Comment by derektank
1 day ago
There are many sub-criminal behaviors that should lead you to reconsider whether you want to affiliate with someone, personally or professionally.
The problem is with people not being willing to decide for themselves whether someone's behavior meets this threshold, and letting the mob substitute their own judgement.
> The problem is with people not being willing to decide for themselves whether someone's behavior meets this threshold, and letting the mob substitute their own judgement.
I don't think we can say that this is what happened here. The allegations were public; some signatories may not have read them and just gone along with the "mob", but many would have read them and made their judgements based on that. This isn't "letting the mob substitute [for] their own judgement."
So who wants to "affiliate" with people who are prone to ruining other people's lives on a whim based on unfounded accusations that not rarely turn out to be false?
Maybe there should be a public list of slanderers, defamers, mob justice participants and cancellers in general so we can all avoid them like the massive liabilities they are.
> unfounded accusations that not rarely turn out to be false?
Do you have stats on this?
Varies. English sources generally give figures up to 10%. In my country, I've seen legal psychologists throw around numbers like 80% in certain contexts such as divorce cases involving child custody disputes.
Every law, no matter how well meaning, can and will be abused. Women are not saints. Be especially wary when lies could provide secondary victories such as favorable child custody outcomes.
Feminist discourse is overwhelmingly in favor of disregarding false positives: they would rather see thousands of innocent men suffer than watch a single guilty man go free. They cast a wide net and hope to catch the guilty men within it. They care not for the suffering they cause to the innocent. Quite the contrary, in fact: I've seen them try to justify it as historical reparation.
> The problem is with people not being willing to decide for themselves whether someone's behavior meets this threshold, and letting the mob substitute their own judgement.
Yes -- additionally there's also the situation where they try repeatedly to act collectively on this for themselves but the individual in question (or a compromised individual) has power over the resulting action, right?
I think it worth considering that many, if not most, of these "cancellations" occur long after serious attempts have been made to privately act that have been thwarted, often by commercial interests.
Sure. As I thought my first sentence made clear, I fully support anyone publicly airing allegations of wrongdoing and attempting to sway the opinion of others in doing so. It is sometimes the only way to meaningfully change a situation that can't be handled by the courts or private institutions.
What I object to is the social dynamics of cancellation, where people feel compelled to e.g. sign an open letter, lest they themselves be viewed as siding with the accused, without fully considering the claims and counter-claims for themselves. I also object to creating a false sense of urgency, in order to to encourage this behavior.
Yes -- I do think there is a lesson about the pile-on.
A few years back I criticised someone (without naming them) online (since the egregious, thoughtless conduct itself was online) and triggered something of a pile-on that I thought was a bit too much.
Subsequently I realised that I had under-read the situation myself, and the conduct wasn't simply thoughtless at all, it was repeated, self-interested and very calculated; people finding that out was actually the accelerant of the pile-on.
So I wasn't really so guilty of it after all. But I definitely witnessed what you talk about -- the "you're with us or with them" of it all, the social compulsion to join the pile-on.
I will probably still openly criticise people if I think it is very merited, but any criticism needs to be tempered with as much of an antidote for a simple pile-on as it can.