You use “mob” instead of “collective” and specifically define mob in such a way as to exempt people that you think are correct. Because, if you believed they were, you wouldn’t be very eager to define their decision-making as simply tribal or malicious.
Back to the drawing board, and put in a pot of coffee.
We do have such asymmetries, but it doesn't follow such different treatments are necessarily sensible. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/broken-symmetrieshtml I personally think part of the issue is that it's just easier to enforce regulations on firms (particularly large firms, which tend to be more regulated) than individuals.
Yeah, I agree with this. I think Scott still isn't quite getting to the core of the issue because it's not really about how acceptable/unacceptable the views are; nor about how much/little people disagree with those views. The thing that would distinguish cancel culture from normal disagreements is: did the people who disagreed use untoward methods to attack the person who expressed the views? And so the effort needs to go into defining what an untoward method might be.
I think an under-discussed aspect of cancel culture - at least it didn't come up here - is the willingness of employers to stand up to Twitter pressure. I feel that it should be accepted as a given that people on Twitter are going to say stupid and nasty shit. The question is whether employers (or gig-offerors) see the existence of nasty stuff on Twitter as a good reason to fire someone. I'd want to include that as part of the definition of cancel culture: cancel culture is a situation in which people's employment is often at risk because of claims that they have engaged in bad speech in a way that is not directly relevant to their professional competence.
There is no pair of reasonable definitions of “cancellation” and “protected speech” where cancellation is not protected speech. Honestly “Coordinated actions intended to harm an individual that are difficult to legislatively prevent because the actions consist entirely of protected speech” is a pretty good definition of “cancellation.”
Have there been any test cases involving that law? Laws are not generally declared unconstitutional when they are passed, their unconstitutionality is established by cases involving them that go to court.
It does seem a decent parallel, especially the bit about "Stone also ruled that the Leonard Law was constitutional, essentially because it did not in any way restrict the speech of the university as a corporate entity. The university remained free to express its abhorrence of racial and other forms of prejudice. He ruled that the law expanded, rather than contracted, the range of legally permissible speech by protecting the free speech rights of students without abridging those of the university itself. "
That’s so interesting! When I worked at Texas A&M I specifically remember a rule saying that I would have to take a leave of absence if I ran for or won a seat in the state legislature (but that city office was fine).
A norm doesn't have to be altogether reasonable to be useful. Mostly it's illegal to fire someone for joining a union or being a member of a particular religion. That doesn't give the employer perfect free-speech rights but it seems like a good thing.
I think the tricky thing is that the anti-cancel culture side is trying to use as a shortcut "if you treat someone as bad for engaging in protected speech, you're bad." But if cancelling people is itself protected speech then that doesn't work as well.
No, you just say that it's bad without asking that people lose their jobs. Announcing your disagreement isn't cancelling. Calling for "deplatforming" or firing it whatever is cancelling. It is extremely easy to protest something without falling into cancelling.
The problem is that some people are not satisfied with the efficacy of this kind of protest and want something stronger.
"The problem is that some people are not satisfied with the efficacy of this kind of protest and want something stronger."
This can be phrased stronger: a lot of people aren't satisfied with a protest that can be judged on its merits, instead of automatically getting their way through (usually economic) force.
Except that people /don't/ agree about what does and doesn't constitute them, because in general language /doesn't/ work very well for complicated questions like this!
The fact that language doesn't work very well to describe the phenomenon doesn't mean people don't know it when they see it. Which was...exactly Freddie's point
Sure, but I'm saying that that point is wrong; lots of people say "I know it when I see it", but they don't all say that about the same sets of things.
I agree about the coordinated actions-- that's what makes it a cancel culture rather than just cancelling.
I'm not sure coordinated is quite the right word. There's too little structure for that. However, I'm not finding a better word.
The other thing that makes cancel culture what it is, is secondary cancelling-- cancelling or threatening to cancel people who don't comply with a cancelation campaign.
How much coordination is "coordination"? If Scott complains about NYT, and in response most of his readers unsubscribe, it Scott guilty of coordinating them?
> The other thing that makes cancel culture what it is, is secondary cancelling-- cancelling or threatening to cancel people who don't comply with a cancelation campaign.
I need to think more about it, but it is a good approximation for my intuition. Unsubscribing NYT, no problem. Telling my friends to unsubscribe NYT, dunno, gray area, depends on how influential I am. Unfriending people if they don't unsubscribe NYT, gray area, depends on how predictable that was and how many people will also unfriend them in turn. Threatening people that unless they unsubscribe NYT, I will unfriend them, and also tell all my friends to unfriend them, clearly bad.
I think the grey area there is "asking" my friends to unsubscribe, no problem, you're leaving it up to them. "Telling" them is trying to force them into doing something, and there may or may not be a threat behind it - at the least, that you will sever ties with them and no longer consider them friends. That's the unacceptable part.
Things like "bad people doing bad things" and "people making mistakes" are bad. Threatening good or neutral people to do bad things, and preventing other people from figuring out their mistakes are meta-bad.
Somehow the meta-bad things make me more angry than the merely bad things. Without meta-badness, things would kinda sort themselves out after a while. Some people would get smarter. Most people would learn to avoid the bad people and the idiots. Meta-bad things prevent this.
It is okay if you don't read a newspaper you don't like. It is okay if someone pointed out a reason that made you stop wanting to read the newspaper, even if otherwise you probably wouldn't notice that. (Basically the "extrapolated volition" - what would you want, if you knew more.) It is not okay if you stop reading a newspaper only because you are afraid that other people would punish you for that.
Cancellations don't entirely consist of speech. At a minimum, it typically involves an company/organization firing someone, otherwise stopping doing business with someone, banning someone from a platform etc. It also often involves non-speech actions by the cancel mob, like boycotts.
My take is that speech should only get speech, material punishment should get material punishment. Say a cancel mob demands a company to fire an employee, and the company fires him. Then condemn the participants of the cancel mob but don't attempt to materially punish them; but do materially punish the company for yielding, e.g. by boycott it.
In theory there is another self-consistent definition: protect all speech except that which seeks to punish others for their protected speech, in which case what's good for the goose is good for the gander. (I.e. speech is protected if it contains an even number of "punish them for their speech that says...".) But since it's fuzzy what counts as punishing someone for speech, it may not work well.
> otherwise stopping doing business with someone ... It also often involves non-speech actions by the cancel mob, like boycotts.
According to the precedent set by Buckley v Valeo (the precedent often misattributed to Citizens United) politicized spending (and therefore lack thereof) *is* a protected "speech" action.
As far as I can tell, this struck down rules about spending *on speech* (spending on the cost of making and distributing one's speech as part of a campaign), and that was key to why limits on spending were considered limits on speech.
Anyway, however the SCOTUS defines speech, describing the spending decisions involved in a cancellation as speech is definitely a stretch from its everyday definition, and I discussed private actions against cancellation, not law. While Scott referred to speech protected by the 1st Amendment in America, Hastings asserted that there were no reasonable definitions of “cancellation” and “protected speech” where cancellation was not protected speech, not just that the prevailing American constitutional definition considered cancellation protected speech.
I think the entire debate largely boils down to people arguing what the norms should be, and in particular trying to get things they don't like defined as beyond-the-pale and things that they do like defined as "opposing them is beyond-the-pale".
I think thee problems not only should, but inevitably WILL be solved by cultural norms, once most of humanity is tired of cancelling, and defaults into anti-cancel camp. Simply put, sooner or later so many people, ideas and organizations will be cancelled, that cancelling will become meaningless. If everyone is a "sinner" By Cancellist definition, then nobody is.
I agree. Am I the only one here who is ok all the way to A12? People have a right to call for pretty much anything they want. They also have a right to unsubscribe, boycott, refuse to participate, try to get others to stop participating, etc. In general, I don't think you can force people to do something they don't want to do, or prevent them from expressing an opinion about something they don't like.
On the other hand, I also feel that private organizations like a business should be more cautious regarding when they actually deplatform or fire someone. In other words I make a distinction between people using language to express themselves and institutions taking actions that affect people. I think private institutions and organizations should hesitate before taking action that harms someone just because a bunch of people are demanding it.
That said, there does come a level of public outrage that any private organization is going to want to protect themselves from. If a business is being boycotted to the point of bankruptcy because of something an employee said, well, they may have no choice but to let that employee go.
Objective harm, and the expression of opinion seem like they belong in different categories for me, and should be held to different standards.
I also support laws against pedophilia. Adults sexually exploiting children causes harm and society has an interest in preventing it. Pedophilia is bad.
But what about speech supporting pedophilia? There are certain behaviors that only become a problem when a lot of people start doing it. Using speech to support pedophilia doesn't seem very harmful, until the rate of pedophilia starts going up. At that point it becomes a public health issue, not a speech issue. If there is solid empirical evidence that some form of expression is resulting in some form of harm to someone, then ok censor it. This also applies to hate speech, racism, fighting words, etc. But I would need to see that evidence first.
Note also that if someone who belongs to an organization and they are expressing support for pedophilia, then there will be a level of public outrage that the organization will want to protect itself from. If graduate students publishing articles in support of pedophilia actually lowers revenue, by reducing enrollment or alumni contributions, then they may have little choice other than letting them go.
Obviously the dynamics change if there is a large enough portion of the public that supports laws against firing employees that undertake unpopular actions, or belong to unpopular groups. This is where anti-discrimination laws come in.
I honestly can't tell what side of the issue I'm on. I don't think I fall neatly on one side or the other. Sometimes I self identify as a "proceduralist" (don't know if that is the correct term)--I seem willing to tolerate a wide range of outcomes if I think that the procedure that led to that outcome is basically fair and contributes to the overall functioning of society in a sustainable way.
I think this is an area and you are caught up in specifically where what are good in theory principles don’t work in the real world of our particular messy humans and their technologies.
Like at discrimination in hiring. From a principled standpoint you just want to say “anyone can hire whoever they want as a form of free association and if they don’t want to hire blacks/wiccans/mormons/whatever that is fine the market will punish them for their inefficiency. No one should be forced to employ or hang out with people they don’t want to.” That is a totally reasonable and normal ideal.
The problem is once you get into the messy reality of what happens in the real world.
