all it took for them to receive death threats and get blacklisted by thousands of radio stations in the US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_controversy
They were hardly cancelled though, they were more feted after the controversy. They went from the CMA to winning album of the year at the Grammys, got on the cover of Rolling Stone, etc. In many ways they vaulted from the country music backwater into the mainstream.
Interestingly enough, they changed their name to “The Chicks” 2 weeks ago.
> Firing people for expressing "distasteful" views publicly is nothing new.
I don't think that is a correct synopsis of the concern. The concern is that there is no space to discuss the definition of "distasteful". There are also a bunch of amorphous terms being thrown around and any attempt to clarify those terms in general or to challenge how a person is using those terms or to explore the ramification of those terms; those efforts are themselves labeled "distasteful".
I'm hesitant to even list the terms that I don't think are well defined in our public discourse for this very reason. I anticipate that I will be immediately labeled as persona-non-grata for trying to clarify what the heck we are talking about.
> The concern is that there is no space to discuss the definition of "distasteful".
What do you mean by this? What kind of space is missing? Was that fact that being anti-war is distasteful something that was discussed and agreed upon in 2003, so that firing was alright?
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I'm very on board with ending at-will employment, but it would only address a small subset of the issues they're describing. Employment protections won't prevent books from being withdrawn, journalists and professors from being censured, or leaders from being forced to resign.
Right, nor should it. The same protections that would keep a person from being forced to step down when someone discovers they were pro-Iraq war would be used to protect them from being forced to step down when someone discovers they're a Klan leader.
I think this comes down to a lack of trust in good-faith debate. People don't trust that someone "from the other side" will actually have the empathy and generosity required to have a good-faith discussion on a topic.
Also, I believe that we're constantly hearing so many voices trying to convince us one way or another, that our own discussions on those topics end up being attempts to convince others. That would explain "safe spaces" to some degree -- people don't want the pressure of having someone else try to convince them of something they don't agree with.
Some of it just the two-party system. The points don't matter, just which side of the line each person is on. I wonder if more parties would help depolarize the situation. I'm really not sure.
> That would explain "safe spaces" to some degree -- people don't want the pressure of having someone else try to convince them of something they don't agree with.
In my experience, it's more that people don't try to convince. Hell, the people who need safe-spaces, and the people they're trying to be "safe" from, don't even share the underlying epistemic assumptions that would allow them to "convince" each-other of anything less clearly observable than the sky being blue. The latter group, the people who other people need to be "safe" from, usually just scream, berate, harass, and often resort to violence.
(Note that I've avoided identifying "which side" is which. The answer is: it depends which side is dominant in your particular area. Boston and San Francisco and Brooklyn are left-dominant. Middle America is right-dominant.)
No place in the US is left-dominant (this is true of most of Europe as well). There are right-dominant areas and centrist-dominant areas. Left discourse (think Chomsky) is extremely rare and almost never accepted in the media.
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It's also experiential - people reaching out in good faith for debate have consistently had their hand chewed up in return; and then a whole audience that sees that exchange and cements their opinions further. I'd argue the problem is often the choice of venue, and the expectation that internet strangers are truly going to come to a debate in good faith, but it still sets a consistent tone.
> The points don't matter, just which side of the line each person is on
That's because it isn't just about ideas, it's about power. Politics and government now are not about coming to consensus solutions that everyone, or at least everyone but a small minority who just wants to game the system, can live with. Politics and government now are about imposing on everyone whichever set of ideas gets a slim 51% majority. That isn't the way it was supposed to work.
I personally would like to see a Constitutional amendment that would require a 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress to pass any legislation, and a 3/4 majority required to override a Presidential veto. That would at least require some amount of bipartisan consensus, and therefore some amount of actually somewhat reasonable debate instead of just shouting back and forth, before a public policy was imposed on everyone.
"That would at least require some amount of bipartisan consensus, and therefore some amount of actually somewhat reasonable debate..."
What you would get would be a lot of back-room deals and strange bedfellows. Like now, only more so.
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A) a 2/3 requirement would mean nothing gets passed, benefitting the only party that gains by obstructing legislation, the Republican Party
B) it doesn’t matter how high the bar is set when one side refuses to do their half of bipartisan responsibility (see impeachment)
When people are strictly divided, the barrier to pass something should be lower so that elections change things again. A government that can’t act might as well not exist. There’s no point in holding elections if legislators never pass any change. The liberal values that make the West free depend on civic engagement.
