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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?)
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
[+] [-] dnissley|5 years ago|reply
- 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...
[+] [-] justin66|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Jun8|5 years ago|reply
Also an interview done with him a few weeks ago: https://www.city-journal.org/racism-is-an-empty-thesis
[+] [-] tptacek|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bargl|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tomjakubowski|5 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] DavidVoid|5 years ago|reply
"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
[+] [-] gwright|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SpicyLemonZest|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lallysingh|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|5 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] Fellshard|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdonis|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] bovermyer|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 082349872349872|5 years ago|reply
[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?)
[+] [-] rayiner|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] anonms-coward|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andreyk|5 years ago|reply
Actually curious to hear what people on here think about this.
[+] [-] HeroOfAges|5 years ago|reply
*edit
this very post will be down-voted
[+] [-] JeremyNT|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SpicyLemonZest|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ciarannolan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bork1|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anonms-coward|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beckyb|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ve55|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chasd00|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] paulgb|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bovermyer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Analemma_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwanem|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anonms-coward|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RangerScience|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] steffandroid|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mellosouls|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mtgp1000|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] insickness|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] iron0013|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nvahalik|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RangerScience|5 years ago|reply
"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?
[+] [-] oconnor663|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] GoodJokes|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] malcolmgreaves|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jvalencia|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] steffandroid|5 years ago|reply
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