I feel like cancel culture is a similar area where people are looking for some appealing consistent principle in an area where one does not exist. Because the failures are failures of particular failure states in the real world, not problems in our abstract values.
I actually agree, to a point. I mentioned in my post that I support government action when there is empirical evidence of real world harm. In the case of discriminatory hiring practices, the real world harm is an elevated unemployment rate for a targeted population, and I think the documented effects of this are strong enough to make discriminatory hiring illegal, at least for certain protected categories, and race is one of them.
If it is a social engineering problem, well I feel that passing laws is how we address those.
For what it's worth I'm good all the way to A12 too, and I completely agree with you that none of the behaviours listed, whether prompted by pro-pedophilia or anti-bossy-use (or literally ANYTHING else) are an expression of cancel *culture*. People being unreasonably (or reasonably) outraged and acting on it and making it known in public and trying to influence others is a universal human social behaviour.
I think that "cancel culture" applies to a behaviour of institutions and organisations that much, much too easily give in to pressure from (usually over the top and unreasonable but not always so) outrage over legal speech or (and I very strongly disagree with Scott in that it's solely about speech) fleeting/ unproven/ very arguable but still highly outraged accusations of (usually sexual) misconduct.
In this sense, a brand boycott is NOT cancel culture, for example.
>“Coordinated actions intended to harm an individual that are difficult to legislatively prevent because the actions consist entirely of protected speech”
Surely that would include typical playground bullying, though?
As well as millions of other thing that happened with great regularity before 2014, or before 1014 for that matter?
In broad terms I think there is some function that maps (degree of outrageousness) to (degree of expected social punishment) and for every level of (degree of outrageousness) the (degree of expected social punishment) should be less than the current level.
Edit: I should be clearer here- makes the point that this isn't and never was, about principles so much as a general sense that people are being a bit mean and need to chill out. This may sound vacuous but it's so much better than pretending there are fully general principles.
I don't agree with this at all. One of the most obnoxious and unconscionable things about wokeness is precisely its support of horrible punishment for trivial things COMBINED with absurd leniency for horrible things. A man disagreeing with 3% of feminism is condemned, a feminist saying "I love the smell of male tears" is *celebrated*. A white guy saying nasty things on X gets death threats from people; those same people defend a black guy with a long record of violent crimes and sex offences and say he didn't deserve to die. See the part on Britain https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-march-2023 for how very left-wing jurisdictions treat "words are violence" hate speech versus how they treat actual violence. Also SF and Seattle leaders saying zero tolerance for "hate", while their police departments have explicit policies of tolerance for actual crime.
I don't think your solution works either, because "your group gets punished for everything" and "my group can get away with anything" are two sides of the same coin for every form of injustice ever. Taking away one part of that (even if you can) will just make them double down on the other part.
The government of the UK circa March 2021 was not, in any useful sense, "very left-wing". Or at all left-wing.
The specific case of actual violence I assume you have in mind is the guy who assaulted a couple of cyclists, including stamping on the head of one of them, and got a suspended jail sentence and some community service. I agree that that's shockingly lenient. (I assume the lenience is at least partly because, so far as I can tell by sheer good luck, no one was actually seriously injured.) And it seems pretty clear that this wasn't a matter of the judge in question being a woke leftie who doesn't care about physical violence; comments the road.cc page linked from ACX include one pointing out the last time the same judge was in the news -- unduly _severe_ sentences for ... protestors against fracking. The judge allegedly has some ties to the oil industry, as do others in his close family. That doesn't read to me as "woke leftie who wants to be soft on real violence". I would place a sizeable bet that the judge's political preferences are nearer to yours than to mine.
And, of course, there's the same thing to say as there always is about shocking stories in the news: these stories are shocking and in the news _because they are unusual_. If it were normal for someone who stamps on someone else's head to get a short suspended sentence, you wouldn't be hearing about it because no one would think it worth making a fuss about.
(In general I have a lot of sympathy with anti-fracking protestors and none with motorists who assault cyclists. But there _is_ some logic here. Someone who assaults someone else in a fit of road-rage might reasonably be expected to reconsider and repent over the course of doing his community service, because no one really believes that cyclists deserve to have their heads staved in. Someone who makes a nuisance of themself in an anti-fracking protest will not, because for them it's a matter of principle. So, if the Officially Correct Sentence for both is some moderate amount of jail time -- which, yes, is ridiculous -- then replacing it with community service does actually kinda make more sense for the guy who assaulted the cyclists. Even though what they did is worse and less-justified.)
It was some people who climbed onto lorries at a fracking site. (I _think_ it was a fracking site; it was certainly a site operated by a company that does fracking.) They caused substantial disruption to the company, which so far as I can tell was their goal. I think they also blocked the road, which caused problems for other people, but (again, so far as I can tell) that was a side effect rather than part of the goal of the protest. (I am aware that some protests _do_ aim at maximum disruption to everyone, or everyone using the roads, but I don't think this was one of them.)
I wasn't trying to make it sound as if they were punished for their views. They were punished for conducting a protest in a way they weren't legally allowed to, and it didn't occur to me that what I said would be understood as saying anything other than that. I have no idea how what the thing you quote from Twitter is meant to relate to this; the thing they were jailed for was the protest action they undertook.
As for whether the punishment was reasonable, all I know on that is that the UK's Lord Chief Justice called their sentence "manifestly excessive". Being the UK's most senior judge doesn't guarantee any sort of infallibility, of course, but if he thinks the sentence was _obviously_ too much then my default position is that it probably was too much.
But SCOTUS has ruled that protesting is free speech even if it interferes with normal activity. So, you are trying to cancel them (by jailing them) for expressing an opinion that you disapprove of. /S
"The government of the UK circa March 2021 was not, in any useful sense, "very left-wing". Or at all left-wing."
I disagree, I find it pretty much impossible to regard a government that was in power for 14 years and made no attempt to repeal its absurdly broad hate speech laws "not at all left wing". (Or maybe they did try and I didn't hear about it--I haven't followed British politics in any detail--but it can't have been much of an attempt, and I don't think they did at all). Other things include the Prime Minister immediately condemning the US Dobbs decision and expressing his strong support for abortion, and "considering" introducing full gender redefining legislation (I heard about this since opposing it was what got JK Rowling cancelled; I don't know if they passed it or not, but the idea of a so called "conservative" government not simply refusing to repeal but actively considering enacting such legislation is almost beyond my comprehension).
Maybe I'm misinformed about all this, but the way it looks to me is that, on a lot of issues, the UK basically has two left-wing parties. Of different degrees.
"The judge allegedly has some ties to the oil industry, as do others in his close family. That doesn't read to me as "woke leftie who wants to be soft on real violence". I would place a sizeable bet that the judge's political preferences are nearer to yours than to mine."
I don't particularly like or support the oil industry. Please don't put me in a box.
As for the cyclist case, you make some valid points. But, (1) this isn't the only time Britain has handed down lenient sentences (Rolf Harris served about two and a half years!!! for sexually molesting numerous children), (2) the issue of repentence is only one factor, and the factor of giving justice to the victims of the attack is neglected in your analysis, (3) my (and Scott's) main point was contrasting this lack of jail for serious assault with *actual jail* for mean words on social media!
A place that didn't treat either of those things with jail would be one thing. It's the combination that's beyond comprehension. And what's more, it seems pretty clear that serious punishment for "hate speech" is strongly correlated with leniency for actual violence (contrary to Philosophy Bear's perspective). I'd be interested whether you dispute that, and if not what you think the reason for this correlation is.
I wasn't claiming that you support the oil industry. I was claiming that people with substantial pro-oil-industry biases (as it seems kinda plausible that this judge has) are usually on the right rather than on the left. (And that if you think the UK's Conservative Party is a far-left party, then from my perspective you are definitely on the right.)
Different people will put the left/right axis in different places -- both by locating its centre differently ("he's further right than me") and by pointing it in different directions (economic: high/low taxes, high/low state benefits, high/low regulation; social: anti-/pro-religion, progressive/conservative on sex, progressive/conservative on gender; international: doveish/hawkish, pro-/anti-immigration). I think that when someone says "party X is far-left" what they usually mean is "party X is far to _my_ left". I will gladly believe that the Conservative Party is far to your left. So far as I can tell, most people consider it somewhere between "centre-right" and "right-wing". Arguing about whether it's "really" far-left or centre-right or whatever seems unlikely to be enlightening.
Rolf Harris was released from prison at the age of 87 and in bad health. It is hard to believe that he was much danger to any children at that point.
Again: most people committing serious assaults in the UK go to jail; most people saying mean things on Twitter in the UK don't go to jail; the cases you hear about are the exceptions.
I would be interested in your evidence that serious punishment for hate speech is strongly correlated with leniency for actual violence. (Do you mean across different jurisdictions?) I don't myself claim to know whether there is such a correlation. I wouldn't be super-surprised if there were, and the mechanism for this that occurs to me is that the usual bundle of "progressive" views includes (1) a belief that criminal punishment is mostly about deterrence and prevention rather than vengeance, which will tend to produce lighter sentences overall, and also (2) a stronger opposition to "hate speech".
On the other hand, "hate speech" is not the only class of nonviolent thing that sometimes gets jail time. I would -- also handwavily and unconfidently -- expect a correlation via "conservative" views between stricter punishment for X and _stricter_ punishment for violent crimes, where X is "drug offences", "societally disapproved-of sexual activities", "activities considered politically subversive", etc. If I'm right about this, the big picture isn't "lefties are soft on violence and hard on nonviolent crime", it's "lefties are soft on everything but hard on _some particular types of_ nonviolent crime".
"Different people will put the left/right axis in different places -- both by locating its centre differently"
I don't agree you can just "locate" the centre wherever you want. Words means things; any definition of centre has to be in comparison to other jurisdictions in a given reference class. The only natural reference classes for the UK are either the whole world or the English-speaking world. The former is far too difficult for me to analyse (though you can try) so using the second: on free speech, the US has no hate speech laws at all, Australia has much weaker hate speech laws than the UK and conservatives have made several strong attempts to repeal even those (just barely unsuccessful), and Canada has constitutional speech protections (though weaker than the US) that have sometimes overturned hate speech judgements plus I think the conservative government repealed a large chunk of those laws in 2013. Compared to all these countries, the UK with its absurdly broad laws that are zealously enforced with no free speech defence recognised (see TGGP's link below for really disturbing stuff) that "conservatives" have done nothing about whatsoever, can only honestly be described as (on speech issues) far-left.