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I think a big part of it is the public space. Let's say I'm on X side of a debate. I can, in good faith, try to talk to someone from side Y. I might find some such person, or even several.
The problem is, if we're talking in a public forum, anyone can come up (from side X, side Y, or both) and jump in not in good faith. And so I get, as Fellshard said, my hand chewed off, not by the person I was talking to, but by a bunch of drive-by conversation-killers.
Under current conditions, I don't think a real conversation can happen in public (which includes social media).
Your first point sounds accurate to me.
I think what we're seeing is the solidification of identity in such strong and unyielding terms that anything that threatens that identity immediately triggers a basic survival instinct. At that point, rational discourse is not possible.
Correct. Rational discourse has already happened, for decades. We appear on the cusp of a structural shift, and in that span of time rational discourse isn't welcome.
People talked about whether the US should enter World War I for years before the German navy targeted US merchant vessels. After the decision to enter, speaking out against the militarization was grounds for arrest. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fiery-socialist-chall...
We have more parties than the US and are less polarised[1]. I recommend more parties, but don't see any incremental way the US could get them.
[1] but then again, we had a mid-nineteenth century religiously-motivated civil war and it only killed a few hundred people. So maybe we support a plurality of parties because we're less polarisable, and not the other way around?
(rather than having a fabric of society, prone to ripping, having a dense irregular felt of society, of tocquevillean overlapping voluntary associations, FTW?)
Ranked choice voting would help considerably
We don’t want to convince each other, we want to destroy each other.
handwave I think it's more "disempower," in general. There's nearly no doing open shooting, but people out in the streets are extremely disinterested in a conversation about "Maybe cops aren't so bad, you guys."
People not willing to venture out their echo chambers is bad, but much better than being hell bent on taking away the livelihood of others for bad tweets.
I find it weird that so many people seem to think that "attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity" (I guess this is a fancy way of saying cancel culture?) is a big problem, because frankly I have no idea how big a problem it is. Where are the statistics on this? How many are actually impacted by it? There are many articles citing examples and saying how dangerous it is (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/25/online-shaming-d...), and yes there are certainly such examples, but are these just outliers? Is this like air travel, where really for the most part it's ok for people to speak their minds and people get overly freaked out because of rare events?
Actually curious to hear what people on here think about this.
If you'd like to see how big of a problem it is, post "males are not females" or "males do not have periods" or "all lives matter" or "we should not be giving hormone blockers to children" to your Twitter or Facebook accounts. Go right ahead. If you feel even the slightest bit of trepidation over publicly stating any of those things, then you will see first hand how big of a problem it is.
*edit
this very post will be down-voted
If I were to post one of these things, I would certainly get some side-eye, but I very much doubt I would be fired or the like. And since when is feeling some trepidation over saying something controversial (because people might dislike you for it) unnatural? I mean, is your stance "it should be ok for me to say whatever I like publicly"?
I guess you think these are all examples of perfectly rational things to say that cannot be disputed, but let's just take "all lives matter". Sure, no one can disagree that "all lives matter", but saying this implies that you think this in response to "black lives matter" , and Pinker himself articulates the issue with this well:
"Linguists, of all people, should understand the difference between a trope or collocation, such as the slogan “All lives matter,” and the proposition that all lives matter. (Is someone prepared to argue that some lives don’t matter?) And linguists, of all people, should understand the difference between a turn in the context of a conversational exchange and a sentence that expresses an idea. It’s true that if someone were to retort “All lives matter” in direct response to “Black lives matter,’ they’d be making a statement that downplays the racism and other harms suffered by African Americans."
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/07/05/the-purity-posse-p...
At least 1/10 of the posts on my Facebook feed at any given time say one of those things or something similar. The people making these posts are not being cancelled, fired, or really even called out.
In my filter bubble the people posting things like 'Black Lives Matter', suggesting that we use people's chosen pronouns, or indicating that maybe our current justice system is anything other than absolutely upstanding and unchangeable are the ones being called out. They're still not being fired for their opinions, though.
I could see myself getting fired from my company for stating one of these views. Even as I write this, I feel it's important for me to state the following.
I think the "all lives matter" is a anti-slogan to something important so I wouldn't say that. I think the first two are based on sex, which is not really disputed. You can gender identify how you'd like though.
I think the hormone blockers is a complex issue and I'll leave it at that.
But I recognize that if I held radical ideas (which the ones you pointed out are either on the edge or beyond it), I very well might get fired for expressing them in a public forum if someone showed that to my companies HR. To deny that is just me being blind.
To be clear, I took my job with that explicit knowledge that, any public information on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, or here would be scrutinized. I don't like it, but I also went into that with my eyes wide open.
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Feeling trepidation before posting sentiments that have complex and potentially problematic histories within public discourse does not equate to being targeted by cancel culture.
If I post "the Republic party interfered with Donald Trump's impeachment investigation by not allowing witnesses to testify before Congress" on my social media I'm sure I would get some backlash; that does not mean that I have been cancelled. It means that I've chosen to post decisively about an issue that might not be as black and white as I consider it to be.
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> Where are the statistics on this? How many are actually impacted by it?
It's a real problem, but mostly just for the sort of people who might sign on to a letter such as this: elite think tankers, academics, and columnists, who would love nothing more than to be able to continue spouting unsubstantiated nonsense with impunity.
If your livelihood is throwing opinions into the Internet wind, then of course cancel culture is an existential threat. As these sorts of people now tend to be extremely online, every little barb and retort pains them disproportionally, too.
For most of us, it's just a distraction. If you're not famous on the Internet, you can't be canceled to begin with.
Nonsense.
Read Matt Taibbi’s recent article for starters. David Shor(a junior data scientist), a Mexican-American construction worker etc.
12-year olds kicked out of school and ostracised for saying the n-word on some random TikTok.
You really must be kidding when you’re saying “normal” people aren’t affected.
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I'm not sure how you'd go about collecting statistics on the question. You can go poll employers on how many people they've fired for ideological nonconformity, but they're all going to report 0 regardless of whether it's true. Anecdotes might be the best evidence available.
I suspect that employers would not admit to firing people for ideological nonconformity, even if they did so. There would be some platitude instead, and you'd have to decode whether the platitude meant that or not.
What kind of data are you looking for? Number of people fired for a tweet? Number of colleagues shunned for not being woke enough?
Yes, something along those lines. It's not like it's impossible to categorize and quantify and catalogue 'cancel culture' events -- even if the result is somewhat subjective , it's better than just this vague belief based on rare examples. I mean honestly, is this 'cancel culture' really a thing, or it is mostly celebrities sometimes being criticized (at times rightly by sensible progressives, at times wrongly by overly woke people) that somehow has many on HN and a whole lot of people so anxious?
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I think this framing of the issue is pretty interesting. There are a decent number of articles that talk about how cancel culture affects celebrities, but I do think it would be pretty hard to quantify the effects of cancel culture. It seems hard to define.
Personally, I'm not totally sold by the letter from Harper's. But I don't have data one way or another to support my bias. I don't believe at face value that cancel culture is the root cause (or even a root cause) of the problems folks see with American public discourse. I wonder how to quantify something like this.
Why do you need data when you can experience the chilling effect cancel culture has on open discussion for yourself?
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I think most of the people being able to speak against the mob opinion have many things in common. They are rich, famous, and are generally hard to cancel. Carmack, JKRowling and maybe even pinker are in this category. For example, one writer got fired just for tweeting "I stand with JK Rowling". (https://www.scotsman.com/news/people/scots-author-sacked-bac...) . Many professors have been suspended just for not speaking tone in tone with the popular opinion. If Pinker wasn't this famous, he might have been fired by now.
The problem with JKR in particular, is that she is "speaking out" against a group of people who are extremely oppressed, and using outdated / debunked info to do so.
Because of who she is, and her massive audience, this does real damage.
A person's right to even exist in society shouldn't be up for debate.
> A person's right to even exist in society shouldn't be up for debate.
But she isn't saying anything like that. No where has she ever said that trans people don't have a right to exist.
> Because of who she is, and her massive audience, this does real damage.
But this is the only reason she is able to speak at all. Another author got fired just for tweeting that she supported JKR. If JKR wasn't so famous, she would have been fired and cancelled long ago.