On abortion: even in places like Australia where it hasn't been a politicised issue, conservative politicians generally avoid talking about it rather than actively championing their support for it and condemning pro-life laws elsewhere. Again, the UK looks far-left by comparison.
The UK was also the only one of these countries where gay marriage was actively pushed (not just allowed to happen or not repealed) by a conservative government, and was one of the earlier places to do so as well (so not just responding to a widly acknowledged trend).
Now yes, I take your point about there being other issues. But if the UK *right* has a bunch of positions that are the same or even *further left* (hate speech) than left-wing parties elsewhere, then it's not enough for them to also hold a bunch of right-leaning positions that are the same as right-leaning parties elsewhere. They would have to be far, far to the right of other countries on a comparable number of issues to be reasonably described as centrist overall. "Way to the left of other right-wing parties on some issues, way to the right of such parties on others" would be enough to call the UK Conservatives centrist or centre-right; "way to the left of other right-wing parties on some issues, the same as such parties on others" would not. And would even out to being overall on the left.
Do you have examples of such latter issues that would balance out the ones I mentioned?
"Rolf Harris was released from prison at the age of 87 and in bad health. It is hard to believe that he was much danger to any children at that point."
Again, you are only considering prevention of further crime by that person, just one factor in the purpose of punishment. Other factors, including (1) making an example of that person to deter others, (2) giving a feeling of justice to the victims, and (3) punishing an evil person because that's intrinsically just, all argue for much harsher treatment of someone like that, bad health or not. Even if you go full consequentialist and reject (3), the others still hold.
"Again: most people committing serious assaults in the UK go to jail; most people saying mean things on Twitter in the UK don't go to jail; the cases you hear about are the exceptions."
Also, again see TGGP's link. If those descriptions are accurate, the situation in the UK is far, far worse than I imagined.
"expect a correlation via "conservative" views between stricter punishment for X and _stricter_ punishment for violent crimes"
Yes, but that's an entirely *consistent* attitude: be tough on everything. (And I'm pretty sure conservatives will always be more tough on violent crime than on sexual deviency or drug use or whatever, though I suppose I could be wrong). What I was specifically objecting to is the left's unbelievable hypocrisy of being tough on harmless things and soft on seriously harmful things.
The right has its own hypocrisies, to be sure, but this isn't one of them.
I didn't say, and didn't mean, that you can just locate the centre wherever you want. Well, I mean, obviously you _can_ and many people do, but some choices are more defensible than others.
The natural reference classes for the UK are the UK, the English-speaking world, Western Europe, Europe, the English-speaking world, "the West", the developed world, and the whole world. The first of those is (at least arguably) appropriate when talking about one particular party, but obviously not if the question is "is the UK as a whole notably far to the left or the right, compared with other places?". The others are I think all clearly reasonable for any purpose.
I agree that the UK does pretty poorly on free speech. I don't agree that that makes it _left_ as opposed to _right_; for me, free speech is not a left-versus-right issue as such, and while in recent years the right has tended to claim it and the left has tended to blow it off, not so long ago it was the other way around.
(The right and the left tend to limit freedom of speech in different ways. E.g., laws against "hate speech" are generally left, laws against "unpatriotic" speech are generally right, laws against blasphemy are generally right, etc.)
UK politicians also mostly avoid talking about abortion. The US is generally further right than the UK (both socially and economically) and somewhere over 60% of the US population thinks that overturning Roe v Wade was a bad thing, and about 2/3 of the US population think abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy should be legal. Boris Johnson's position would be entirely normal for a moderately right-of-centre American.
So I can't agree with your claim that the UK is far left on abortion and freedom of speech and should therefore be considered far left unless it's exceptionally right-wing on other issues: UK opinions on abortion aren't all _that_ different from US ones, and I don't think freedom of speech is a right-wing value at all.
This is all sticking with your framing where we compare the UK to the US, Australia and occasionally Canada. (Canada is about as liberal on abortion as the UK, I think.) Of course this ignores New Zealand, which has plenty of laws against hate speech and is I think similar to the UK on abortion; and Ireland, which has laws against hate speech and (on account of its rather theocratic past and still rather religious populace) modestly restrictive laws on abortion.
If we compare against Europe, or perhaps more specifically Western Europe, I'm pretty sure the UK comes out consistently to the right both socially and economically.
TGGP's link, if I've correctly guessed which one you have in mind, is to a tweet containing a screenshot of something with links in it. (I wish people wouldn't do that, but never mind.) Once again, this gives (at least so far as I can tell from that tweet; maybe there's more in the replies, but Twitter is configured not to show those unless you're logged in to it, which I'm not) _one_ example of someone getting a harsh sentence for "hate speech" and _one_ example of someone getting a lenient sentence for possession of child pornography. So, I repeat once again, you have heard about these cases _because they're unusual_.
Seems like you are defining the USA and its particular left/right coded issues as the norm and any assessing any cultural or political differences in other countries by that standard.
Eg, Cannabis remains criminalised in my country (NZ) marijuana. Some, mostly left wing politicians want to change that. Does it make sense for me to look at the relatively liberal regime in much of the USA and conclude that your country is very left wing?
On your wider point. I don't find picking real or hypothetical examples of where a criminal or commenter of one persuasion is treated more leniently than another very convincing.
1) This is very dependent on context; there's plenty of spaces where saying "I love the smell of male tears" will be condemned. Plus there is lots of random variation in punishments.
2) Your impression of whether "left" or "right" get treated unfairly is always going to be hopelessly biased by your own opinions. This is the value of Scott's approach of picking topics for his examples that are nonpartisan to try to come up with conclusions (all sides condemn pedophiles).
3) People are complex, they might hold 'left' or 'woke' positions on one thing and 'right' positions on others.
The upshot is, it's pointless to compare hate speech to Rolf Harris. Approximately no one (even on some weird woke corner of the internet) would argue Rolf Harris deserved less punishment than someone who commits a 'hate speech'.
The divergence there is that they are *socially* liberal (since that is the trend in society today, and the UK government draws from middle to upper-middle class, college-educated, urban professionals who have all been raised with nice liberal views). Hence, pro-abortion, pro-gay rights, pro-trans rights (often as much out of calculation that this will play well with the voters as out of genuine conviction on these issues).
They're *fiscally* conservative, which is why they're centre-right and call themselves conservatives: cutting back on welfare and social spending, low tax on business and the rich, etc.
The government of UK circa 2021 was not left-wing at all by UK and European standards. By the US standards, it was quite a bit to the left of any recent Democratic administration. Additionally, UK judicial system is pretty independent from the government and also more left-wing in many aspects than most left-wing-by-UK-standard governments.
"PRIEST: It seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. You forgive a conventional duel just as you forgive a conventional divorce. You forgive because *there isn’t anything to be forgiven.*"
&
"The Priest further notes that this is why the townspeople can self-righteously consider themselves more compassionate and forgiving than he is. Actual forgiveness, the kind the priest needs to cultivate to forgive evildoers, is really really hard. The fake forgiveness the townspeople use to forgive the people they like is really easy, so they get to boast not only of their forgiving nature, but of how much nicer they are than those mean old priests who find forgiveness difficult and want penance along with it."
-- as in, people call themselves merciful because they've never actually been challenged to be merciful. The moment someone actually displeases them though...
(i.e. It's like the man who's brave only because he's never actually been in any risk in any way, in other words.)
I for one would love to read such a reflection. 'ICTABTO' had a very large impact on my entire outlook on politics; I had spent my life making the exact mistake he describes. It's a piece whose points seem obvious to me now because I've internalized them so thoroughly, but it sure didn't feel that way at the time.
Yes, this. I wanted to make a comment along these lines but was certain it had already been said somewhere, so might as well scroll till I found that comment and maintain something like a proper thread.
I think the key here is that CANCEL CULTURE IS NOT NEW. There has always been an Overton Window of acceptable discourse, and posting outside of it would get a person "canceled." It could have been that you were fired for being openly gay. It could have been that you violated the Comics Code. Whatever. I think the issue with Cancel Culture is that there has been a shift in the Overton Window, for some people but not for others. So the notion of what's acceptable public speech is no longer a matter of general public consensus. It'd be like if the definition of 'pornography' suddenly switched to 'women showing their ankles' for a quarter of the population. We always had some general sense that 'pornography' shouldn't be on public TV. But now we have some intractable disagreement about what constitutes pornography.
So, the root problem is that society no longer has a consensus about what constitutes acceptable public discourse.
I don't think there's any "anti-cancel culture coalition" to be had here, because complaints about 'Cancel Culture' are explicitly part of a conflict, wherein Social Conservatives complain about Progressives trying to shift the Overton Window.
Yeah, that's the problem with the right-wing appeals to "Free Speech". Free Speech is only Free Speech if you're supporting people you hate. When you're supporting your comrades, that's just garden variety behavior.
"A white guy saying nasty things on X gets death threats from people; those same people defend a black guy with a long record of violent crimes and sex offences and say he didn't deserve to die."
OK, wow is that ever not an apples-to-apples comparison. Saying "[person] didn't deserve to die" (note especially since this is AFTER the fact) is about the most absolutely minimal defence of somebody one can possibly give. Personally, I don't believe ANYONE "deserves to die" (though I'm significantly less upset by some deaths than others).
Now, if it's the same people saying that are the ones making death threats, then yes, that's certainly inconsistent and morally reprehensible. But as a general rule, people who go around making death threats (even the relatively implausible online sort) are the Extremists of their particular position, with a capital E. I'm highly skeptical that all, most, or even a sizable minority of your ideological opponents are making or support making death threats. This only passes muster if you broad-brush everyone in your outgroup as believing and doing all the same things, which of course they don't.
Yes, some people are getting screwed more than others. The ability to broadcast grievances and character assassinations through social media is a game changer but….
“Tis a Wicked and Censorious world Master Sparkish!