> against a group of people who are extremely oppressed, and using outdated / debunked info to do so
I have no expertise on the information JKR and her opponents are tweeting, but I agree she might be incorrect in several. But is it so wrong for her as a woman to say that she doesn't feel comfortable if any man who self identifies as a woman is allowed access to women spaces, because this is what a lot of her opponents reply with. Please note that women also have been oppressed for not centuries, but millennium.
No one is debating whether trans people have the right to exist.
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With seeing more letters like this recently, I wonder if they can really have much of an effect. They seem to just ask kindly that people act more kind, which often doesn't do a whole ton. What is needed is to change the way communication is occurring away from viral algorithms promoting the most viral content (outragebait), which only certain companies and people can do.
I really like the term "outragebait", I think it fits perfectly.
One tactic i think is pretty clever is changing neutral to mean against. You can be vehemently for a topic or vehemently against a topic or you can just keep your mouth shut and live your life as you see fit.
I guess too many people were doing that because now those people are being positioned as part of the opposition. Now, not only are you suppose to be outraged at the other side you're suppose to be outraged at everyone not outraged or on the other side.
> What is needed is to change the way communication is occurring away from viral algorithms promoting the most viral content (outragebait), which only certain companies and people can do.
Exactly. Articles like this are fine and all, but they're generally preaching to the choir; the audience they really need to reach is indifferent to the arguments, and like it or not, calling for someone to be cancelled is also an exercise of their free speech rights.
Social networks don't want to change anything, because culture wars drive engagement (even if they slowly make the platforms uninhabitable).
I don't know what's to be done except to move away from social networks into smaller communities (Slack groups, etc.) that have their own norms of discourse.
> Social networks don't want to change anything, because culture wars drive engagement
Is there any public evidence that outrage-driven engagement is profitable? It's a statement that is frequently repeated, but I haven't seen any evidence for it.
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Walking back from the precipice we're on is going to be very, very hard.
When I try to visit that page, I get an error saying "504 - this request was canceled", which is darkly amusing in its appropriateness.
You can find an Internet Archive snapshot here: https://web.archive.org/web/20200707133437/https://harpers.o...
FWIW getting server errors on this did make me chuckle, because the publisher of Harper's Magazine has had a reputation for being a neo-Luddite when it comes to web publishing [0]:
> He described being trapped in a corridor in the early 2000s “by a small mob of what I can’t help but refer to as ‘young people.’ ” Those youths, he wrote, demanded that he open the magazine to online readers. What he told them was “essentially, forget it.” The web, to him, “wasn’t much more than a gigantic Xerox machine” designed to rob publishers and writers.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160112032957/https://www.nytim...
I had the same, refreshed twice and it loaded.
One of the most fascinating things to me about the 1960s has always been the fashion in which power was transferred from the old left of the day, to what was then known as the "New Left" - Tom Hayden's crowd. I've always wondered what it would look like to see something like that happen in real time.
One might hope to see the then-"New Left", now both physically and ideologically very much the old left, face their supersedure with greater equanimity than their own predecessors, to whom they offered no more kindness than they are receiving now. They, too, had their little lists, back when they were young. To bleat about having earned a place on others' lists now fails to favorably impress, for all that it's unsurprising.
I think this is very important.
Mob justice over what people said years ago is very dangerous. And due to the global nature of the internet, it is very hard to get the mob off your back. It seems many students have been denied their college admissions due to stuff they tweeted as a teenager. It seems in the modern world felons deserve redemption, but bad tweeters do not. Not to mention that cancelling people over what they said in the past is so stupid, that if applied consistently, will lead to funny scenarios. For example, if teenagers should be punished for their past tweets, why shouldn't be Joe Biden for saying on the record that he doesn't support same.sex marriage in the 2008 VP debates. This is not even counting what opinions biden held in the 20th century.
It seems that we have come to a point where you simply can't speak on certain topics, neither in the affirmative nor in the negative, and so most people end up saying what will keep the mob at bay. Case in point, all the people attacking JK Rowling do not want to say that any man who self ids as a woman should have access to women's private spaces.
> world felons deserve redemption
What do you see in the world that leads you to this?
Edit: I mean, I think they definitely deserve redemption. I don't society doing a good job of realizing this. If you're convinced otherwise, I'd like to be presented with the ideas / experiences that convinced you, so that they have the opportunity to change my mind, as well.