I liked the way he used pedophilia as an example of something (hopefully, almost) everyone on both sides finds really offensive. I think at least part of the objection to cancel culture comes from disagreeing about where the original statements receiving the punishment should sit in the overton window, rather than a bright line between acceptable and unacceptable consequences to be then applied.
Yes. It's almost always a gradient, with the "ideal position" somewhere in the middle. E.g. cannibalism is bad, but ... when a group is isolated and starving, it's the response that allows, or may allow, SOME of them to survive.
I especially like it because almost everyone[1] who whines about cancel culture will, in practice, agree with every one through A11 - because most of them demonstrably don't *actually* believe in the principal of free speech for things they find truly disagreeable, they just believe their own speech should be unpunished. [2] (You see evidence of this with Scott's starting anecdote in the linked post, where conservatives suddenly are ambivalent about cancel culture). Almost everyone is pro-censorship, they just disagree on what is permissible to censor (and, as I like to point out, when everyone agrees what to censor, it's just called "moderation").
Using "pedophilia" as an example is always useful as a test for whether people can be actually ideological consistent when faced with an extreme emotional stimulus, or whether they don't really believe in their principals.
[1] The posters in this blog section are an order of magnitude more likely to be in the ideologically consistent camp, as are most that identify as actually libertarian instead of right-wing/anti-liberal
[2] I wrote this, scrolled down, and then saw commentor "La Gazzetta Europea" outright saying the quiet part out loud, to some degree of agreement from the right.
Like I said, that is probably true for many people here, but it is *much* less common on places like eg twitter, especially when you weight more towards the loudest voices.
I only think it's a good idea up to A4 or A5, and only think it doesn't deserve any condemnation up to A6 or A7. Zero tolerance for anything and anyone remotely adjacent to something always leads to overreach, whether it's a partisan issue, or a non-partisan one like pedophilia. Scott has written about this too: https://web.archive.org/web/20170325201558/http://squid314.livejournal.com/333353.html
But people who only complain ("whine") about their own speech being punished, while they don't oppose cancel culture when it comes to speech they find truly disagreeable, are still right that punishing their speech is wrong! They are only wrong when they don't consistently extend the same treatment to others. In general, if someone is hypocritical (asserts both "A" and "not B", where A and B are equivalent), that doesn't mean he's wrong about both assertions, or that you can decide he's wrong about either assertion of your choosing, it means that he's wrong about one and right about the other, and it matters which one is which.
EDIT: Also, even if everyone only really cares about his own speech, different people who are at risk of some of their views being punished may form a coalition against cancel culture, or you can use their own interests to convince them to join such a coalition. Likely many (though far from all) people who only started to care about cancel culture because it targets their own views have also come to care more strongly about free speech as a general principle as a result.
>In general, if someone is hypocritical (asserts both "A" and "not B", where A and B are equivalent), that doesn't mean he's wrong about both assertions
Correct, but in this case, A being "my speech good" and B being "other's speech good", given f(a) =A and f(b) = B, they're claiming to assert f(x) is correct while also claiming f(b) = ¬B. They actually are asserting a special, discontinuous function g(x), which will do just as much damage when enforced.
It's not that they're never right, it's that they're wrong (or lying) about their stated beliefs - so we shouldn't take their beliefs *system* seriously, because their actual terminal values are counter to what they're claiming.
In response to your edit, your hypothetical coalition sounds basically exactly like the coalitions of early socialism - in practice, the object level beliefs actually win out and your glorious stateless revolution ends up passing the keys to the next set of would-be statists.
Re: the last paragraph: I don't know what the coalitions of early socialism were or what they did (where? Russia? the West?), and don't really follow how it's relevant to the cancel culture discussion. Do you mean that if you don't want view A to be suppressed, so you don't support suppressing view B, then the pendulum will swing to view B winning, and it will suppress view A just as much as the current system? Firstly, I'd say siding with the underdog in the marketplace of ideas (which is closely related to whichever ideas currently get suppressed) makes it less likely that any one side wins a complete victory, and a complete victory makes it more likely that competing ideas get suppressed. Secondly, a complete swing of the pendulum is arguably implausible; politics often moves in the same direction for a long time, if we don't suppress those who disagree with the direction, it may at most slow down the movement or move it slightly backwards, but it has a slim chance of actually enabling a complete victory of whoever we stop suppressing.
I'm generally fine with Scott's takes on things, with my one gripe being that he sometime writes in a way that falsely presumes there's a clear bright line between "censorship" of "free speech", which is bad and we should never do it, and "moderation", which even he recognizes is necessary. This post is pretty explicit about there not being a bright line.
I was mostly talking about the discourse elsewhere. I'm not convinced of the value of arguments rooted in bad faith, but I understand your point
As for the socialism metaphor, I was clumsily trying to allude to the tendency of socialist revolutions, composed of true believers in equality and allies of convenience, tend to result in those allies of convenience just using the true believers to swing the power wildly into their favor, and only further inequality. I see the same patterns in both sides of the free speech/cancel culture argument - but especially the right, because freedom of speech is a fundamentally liberal idea, and they hate libs.
You seem to understand that based on your pendulum metaphor though, so I think we agree on the basic facts, just not on the likely outcomes.
I'm so curious about the flowchart linked from that post ('Whoever made it obviously had never met an actual Christian') but sadly it doesn't seem to have been archived (weirdly, the wayback machine's list of captures has a 500 error).
I would guess this is probably true for classic First Amendment free speech as well - the people who defend it consistently are a minority. And yet most of us here don't consider that a knock on the First Amendment.
I'll certainly admit that opposition to cancel culture tends to be even *more* hypocritical than defense of the First Amendment, but that seems to me a matter of degree.
A1-A6 concern only an individual's private behavior to not support something they find offensive, and are therefore not relevant to "pure" cancel culture discussions (as opposed to concerns that people are personally more bothered by certain discussions than they should be). However, cancellation campaigns require participants, and someone in any of these categories may be participating in a campaign to cancel someone, in which case their behavior is unfortunate but should not be directly targeted as morally wrong.
A7 is pure speech with no coercion, so same as above.
A8-A9 are attempts to use social pressure to make others participate in a deplatforming campaign. These are often bad, and often a part of cancel culture, but do not require or prompt any official response. However, A9's threat to refuse to interact with those who disagree is where I would draw the line between liberal attempts to convince others and exercise of one's own right of association, and illiberal attempts to force others to conform.
A10-A12 seem like pretty classic examples of attempted deplatforming, which is harmful in a way that goes beyond social condemnation, as it no longer appeals to individuals' rights of free association but instead asks some sort of authority to censor or reduce the reach of a given type of speech.
I consider myself very opposed to cancel culture, and I would personally have no qualms about doing A1-A7 in the case of something I found morally unacceptable, would reserve A8 for what I thought of as the absolute worst content, and would not do A9-A12 on principle (although offline, I would probably reconsider my friendship with someone who I thought actually supported pedophilia or something else I consider equally bad).
I think most of the problem is that people disagree about how outrageous certain things are or should be. Once you take the mask off, it's all an object-level political war and the meta-level talk is pure pretense.
We cannot give a clear definition of cancel culture for a single reason; the problem is not "intolerance" or cancel culture, but the existance of left-wing progressivism and its moral crusade for a new society, that require extreme cultural repression.
All societies in history had a form of cancel culture. Our problem is that we cancel good things, not that we cancel stuff.
Yep, society needs to have a broad agreement on which things are good and which are bad for liberalism and civility to work. Whereas we're in the middle of a "progressive" revolution so broad in scope that even a core notion like "woman" is no longer uncontroversial. Also, amusingly, these "progressives" usually refuse to acknowledge this revolution, their default frame is "all reasonable people have always agreed with whatever we say", but this probably isn't a key point.
I'm confused by this comment because I've seen basically every minute of Star Trek produced before 2015 or so, and...um...yeah, it *was* always woke. Depending on your definition of "woke," I suppose (which has always seemed to be a pointlessly broad word).
To be more precise, Star Trek has always had some tendency to push the ideological boundaries of its day in a progressive direction. In the 60s that was racial integration and women's rights. I suppose one could split hairs in disputing "always" by noting that Captain Pike in The Cage is explicitly sexist--so if you go far enough back to include just the pilot, the claim fails-- but TOS as a whole certainly did some boundary-pushing.
Once you get into TNG era Trek, of course, the progressive themes ought to be familiar enough to be extremely obvious to a modern audience. Themes of racial equality and gender equality are plainly present, and there are a number of episodes touching (in a somewhat veiled way) on various aspects of queer rights. My understanding is that the main things that stopped it from being more overt with these was that Rick Berman was much more conservative on that score than most others involved. For example, Andrew Robinson has said that he wanted Garak to be explicitly gay, but was instead forced to play him as extremely-clearly-and-unsubtly-gay without it actually being made explicit in the text. For example, there's probably gay porn videos that are less in-your-face about their gayness than his performance in "Our Man Bashir."
The only sense in which "Star Trek was always woke" fails is if you define "woke" as only applying to the specific social issues that are currently hot points of contention in 2024. In which case sure, I'll grant that he people making Star Trek in the 1960s were not, in fact, capable of time travel.
I'm not entirely clear on WHO you think is doing that. I agree that lumping in racial equality, sexual equality, mass censorship and trans issues all into one big package would be a silly thing to do. Which is why the word "woke" is so confounding. YOU may regard it as particular to the politics of 2024, but that's not the way I see it used in practice. It seems to be a catch-all term for things that various factions and segments and subcultures of the American right dislike, which *absolutely includes* all four of those things listed above, and many more.
If you want "woke" as a pejorative to specifically apply to, for example, trans issues and mass censorship (which would still be a weird grouping, but you do you) then you need to start pushing back a lot harder against the people using it to talk about race and gender equality, because right now they're doing a very good job of claiming the term as disparaging both the things you dislike and the things you do like.
Oh, very much agreed. I much prefer to avoid using the adjective "woke" at all simply because it seems to have become almost meaningless. A lot of red tribe people seem to apply the term to anything with the slightest hint of blue-tribishness, while it seems like a good fraction of the blue tribe (at least the very online segments) have picked up on this and ran with it, using it ironically or with implied scare quotes, to mock its overuse by the red tribe. I take "Star Trek has always been woke" to be mostly a claim of that sort.
To the extent that it still has a descriptive meaning at all, I'd say "progressive but specifically for social issues" is the closest that one can easily come. But that's somewhat related but still pretty distant from the original use, which was something like "aware of racial injustice and power dynamics."
> To the extent that it still has a descriptive meaning at all, I'd say "progressive but specifically for social issues" is the closest that one can easily come.
This is inaccurate, except for the part about being "for social issues", except that "social issues" is defined broadly enough to include almost everything.
> But that's somewhat related but still pretty distant from the original use, which was something like "aware of racial injustice and power dynamics."
That may be what people said, but it's like defining "psychology" as "an understanding of the root causes of human behavior", when an outside description would call it "a bizarre cult that believes alien ghosts cause all of our problems" and see a clear difference between it and real psychology. You can define Scientology in general enough terms to make it sound reasonable, but that definition has nothing to do with why people object to it, except for on a meta-level where the evasive answer demonstrates part of the problem.
> I've seen basically every minute of Star Trek produced before 2015 or so, and...um...yeah, it *was* always woke.
I disagree. ST was progressive, but it was liberal progressivism, not woke progressivism. Serious question: can you tell the difference? I ask because the rest of your comment conflates "woke" with general progressivism, whereas I'd bet that most of the comment section here see them as quite distinct, and I'd even guess that most of us explicitly identify as "progressive" but not "woke".
(E.g., "Let this be your last battlefield" is not woke.)
(TNG started adding some bits of generic leftism (as distinct from liberalism), and DS9 seemed to be deconstructing those bits.)
Here's an example: some people may be against murder because that's one of the 10 commandments, others might be against murder because of the categorical imperative, or because of some elaborate bit of game theory, or maybe they were just told that "murder is bad" by their parents and it seemed like a good idea. Some religious people argue that any form of anti-murderism, anywhere in history, is a result of human perception of God's will. And so they look around and say that there's really no difference, that everyone everywhere who thinks that murder is wrong is basically agreeing that God exists and (e.g.) Jesus is his son, full Nicene creed, etc. Do you think they have a point? Does it matter that most of those people wouldn't describe themselves as Christian? Are they allowed to take credit for all of that, everywhere, throughout all time?
"I disagree. ST was progressive, but it was liberal progressivism, not woke progressivism. Serious question: can you tell the difference? "
Not really, no. Which is to say, I can tell you roughly which social and cultural issues were at the forefront of the progressive movement during which historical periods. But I don't see a clean and natural dividing line between "liberal progressivism" and "woke progressivism." It certainly seems like some people are very strongly in favour of the outcomes of last season's liberal progressivism, but much less in favour of aims of this season's. And certainly there are broad differences in the national culture between the 1960s, the 1990s and the 2010s-2020s that inform how these debates play out. But which facets of proposed or realized progressive change count as "fine, settled, reasonable, liberal" and which count as "radical, crazy, unhinged, woke" seem to vary *quite a lot* from person to person. People making serious use of the word "woke" do mostly seem to all think that they are using it in a coherent sense to refer to the same, but AFAICT they are simply incorrect about this. Mostly it doesn't matter (for now), because it cashes out into strident opposition for the same people, but that doesn't mean the differences don't exist.
I don't think your example regarding murder is a good one. I think the abolition of slavery, the fight for women's rights and fight to end segregation were all expressions of the same underlying impulses and value systems. I think the fight for queer and trans rights and various continuations for the fight against racial and gender inequality are also expressions of that impulse. I think it's the same, underlying, motivating factor that's behind the mass movements in all of those cases. Doubtless there are fellow travellers who were on board for some of those and not others, but I think the core ethos has been the same for *quite* a long time.
> But which facets of proposed or realized progressive change count as "fine, settled, reasonable, liberal" and which count as "radical, crazy, unhinged, woke"
So that, right there, is *not* the distinction I'm making, not at all. There's a more subtle distinction here, which you are apparently completely missing. I'm about to go on a plane, but for the moment, give this a read and see if it helps? He's more eloquent than I am.
I do think that liberalism is generally unstable and can't reliably defend itself against viral totalizing ideologies, but, like the saying goes, it seems better than everything else that has been tried, so I appreciate people like Scott fighting for it, however doomed this particular attempt may be.
That's not what they are saying. At least that is not what I am hearing. What I am hearing is that it is not necessary to have one definition of notions like "woman" accepted by all, a plurality of definitions can live side by side, and that even includes definitions like "I just feel like that". The fights are started by the other side, such as Rowling, who say everybody has to accept one definition. In practice, in most of everyday life we can get along without any common definition, and when it is necessary, for example sports competitions, then a definition can be made for that specific purpose.
This seems clearly false. If somebody who "just feels like it" gets called a "he" by somebody operating under a slightly outdated definition, the punitive forces of the right side of history would come down like a ton of bricks on the offender. Both Rowling and them in fact agree that there has to be one definition, they just disagree on what that should be.
Hmm. No, that's not true. I'm a gay man, and to me, being a gay man means that I like dicks, and I also like masculinity, but a preoccupation with dicks is what I say is the defining factor. So trans guys don't do it for me, and I used to be a little annoyed by trans guys in gay men's spaces, and then I realized what gay means for me isn't what it means for everyone else, and I can both have my definition and apply it by virtue of the fact that nobody is making me fuck trans men. Plus, gay men's culture is downright utopian compared to the extreme dysfunction straight people have going on right now, so I don't blame anyone for wanting to be a part of it. Hope y'all figure that out.
Talking about what people actually say and believe is reasonable. The insistence that your ideological opponents are intending terrible and nefarious things should either be left unvoiced or backed by strong evidence that they actually intend those things. There are plenty of better places to indulge in fact-free speculation about all the evil things that the out group intends to do.
p.s. I've read plenty of discussions about trans people in queer spaces, and I strongly suspect you don't understand the arguments actually being made. But the dearth of actual content in your comment makes it hard to tell.
Sure. But you don't need to have your sexuality on your driver's license. There aren't Olympic competitions for gay men only, say, or any deep reason to have such things. Your private decision is functional here explicitly because it isn't the basis for any collective action. Culturally, it's not load bearing.
I agree that for some topics it's possible for people to have lots of different private definitions, so long as individual choice rather than collective consensus is what matters. And the more we can reach that kind of conclusion, the better. But you just need the right scissor situation where people are *forced* to choose one side or another, and where that choosing a side is seen as threatening to some group, to bring that quiet divergence to a head. Until that moment, everything is calm.
And yes, maybe that moment will never come for any given question.
Yet the expectation that cis lesbian women SHOULD be willing to fuck trans women, and it represents a moral failing on their part if they don't want to, is so widespread in trans activist circles that there's a specific term for it:
Cotton ceiling specifically dealt with a pornographer trans woman that routinely had private sex with cis women that confined in them that they wouldn't have sex with her on camera, due to various reasons including losing their queer/lesbian cred.
Cotton ceiling doesn't mean forcing all lesbians to enjoy girl dick.
Specifically the expectation in SJWy trans activist circles, who do not represent all or necessarily even the majority of trans people. I agree that there are communities where this expectation exists and it is toxic and terrible, but it's not the certified transgender opinion that all transgender people have.
I have mistakenly misgendered people before. When corrected, I apologized and used the term they prefer. Because I am a polite person who doesn’t feel the need to die in the hill of my right to make someone else feel like shit. The “single act of misgendering brings society down on you like a ton of bricks” thing is a horseshit strawman. It’s about insisting on everyone agreeing with your definition so hard you’re a huge asshole about it.
A lot of the stuff that people decry as cancel culture is just a group deciding some behavior is shitty and some people refusing to accept that they might have to accept some shit they think is silly or wrong in the name of being polite. A lot of the rest is people being straight up hateful and cloaking it in justifications about strongly held beliefs.
Social consequences for being a dick are normal. We just have more disagreement now about what constitutes being a dick and many, many more people with the opportunity to see us being a dick.
As soon as you grant that the notion of "misgendering" someone makes sense, you have accepted that the "progressive" definition is correct, and of course from then on there's no reason not to behave accordingly other than sheer assholery. I'd also agree that even if you don't grant that, it's assholery to make a confused person needlessly feel like shit to their face, when all of their social circle vigorously enables and "validates" this confusion.
If I insisted upon calling you a gender you don’t identify with, in public and repeatedly, I imagine you would be very unhappy about it. If not you, many cisgender people are. And I would bet you have no problem with them feeling that way. So… there is actually already a broad agreement that it is asshole behavior to misgender someone. Your argument is that it should be ok to misgender lender some people because you disagree that they are the gender they believe themselves to be.
You, then, are just an asshole who wishes to not have your asshole behavior socially punished in this specific scenario. Good luck with that.
"What I am hearing is that it is not necessary to have one definition of notions like "woman" accepted by all, a plurality of definitions can live side by side,"
This is completely and absurdly false for most progressives. If it were true, "misgendering" wouldn't be called a bad thing, let alone a form of genocide. Probably at least half of everything the trans movement has ever done would make literally no sense if this were true.
I'm reading this about the same way I would read "Christians have never really had a problem with one another having different beliefs". Like, are we living in parallel universes?
There's a difference between demanding you believe a definition of gender and demanding you treat somebody's personal understanding of their gender with respect. I don't care if you think I *must* be a man/woman, even though I don't feel I am either. But if you want to insult me by insisting your concept **must** apply to me instead of my internal concept, not cool.
re: the Christians analogy, precisely zero trans people have set up the inquisition, burned down anti-trans establishments, passed laws requiring people to use preferred gender language, etc. And literally every trans and non-binary person I know is chill if you accidentally misgender them. They're adults (I don't know that many kids!), they get that not everybody's brain automatically sees them and registers their preferred gender.
Also, when people use terms like "genocide" to describe language, ignore them. That's ridiculous and non-serious as flat-eartherism. It's not worth anyone's time to debate what the lunatic fringe is doing, even if they have very busy Twitter accounts. (And, yes, I will dead name Elon Musk businesses until the end of time. Call me Mx. Double Standard.)
You mean the guy who got sued over his religious belief that he had to refuse service to people the Bible says are bad but doesn’t require you to discriminate against?