> you simply can't speak on certain topics
You know... that's actually correct, I think, and actually... it's reasonable. What business is it of mine to tell you what your life was like, or who you are, or who you should be? These are things I should shut up and listen about, instead of saying anything at all.
> It seems many students have been denied their college admissions due to stuff they tweeted as a teenager.
How many of them have still been denied after showing genuine remorse for their views? Nobody is owed a college admission.
> all the people attacking JK Rowling do not want to say that any man who self ids as a woman should have access to women's private spaces
Nobody's saying that men who falsely claim to be women should have access to women's spaces.
Nobody is owed a college admission.
Nobody is universally "owed" anything but we do a lot of good and prudent things anyway because it's entirely within our capacity to execute good and prudent acts and we're sometimes better off for it. And yes we sometimes do bad and despicable things because sometimes impulse overrides reason, but that too is in our capacity to put a handle on and reign in, so we do, or at least we ought to.
So maybe there's a better way to articulate this dichotomy than the lazy argument of "You're not owed $thing"-which doesn't solve anything for anyone except the speaker's own ego.
> Nobody's saying that men who falsely claim to be women should have access to women's spaces.
What are they saying?
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I'm not sure if it's crafty or cowardly that the first section co-opts support by attacking Donald Trump and "right-wing demagogues".
Whatever their faults (and the historical right-wing witch-hunt parallels like McCarthyism), Trump and conservatives are not the enemies here - this modern censorship and cancel-culture trend is entirely an attack from (and problem of) the Left.
It is shameful, illiberal and will only be stopped if we are crystal clear where the blame lies.
>While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture
The "radical right" enclaves on the internet are literally the only places where you won't be banned for not falling in line.
We need to have this discussion in more than one dimension. Left/right and authoritarian/anarchist are orthogonal metrics.
I'm not sure which "radical right" enclaves you are talking about.
Donald trump and conservative groups on reddit for example are some of the most ban-heavy groups around. Where are you thinking about?
TD is not far right. 4chan is "far right". 8chan is "far right". But there are regular far left threads on chans advocating for all kinds of radicalism (including violence) as well as making legitimate talking points - no one gets banned, even though the sites primarily lean right.
The only "side" interested in actual free speech currently is the "far right", unlike left leaning forums and media outlets which explicitly censor one particular point of view, regardless of whether it is backed by legitimate science which should be open to discussion.
Censorship has undeniably become a leftist problem, if you insist on reducing the high dimensional space of political leanings to a single myopic dimension. Unbelievable that in 2020 people are shamed for going to the last places on the internet where discourse is unrestricted.
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Not my experience. Back when it was a going concern, The_Donald moderators were incredibly quick to ban anyone who was not a 100% full-throated supporter of Trump. I know because I was banned repeatedly for trying to engage in nuanced, good faith discussions. r/Conservative is extremely quick on the ban trigger as well.
I find that a desire for safe-spaces and monoculture spans both sides of the aisle and seems to be a broader trend in our culture today. Perhaps this desire always existed and the Internet's ability to cater to the long tail has simply enabled it.
There are discussion websites other than reddit...
Also calling the_donald "far right" really indicates the bias of discourse online. Which is part of the problem - people are deliberately loose with language and netizens (at least on reddit) truly believe that Nazis have taken over the Republican party...
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> resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting.
I get it. This is aimed at left-wing people who think their side can do no evil and thus proceed to censor any disagreement. But it's still funny to me that this whole thing needs to be preceded with 'the right is bad, but believe it or not, people on the left might do some bad things too', as if any side has a monopoly on virtue and goodness.
It is being exploited though. It's literally part of the strategy:
"The longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the Left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats." -Steve Bannon
Sure, but it was Bannon and Trump who brought that sort of thing into electoral politics. Barack Obama was constantly telling college students and "cancel culture" that they'd gone too far and needed more civic spirit and respect for others' liberties.
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And yet, Biden was a 'tough on crime' guy back in the 1980s and 1990s - his stances have contributed significantly to the institutional racism problem we all face today. Trump has a way better record on criminal justice reform. Don't fall for the hype. E.g. see https://www.politico.com/interactives/2020/justice-reform-bi...