>But if you want to insult me by insisting your concept **must** apply to me instead of my internal concept, not cool.
Isn't this exactly what gender-critical feminists complain about with regards to gender ideology? They resent the claim that trans women are exactly as much women as they are, by virtue of how they identify?
Nobody is telling them they aren’t women, or insulting their personal sense of identity as a woman. That’s the difference. They simply dislike a definition that is more inclusive than the one they prefer and openly insult those whose identity is based upon that definition.
"I don't care if you think I *must* be a man/woman, even though I don't feel I am either. But if you want to insult me by insisting your concept **must** apply to me instead of my internal concept, not cool."
I'm sorry, I don't understand the distinction you just made; the two parts are phrased almost exactly the same. Either you're saying that I can disagree with your definition but you can also disagree with mine--which is something virtually no progressive I've ever seen supports--or you're saying that I can believe what I want but I have to call you the thing I don't believe. Which is like saying "you don't have to believe Islam is true, but you *will* be killed if you publically repudiate it". And then saying that's religious freedom.
>Which is like saying "you don't have to believe Islam is true, but you will be killed if you publically repudiate it". And then saying that's religious freedom.
Again, no one is getting killed for repudiating gender ideology, and in fact many people are getting rich off of it (and the converse can't be said - *lots* of trans people get murdered merely for being trans, and in many states it was even explicitly accepted as not criminal to do so).
And it's funny for you to use religious freedom as an example - you're entitled to your own beliefs on the nature of God(s), but if you go on the internet and say "Muslims" are all mentally ill, *you're* the asshole. Likewise, intentionally giving a Muslim pork in a society of religious freedom makes *you* the asshole - and it's the same with intentionally misgendering someone.
It’s “nobody cares about your beliefs except where you start being an asshole about them”. What your internal belief is irrelevant. You have been made aware that misgendering is considered extremely hurtful, so to insist upon misgendering is shitty behavior. Even if you believe the idea of transgender is a bunch of hooey, it’s still shitty to do it.
And, frankly, the degree to which the tales of the harm of the transes turn out to be some waking up in a bathtub of ice fabrications makes a lot of the justifications provided for why it’s ok to be a dick about this ring hollow. Especially with how hard it rhymes with anti-gay propaganda we have mostly all agreed sucks at this point.
I am very much live-and-let-live with the trans crowd. But they're over-represented in a lot of the violence since 2020. And you can't blame the "far right" for I don't know, whatever, and not also note trans spree killers like Randy Stair, Alec McKinney, Ezra McCandless, or that kid in Nashville. Murder isn't a sane response to misgendering. I think trans rhetoric contributes to the problem. I agree, almost every trans person I know has been a decent human being. But so has almost every religious person been decent.
Liberals in general? Well, Jane's Revenge went on a little spree vandalizing LDS churches here in Utah and Catholic churches everywhere else. And let's not forget the many dozens of churches in Canada torched after that made-up boarding schools "mass grave".
My point isn't to dunk on your comment about "zero trans people do bad things." It's just to make it clear that sadly there isn't any group that's completely wholesome, and I think trans rhetoric (on the fringes! not everyone) lately has been quite a lot more violent.
This response is purely a matter of factual clarification and not trying to argue for or against any underlying morality.
If someone can't apply their taxonomy to you and must respect your taxonomy, I'm sincerely not sure how that's different from demanding agreement with your taxonomy. Such a demand for agreement might be seen as reasonable, but it's still a functional demand to use your taxonomy and for people to abandon their own.
" passed laws requiring people to use preferred gender language"
California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) considers persistent misgendering as harassment.
Canada's Bill C-16 included "gender expression or identity" as prohibited grounds for discrimination.
The UK's Equality Act 2010 makes discrimination based on gender identity illegal if it creates a 'hostile or intimidating environment.'
Again, I'm not saying that these things are good or bad. I'm simply noting that there is a definite movement to enshrine certain standards in law,, which has had some success.
> re: the Christians analogy, precisely zero trans people have set up the inquisition,
Trans protestors have raided and defaced churches
> burned down anti-trans establishments
Masterpiece Cakeshop only still exists because it's become a celebrity institution on the Right, but other businesses have absolutely been destroyed through trans-focused lawfare and harassment
> passed laws requiring people to use preferred gender language
"re: the Christians analogy, precisely zero trans people have set up the inquisition, burned down anti-trans establishments, passed laws requiring people to use preferred gender language, etc. "
Agreed, it's not necessarily trans people doing this, it's their cis allies, e.g.
"An Irish university has removed controversial references in its gender identity policy.
The South East Technological University had previously stated that refusal by staff or students to use the preferred gender pronouns of another university member would constitute "unlawful discrimination or harassment".
In an updated policy released last week, SETU has removed the “unlawful” and is instead asking staff and students to avoid “unacceptable behaviour” and to avoid using a person’s pronouns “with which they do not identify”."
EDIT: As others have mentioned Masterpiece Cakeshop, I had forgotten about Autumn Scardina and their various lawsuits.
And here's an opinion piece that laments that the defendant is "a genuinely sympathetic claimant" because his "probable victory will make the law even more dangerously incoherent."
Curse those conservative Christians who would have baked the damn cake if Mx. Scardina hadn't deliberately tried to make a case out of it by provoking a reaction! Don't they know you only get to plead your conscience if you're LGBT+ and want to claim the right to do things that offend the normies? And double curse those judges who think conservatives have, you know, *rights* under the law!
"Since Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, not a single conservative Christian plaintiff has lost on the merits at the Supreme Court. The judicial justifications for these decisions have become increasingly implausible, and taken together they have made the law increasingly unintelligible.
...Autumn Scardina is a transgender woman. On the day that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the earlier case, she called Phillips’s bakery to order a pink cake with blue frosting. She did not describe any words or decorations. The bakery confirmed that it could make the cake. Then Scardina declared that the cake was to celebrate her transition from male to female. Phillips thereupon refused the order, later explaining that he “won’t design a cake that promotes something that conflicts with [his] Bible’s teachings” and that “he believes that God designed people male and female, that a person’s gender is biologically determined.”
Scardina is an attorney, and she carefully sequenced her questions so that there could be no doubt that Phillips would sell this type of cake to the general public. Scardina complained to the state Civil Rights Commission, which found that Phillips had discriminated on the basis of transgender status. That finding was clearly correct as a matter of state law — Phillips refused to sell her something that he was willing to provide to anyone else."
I like this interpretation of the earlier case:
"Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Denver, won an earlier case in the Supreme Court in 2018. He objects to same-sex marriage on religious grounds and so refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. The couple sued, citing Colorado’s ban on sexual orientation discrimination. The case promised to address major questions about the balance between gay rights and religious liberty, but the court ended up disposing of it in a way that evaded those questions by inventively declaring that the state adjudicators were biased against Phillips."
There's no 'inventiveness' about it. The state adjudicators were open about their bias, and the irony was that at the same time they were punishing Phillips for not baking a gay marriage cake, gay marriage was illegal in Colorado. Nobody ever explained how it could be discriminatory to not bake a cake for something Colorado said didn't exist, but hey. Why sue the State of Colorado when you can just go after a small businessman instead?
And even this rah-rah piece doesn't much like Scardina:
"Scardina’s relentless campaign against Phillips is reprehensible. But law consists of rules, and sometimes malicious and vindictive people have valid legal claims. Scardina cleverly came up with a cake design with no explicit message for Phillips to reject, but which had a significance that would repel him and induce him to refuse. So, even though he has stopped making wedding cakes and was bothering no one, she gets to entrap him with this trick. Nyah, nyah.
One might defend Scardina by observing that it has not been unusual for civil rights groups to use testers to determine whether real estate brokers discriminate against blacks. But such testing uncovers actual ongoing discrimination. Phillips was unlikely ever to discriminate against even a transgender person unless confronted with the scenario that Scardina crafted.
Scardina claims that she is upholding principles of nondiscrimination: “I don’t think the law can accommodate individuals sidestepping secular law based on your own internal religious belief. It descends into chaos very, very quickly.” But this litigation was her idea. And, if the dispute gets to the Supreme Court, it is likely to produce exactly the kind of bad law that she claims to fear. It is as unsympathetic a test case as anyone could devise.
The Supreme Court would be eager to rule against her, and the result is likely to be some vague expansion of what counts as free speech, or some vague limit on discrimination law. Devising the right balance between gay rights and religious liberty is difficult, but here’s a good starting point: don’t provoke pointless fights."
"This is completely and absurdly false for most progressives. If it were true, "misgendering" wouldn't be called a bad thing, let alone a form of genocide."
I suspect we are living in parallel universes. Could you cite at least one example of somebody referring to misgendering as "a form of genocide?" And if you do, perhaps include some degree of evidence that "most progressives" agree with it?
Misgendering trans people is considered a bad thing for exactly the same reason that misgendering cis people is: it's rude. It's jarring (for many people, not everyone) to have people refer to you in a way that significantly conflicts with your self image, and not deliberately upsetting people is basic, bare-minimum courtesy in most contexts. There are absolutely, definitely, without a doubt cisgender people in the world who look ambiguous/androgynous enough that you, yes you cannot determine their gender accurately at a glance. If you accidentally refer to a cisgender person by the wrong pronouns, do you consider it appropriate to apologize? If you encounter a person whose gender you are unsure of, do you consider it appropriate to ask how they would like to be addressed? Both of these questions would still exist in a world with zero transgender people, so unless you have a firm belief that "no" is the correct answer, your view has less to do with what you consider the definitions of "man" and "woman" and more to do with preferring to be deliberately rude to trans people in particular.
Now, the tiny kernel of truth here is that communities that support trans rights certainly have a much larger chip on their shoulder about certain sorts of misgendering than anyone would if it were just an issue about how cis people refer to each other. But that chip pretty clearly a result of the fact that trans issues have become a political football lately, and ESPECIALLY a result of the fact that deliberately misgendering trans people has become seen as a sort of activism or point of ideological pride among certain groups. It's particularly common among groups that are hostile to trans people existing at all, so somebody doing it repeatedly and deliberately is providing significant Bayesian evidence that they're part of such a group. Meanwhile, if you're just spending time in trans-friendly spaces and not deliberately antagonizing people, accidentally misgendering someone isn't a big deal at all: it might earn you an exasperated glance at worst, but more usually just a friendly reminder.
No, but if he wants to wear a Napoleon costume and get plastic surgery that makes him look more like Napoleon, and you want to ban this, you are trying to prevent him from existing as he sees fit.
Obviously, this colloquial definition of "existing" still limits the word to cases in which someone is specifically supporting a policy that would restrict the freedom of trans people to live their lives as they please, rather than saying that they believe a woman is an adult human female etc.
"Misgendering means using incorrect pronouns when referring to someone’s gender identity. Sometimes, it happens by accident. People can slip up or unknowingly misidentify someone. Other times, it is intentional and derogatory. For example, people may purposefully identify a transgender woman as ‘Mr.’ or ‘him’ in order to undermine their gender identity and make the person feel uncomfortable.
It is important to respect the pronouns that others choose to share. It is also helpful when introducing yourself to share your gender pronouns so that others do not accidentally misgender you. For example:
My name is _____, and I use _____ (she/her, they/them, he/him, she/they, etc.)___ pronouns.
There are a lot of ways that people in the LGBTQ+ community describe their identities. Understanding this language is important to create safe and respectful discussions. Using the proper terms and labels encourages respect and understanding."
They also engage in activism on the topic:
"In 2020, World Without Genocide submitted an amicus brief regarding N.H. and Rebecca Lucero, Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Human Rights v. Anoka-Hennepin School District No. 11. In this landmark case, the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled that Minnesota schools must allow students to use locker rooms which align with their gender identity", and they include "Sexual Orientation and Identity" in their list of "Genocides and Justice":
"World Without Genocide publishes information about many genocides and conflicts around the world.
Use the right-hand navigation to select a topic."
This person explicitly links genocide and trans issues:
"Anti-trans activists have really effectively mobilised a strategy of stigmatising communication about harm targetting trans people, on multiple fronts. When we talk about hate crimes, they claim that any rise in hate crime is due to reports of misgendering. When we talk about violence, they cite activists talking about how using the wrong pronouns is “actual violence”. This is an effective strategy at smothering any discussion of anti-trans harm because minimising everything we say and changing the topic rapidly forces us into further debates of degenerating quality and relevance to anything like addressing harm against trans people. One of the things it relies on is seizing on any and every exaggeration of harm that ever happens and maximising that as a “gotcha” to demonstrate that we are playing up rare but tragic events in conjunction with a variety of everyday things that normal people have no problem with in order to manipulate the poor and vulnerable feelings of the general public for some sinister purpose. The confusion is the point!
One of the things that makes this minimise, deny, reverse victim and offender strategy (known widely as “DARVO”) strategy so effective is that it rapidly degenerates all discussion of harm into a community vs anti-community activist version of “He said, She said”. We do not have the same access to the media that cisgender anti-trans activists do, and we are starting automatically from a position of suspicion in relation to being a group labelled as suffering from a catastrophic mental illness — we can’t even figure out what sex we are so how on earth can we be relied to know what’s good for us? And the natural human reaction because as a community we have not been very organised in responding is to increasingly try to counter-escalate, and insist, no really, harm is happening and it’s very serious! This doesn’t work.
And so we start reaching for the lists of stages of genocide, the stories about the sacking of the Hirschfeld institute, the names of trans people murdered under the Nazis, we effectively try to overcome these fabricated communication barriers which at their root are about our relative disprivilege in being taken and heard seriously and we try to overcome them by finding more intense and terrifying things to explain the creeping terror we are increasingly feeling, because we are being ignored when we talk about the harm we are facing and we quite naturally imagine that if that harm and terror about threatened further harm was understandable to cisgender people, they might help us stop various impending disasters.
Except at this point, we’re facing some very serious forms of harm and threat, neonazis in the street working in cahoots with major broadcasters, mass shooters, demonisation, and apparently the best communications strategy that we’ve somehow allowed ourselves to commit to is training the wider cisgender public in obscure niches like the very cutting edge of Transgender Holocaust studies, the nature and typical progression trajectory of an average genocide, the complex ways that existing anti-genocide frameworks don’t quite encompass as a group that isn’t a religious minority but nevertheless we are being targeted as if we are a religious minority. We’re seriously in the weeds! And all we need to do is talk about how many of us are facing increased street violence, harassment, cyber-stalking. About how specifically the government in the UK and the USA are each working diligently to ensure that human rights infrastructure will not protect us when we need it, or in some states is transitioning into active efforts to persecute trans families. When we’ve reached this point, these genocide frameworks have helped train our instincts to recognise the quite grave threats on the horizon but leave us lacking in trying to discuss those threats in a way that is immediately actionable in the present."
If that is indeed the position you are "hearing", then I can only assume you've been carefully avoiding any political media outside of that written by Scott and his friends for the past several years, because that position has basically no presence anywhere outside of his sphere of influence. The position of mainstream liberals is that "woman" *must* be defined entirely by self-identification and anyone who considers biology-based definitions relevant for any purpose is a hateful fascist.
As far as I know, Rowling has not gotten anyone cancelled. She started getting cancelled for tweeting that biological sex is real. If you think Rowling is the problem for tweeting her definition of sex, then in what sense are you allowing a plurality of definitions to live side by side? Are people only allowed their definition if they don't tell anyone?
There's a symmetry to "who started it" arguments. Both sides see themselves as just acting like normal, reasonable people and the other side as the ones who took the first bad action that started the fight. You see this as Rowling starting the fight while Rowling sees a crusade started against her for an innocuous opinion.
I mean, currently she is being "cancelled" for committing some form of libel or defamation by picking someone who is -- according to all confirmed evidence -- a biological woman and calling them a man.
Unless Joanne has done a test on the boxer herself, it doesn't matter whether no test has been released, asserting something defaming that you don't have substantial (as opposed to purely speculative) evidence for *is the definition of* defamation in the UK - the burden of proof is on Joanne to show it is something she knows to be true.
If the parent commenter thought that original tweet was allowable but some more recent tweet by Rowling was not, then I may have just been missing the relevant context.
But if Rowling is just calling a woman a man, then the parent commenter's argument wouldn't apply. They said the problem is Rowling insisting everyone use the same definition of sex. You're saying this isn't a definitional issue - Rowling is just lying about facts.
Right. My point was the reality of the present undermines the claim that she's "just" being cancelled for "tweeting that biological sex is real".
In reality, what people are opposed to is the fact that Rowling believes that in the *social* (and more pertinently, *legal*) context(s), *only* the biological definition should be used.
And that she's a genuinely phobic bigot that sees trans women as "male" predators nefariously invading women's spaces, and sees them around every corner - even in people who are, by biology, women, with all the parts she has claimed in the past to define a woman.
This case is very complicated, as there are conflicting claims: is Imane Khelif female? intersex? trans? Nobody quite knows for sure, the various governing bodies are issuing contradictory messages, and it's an entire mess.
I don't think there is any "confirmed evidence" about Khelif's "biological womanhood" and I feel sorry for them getting dragged into this fight in such a manner. This is a very personal and private matter, and having to litigate it in public like this is invasive. But there is a real question going on here and a real need for clarification on policy.
The side that invented "racism = prejudice + power, ergo you can't be racist against white people" does not get to retreat to the motte of linguistic descriptivism when threatened. Trans activists are not demanding that trans women be permitted to compete in female sporting events because they believe there are multiple concurrent definitions of women which are not in conflict with one another: they are doing so because they believe that a woman is anyone who believes they are a woman, and the people who believe that a woman is an adult human female are mistaken or bigoted (or both).
There are cases where a plurality of definitions can co-exist, but there are also cases where definitions are not open in that way, but are the first and necessary step for us to even engage an aspect of reality. For example, you probably wouldn't say that many definitions of mammals can happily coexist, some including reproduction by self-cloning, some not. In such cases, if you change the definition, you are talking about a different phenomenon, and that should be clear.
very backwards, the whole point of liberalism is that its meant to make it possible to have civil society under conditions of widespread disagreement about what things are good/bad, healthy/unhealthy, natural/unnatural, sacred/profane
Sure, that's the proclaimed ideal. What's swept under the rug is that it has ever more-or-less worked in largely racially and culturally homogeneous societies, where people may have disagreed about esoteric scriptural subtleties between their Christian sects, but didn't even consider it possible to disagree on what the word "woman" meant.
And yet, here we are today, where liberalism has delivered precisely the opposite of its core stated purpose. Intolerance and hatred is amped up to 11 everywhere, and so far as I can tell, mostly perpetrated by the adherents of "tolerance and empathy."
Like how Socialism is supposed to deliver us unto a utopia, but instead every time we try we get a genocide-cult.
The contradiction is actually reasonably easy to ferret out. Liberals reserve all their good behaviour for the ingroup. The outgroup gets the pointy end, and lots of it.
In case you think I'm being unfair here, recall that conservatives are more able to comprehend and accept the outgroup beliefs than vice-versa. Obviously everyone treats the outgroup awfully. Just that... liberals take it further and do it more vociferously.
> where liberalism has delivered precisely the opposite of its core stated purpose
Eh, I'd say this is what happens when liberalism is in the process of breaking down. Liberalism requires that a decent fraction of the population, especially leaders, be willing to put aside their own preferences and uphold liberal values even when they go against their own beliefs. These days, that's taken as a sign of weakness and insufficient fervor. A liberal democracy can't survive once more than half the voters abandon liberalism.
(I'm taking about liberalism specifically, here, and not leftism.)
"Whereas we're in the middle of a "progressive" revolution so broad in scope that even a core notion like "woman" is no longer uncontroversial."
Is "woman" a core notion, though? I'm sure it feels like one, but I suspect that's more about cultural memory than actual reality.
In centuries past which category you got sorted into at birth "man" or "woman" was extremely, extremely important to the future course of your life. It could determine all sorts of things like your eligibility to own property, your access to education, your ability to manage your own finances, how much say you got in who you married, what jobs you were allowed to work, what hobbies you could pursue, what company you would be welcome in and whether your spouse was legally allowed to rape (or in some extreme cases) murder you.