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I agree that it looks funny here. But I think it's more of a strategic thing: it reveals the target audience they're addressing, and trying to show "hey, we're one of you" before saying anything more controversial that follows (that it's at all controversial is more sad than funny however).
Would you at least entertain the possibility that one of the sides could, at the moment, be a bit worse than the other?
That wasn't the question. If cancer is the deadliest disease, that doesn't mean we can't talk about the obesity epidemic(or vice versa depending on the actual stats, I'm just making a general point).
Imagine if, every time someone wanted to talk about helping end the obesity epidemic, many other people chimed in about how dare you talk about obesity when cancer still exists. And the only way you could make a point about obesity is to put a disclaimer that cancer is totally worse than obesity.
One of these sides and the problem they represent just grew a huge amount in the last month. If it continues to grow at this rate, it will become the number one problem very shortly, and the time to speak out is now.
Entertain? Sure. But you're also talking about "mainstream media". If we had an unbiased media outlet making this accusation, I think it might make sense. But any person center or right-of-center makes no bones about the fact that all of the major media outlets are left and getting "more lefter" all the time.
I'm not aware of anyone on the right advocating that words are acts of violence. It might be possible, but I _know_ it comes from the left.
That said, that conservatives don't speak up more about this type of stuff is concerning. They are, after all, supposed to be about the business of "conserving" things.
That said, that they even published this letter is at least a breath of fresh air. Regardless of the view, I'm glad that there is a call to examine this.
This is a "let a hundred flowers bloom" campaign coming directly from elite media. Oldest trick in the book - be careful not to fall for it.
What would be the left-wing analogy to President Trump rallying against the attacks on Confederate symbols (e.g. flag ban at NASCAR, taking down of statues) and using it as a purported example of liberal hypocrisy regarding tolerance and freedom of speech?
edit: This is a genuine question, not whataboutism. The letter is obviously very keyed to the current situation, rather than just a broad defense of free expression. Many of the signatories are presumably worried that backlash to perceived unchecked movements on the left will lead to the Trump administration retaining power. The parent commenter suggests that this kind of letter would be written in a vacuum, and I disagree.
It’s a good question.
Maybe a Dem POTUS rallying against cops as they try to stop protestors from confiscating and destroying various means of production?
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This is a bit rich considering Harper’s has fired multiple editors over the last couple of decades because John MacArthur didn’t like their liberal views. How is that not “being cancelled”?
It's disappointing that, while they name DJT and the "radical right", they don't explicitly call out the "radical left" (it's assumed within the article, but it would be nice to call it out).
One of my favorite internet apologists has a saying that people who don't have good arguments have to resort to bad tactics, and for many people that I've had conversations with (especially among the left, but also among the right) this has often been very, very true.
While I don't support BLM/M4BL (the hashtag, not the sentence), I do think that several valid points have come up. And even though I disagree on their conclusions and sometimes their methods, it has at least caused me to think critically about how I understand the situation and what should be done about it.
I hope that the future can continue to be a place where we don't think of ideas as either "safe" or "unsafe". Any view we come across that challenges us can frighten/scare us away. Maybe it causes us to change our views, maybe it doesn't, but the introspection is valuable. I feel that's what a lot of people who want to silence debate are missing. Perhaps they don't want the introspection. Maybe they just want an echo chamber.
Regardless, let's fight for a world where ideas aren't crimes, and that people are strong/wise enough to debate and engage them in a way that makes everyone better.
> ideas as either "safe" or "unsafe"
"An open mind is like a fortress with its gates left unguarded".
Thing of it is, there ARE safe and unsafe ideas (or, more commonly, safe and unsafe presentation of ideas). And it's critical thinking skills that render you capable of safely handling unsafe ideas / presentations.
You're right that the introspection is valuable, and that encountering "unsafe" ideas should lead to it; so I'm going to suggest: it's a person's attitude towards introspection that realizes the risk posed by an idea.
> who want to silence debate
IMO these people are just very badly communicating the idea "stop talking about other people's lives, and have those people speak instead" (plus layers of baggage and trauma). Halle Berry's recent controversy over a trans role is a good example of this; people talked about how she should't play the role (and some other issues), what they meant was "someone who lived this story should tell this story".
> people are strong/wise enough
Yes. Do you support massively more funding for education? Or do you see something else as a means to fight for this?
> "there ARE safe and unsafe ideas"
A nit to pick: The consequences of ideas can be safe and unsafe. The words "The police are racist" can be questioned, examined, and judged accordingly. The _result_ of the ideas and how you process them are the issue here. Gasoline is perfectly safe if left alone. But thrown in a live fire it will cause major damage.
Discarding ideas simply because others might abuse them isn't the right way to go about this.
> "someone who lived this story should tell this story"
I feel that there is a danger to this argument. It is in the same vein as what I have encountered before: a refusal to hold any sort of meaningful conversation due to an intersectional party who claims that their point is "more valid" because of lived-experience. And they would not allow anyone else to say anything because they were not <insert intersectional crossroads here>.
This promotion, if left unchecked, can mean that the person lives within an echo chamber and can be very unhealthy. They are unwilling to have other people influence them. It can be very detrimental.
> Do you support massively more funding for education?
We homeschool, so I'm not really a proponent of state-run education. However, as a parent just talking to our children and fostering good relationships with everyone around us should be a priority. I'm for the idea that this concept starts within the home and then extends out. Kids mirror what they see at home.
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> it would be nice to call it out
I think it's important to consider the primary audience here. If this were a Wikipedia article, a neutral perspective would be important, yes. But this isn't a Wikipedia article. It's a persuasion piece aimed at the members of the left, and writing from the perspective of the left (or at least not from blatantly outside that perspective) makes it more effective.
I agree and would go even farther. This article would be 0% effective if written in a neutral style. When you're trying to reach people stuck in an "us vs them" mentality, you have to identify yourself as "us" before you start criticizing "us". Otherwise the criticism will be seen as identifying yourself as "them" and people will start railing, not against what you're saying, but against all the other arguments associated with "them".
I concur. It's subtle but likely effective given the audience. :)
Can you point to an example of where an idea has become a crime? Specifically, an idea or action that has not already been criminalized? I am not in full support of this, but all I see are people losing their jobs in private companies for at best being stupid and at worst bring harmful to their co-workers and creating a toxic oppressive atmosphere at work.
Lets inspect these ideas that are being deemed unsafe and why they are and then make a judgement.
Every time I dig into this subject it just turns out to be a bunch of a privilaged people bemoaning an inability to keep spouting their ALREADY DISPROVEN ideas like they are some novel creation.
> While I don't support BLM/M4BL, (the hashtag, not the sentence
This is a bullshit take. You either think black people are human and their lives matter. Or you don't. There's no "not the hashtag" -- the hashtag is the literal "black lives matter." The entire point of the political movement is to recognize that black people are people too and that western institutions of power * do not * recognize this truth.
> You either think black people are human and their lives matter.
You are making a false equivalence here. I can (and do) believe that black people are fully human and their lives matter.
I can also agree with certain points of the BLM movement, again, disagreeing with their reasoning, but supporting some the overarching ideas.
> The entire point of the political movement is to recognize that black people are people too
Based upon their website[0], they seem to have a much broader idea of "what matters" that goes far beyond "black people are people to" that will, undoubtedly, cause many people to shy away from the hashtag (but not the sentence).
[0]: https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-matters-2020/
Again, I think the George Floyd's killing, underscores a massive problem that needs to be justified, but you don't have to agree with BLM to want to see that problem solved.
> [...] the hashtag is the literal "black lives matter."
No, it's not, that's exactly the point. Otherwise #WhiteLivesMatter is completely valid too. After all, literally "white lives matter" is true, right?
This is exactly the bad faith argumentation that the GP and TFA are about. "You either support our hashtag or you do not think black people are people too."
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Your comments sound a lot like religious zealotry.
Think about what you are suggesting:
"You are a racist if you don't support this particular organization"
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It's interesting to note that as of the time of me writing this comment, over half of the comments on this thread have been down-voted.
I noticed that too. Many of them seem to be downvoted for using specific viewpoints as examples.
I think having thoughts about the meta-arguments here is perfectly ok, but having strong opinions about the actual topics is not.
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Would be wonderful if these irrelevant clowns truly were being silenced, but sadly this isn't the case.
> The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.
Unregulated markets have had near a century of exposure and yet here we are. So I think maybe we also need reform to stop the wealthiest just buying good press coverage of ideas which they find convenient.
> Unregulated markets have had near a century
Where? Source please.