None of that is true anymore (in typical liberal democracies). Nowadays which category you get sorted into determines a far narrower range of things, stuff like access to a few scholarship opportunities, your overall risk for homeless, dying in war, and being a victim of domestic or sexual violence, how hard it will be to get custody of your kids in a divorce, which washrooms you use and which sports teams you're allowed to play on. Some of those are still pretty important things, but much, much less sweeping and inescapable than the previous list. And for basically every one of them, there's someone out there (usually a great many people) who think that that thing *shouldn't* be determined by your category membership, and are working to break that link. Oh, and it also determines some very nebulous, difficult-to-pin down social stuff around the impressions you make on people and how they treat you.
Note that for pretty much everything listed on the first list, we're not "in the middle" of breaking the link (here in the developed world), we have already done so. We have done so soundly, convincingly, several decades ago at a minimum. Those questions are settled. It doesn't seem remotely realistic to me to expect that wheel to run in reverse any time soon. So the question is, are the items on that second list REALLY important, core, bedrock principles to our culture and politics? Obviously opinions can differ, but it sure doesn't seem like they're *treated* that way. Appeals to incredulity (i.e. "The doesn't even know what a 'woman' is!") seem to be far more common than object-level arguments about why most of the remaining social consequences of category membership are important to defend.
You may note I haven't said anything about biology. Biology exists, of course. Contra various slogans and hot-takes, there's actually very little disagreement in this debate about the *physical* consequences of peoples' genetic makeup, it's almost solely about the *social* consequences. That is, the essence, the entire debate: should there be ONE definition that tries to bind the biological categories perfectly to (what's left of) the social categories or TWO definitions, which lets them be separate.
And here I thought the core notion of "woman" might have to do with one's role in the reproduction of the species. Which feels, I don't know, pretty core.
Biology is relevant to many very important social issues. Which sex you belong to determines which sex you can have children with, which of two almost disjoint sets of people consider you a potential romantic or sexual partner or spouse (which in turn affects how they behave towards you, and how you want them to behave towards you, in many contexts), whether you are the one who gets pregnant, gives birth and breastfeeds when you have children (which likely affect your career and your related choices), what attributes your potential partners find attractive...
?! It seems to me that the central motivating factor in the entire ideology of liberalism was the 17th-century discovery of what happens when people *don’t* have broad agreement on which things are good and try to fight it out, and that the central dogma of the ideology is toleration specifically of things you may believe are wrong.
Are you saying that, if left-wing people stopped cancelling people, and right-wing people started cancelling people, then cancellation would be a good institution? If so, how do you avoid something like Lysenkoism?
Some people will respond: "Because I support good things and oppose bad things". This misunderstands Lysenkoism. Many people who supported Lysenkoism acknowledged in private that Lysenkoism is wrong and harmful. Cancel culture makes you choose, in that case, between being right and not being cancelled. I can't really take anyone advocating cancel culture seriously until they give some reason to believe that have an answer to that. More broadly, cancel culture can be, and is, abused (another example is described in Ivan Fyodorovich's comment on this thread about the "Racists getting fired" blog). This, IMO, is a fundamental, unresolvable, and significant problem with cancel culture that is sufficient to make the whole institution net harmful.
Agreed for the most part, but this goes back much much further than the 1950s. Cancel culture is pretty much as old as civilization, and Liberalism was our cultural answer to it. Two religions in the same area used to result in wars of extermination, but now we can mostly get along without ongoing violence. That's a big deal. When one side defects, the answer should not be "it's okay when we do it" or "we're just getting revenge from before" but instead "no, this is also wrong."
I'm not upset with the left for some of its members engaging in cancel culture. I am upset with the left that the rest of them seemed fine with it and often egged it on. I am not upset that some of the right is engaging in cancel culture, but I will be upset with the right if/when the rest of the members support cancelling.
I don't agree. I do agree that the right is no less cruel all things considered, but their cruelty takes a different form. Vicious and all-encompassing campaigns of cancel culture are a distinctly and essentially left-wing thing.
Nothing during the Bush years remotely compares to late- and post-Obama cancel culture. You had a handful of people targeted for very direct opposition to the wars or for actually insinuating that 9/11 was justified. If there'd been hundreds of people fired every year for suspected anti-war opinions, or even neutral opinions or pro-war opinions expressed with the "wrong" language, and if the same had also happened with dozens of *other* issues important to the right, then you could make a comparison.
Going back, the Soviet Union murdered *several times* more people than Nazi Germany, yet strangely that receives a tiny fraction of the attention. There's a new Holocaust movie every few years but most people probably barely even know about the Soviet purges, and academics certainly have no interest in drawing attention to it, for obvious reasons. Admittedly the Nazi murders were probably a lot crueler than the Soviet ones, but I'm not really sure because again, nobody talks about it.
(Now try comparing the *McCarthy purges* to the earlier Soviet ones...)
And of course, the very first instance of left-wing cancel culture, the Reign of Terror, literally happened three or four years after the term "left-wing" was coined!
The right does other bad things, but I don't think you can deny that cancel culture is baked into the left's DNA.
Still at least two nines of similarity if some chimps got mixed in, and they've got social dynamics including ostracism, so our common ancestor probably did too.
Yeah, you're definitely not on the wrong track at all, claiming that a large fraction of the human populace is in fact inhuman. Keep going down that road!
Stalin was _awful_ but his administration didn't murder nearly as many people as the Nazis did. There's a difference between incompetence leading to mass famine (which happened in the USSR) and rounding people up, putting them in extermination camps, and gassing them en masse (which happened under the Nazis).
This seems to imply that as far as deaths go, Stalin was mostly guilty of incompetence.
Firstly, the GULag archipelago is a thing, with its millions of victims (the exact number is hotly debated) totally intended. Secondly, mass purges and executions outside the GULag system are a thing. And finally, considering the Holodomor as pure incompetence with no ill intent is a position that needs justification.
The specific “body count” Stalin had is debated, but 15 million is _not_ a radical position.
It’s also worth mentioning that his camps did not vanish with his death.
>And finally, considering the Holodomor as pure incompetence with no ill intent is a position that needs justification.
The Holodomor-as-Ukrainian-genocide seems to me a nation-building kind of myth boosted by the current war. It's a more antagonistic version of how Canadians define Canadian-ness as not being American.
There were famines throughout the USSR during that time, and there is at least some evidence that Ukraine was treated better than some of the other regions.
"Yet this reduction set a precedent for more reductions. In August, once procurements began, Ukrainian leaders and leaders of other provinces appealed to the central government for more reductions in procurements. Stalin and the other leaders agreed to cut Ukraine’s grain procurement plan a second time, by 40 million puds (656,000 tons), over 12 percent of the plan that remained for Ukraine to fulfill. This proposal was approved (the decree specified that procurements were to be reduced by 39.5 million puds, holding back half a million puds of reduction in case further reductions were needed) and implemented over the next two weeks.
In preparation of this measure, Stalin wrote to his subordinate in Ukraine Lazar Kaganovich and specified that this reduction was only for Ukraine, the other regions would have to wait:
'As is evident from the materials, not only the Ukrainians but also the North Caucasus, Middle Volga, Western Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Bashkiria willspeak with the Central Committee about reducing the grain procurement plan. I advise satisfying for the time being only the Ukrainians, reducing their plan by 30 million and only in extreme case by 35–40 million. As for the others, postpone discussion with them until the end of August. (Pyrih 2007, 290–298)'
Stalin here clearly indicated that he considered reducing procurements for Ukraine a higher priority than for other regions. These are not the words of a leader who had a strong anti-Ukrainian bias."
First of all: re-reading my comment above, it came out kinder to Stalin than I intended. His government did commit a lot of outright massacre. I just think that (1) the large majority of death caused by the Stalin regime was the result of incompetence and low-grade callousness rather than deliberate murder, and (2) the amount of deliberate murder they perpetrated was substantially less than the amount the Nazis perpetrated.
So I think it's correct that "as far as deaths go, Stalin was mostly guilty of incompetence". Not because he wasn't also guilty of monstrous levels of outright evil, but because the incompetence managed to kill _even more_ people than he deliberately had murdered.
On the specific subjects of the Holodomor and the gulags:
I am not an expert on this stuff, but my impression is that the Holodomor was somewhere _intermediate_ between deliberate genocide and mere incompetence. Something along the lines of "meh, who cares about those uppity Ukrainians". Evil, for sure. Resulted in a fuckton of deaths, for sure. But not a serious attempt to wipe the Ukrainians out.
Millions of people were sent to the gulags, and somewhere on the order of 1-2 million people died either in them or shortly after release (and credibly because of hard treatment there). Again, evil on a grand scale, but not (so far as I can make out) deliberate murder in the way the Nazi extermination camps were: most of the people who died in the gulags weren't _intended_ to die, the government just didn't much mind whether they did. (Whereas the Nazis _did_ want millions of Jewish people dead, and when it looked as if the war was going to end before they managed to work them all to death they accelerated the process with poison gas.)
To reiterate: when I said Stalin was awful, I meant it. It looks to me as if he did somewhere around the same amount of damage to the world as Hitler did. It's just that less of it was a matter of deliberate murder.
also attributing the famine deaths to Stalin while limiting the Nazis just to the Holocaust and other direct purposeful killings and not the full 50-odd million of the Western theater (I'll grant that the Pacific isn't really on them) seems like isolated rigor
Don't forget Stalin's responsibility for the Western theater. Molotov-Ribbentrop plays a crucial role in setting the whole thing up, and that's on both Stalin and Hitler.
I'm not going to bother litigating any of these individually at length but think it's worth pointing out:
1) the absurdity of conflating the political DNA of 20th century Soviet Russia with that of the contemporary neoliberal American Democrat;
2) the similar absurdity in using revolution-era Soviet Russia as your leftist counterpart to right-wing "cancelation" campaigns in stable, mid-century America (McCarthyism);
3) that your focus on war protest firings during the Bush years ignores that America has historically institutionalized employment screening for right-coded offenses (i.e. felonies, sexual orientation, union membership, etc.), making "cancelation" simply the default state for the selected undesirables;
4) that you are straightforwardly wrong about the scale of the Soviet Great Purge (700k - 1.2 million murdered) as compared to the Holocaust (around 11 million murdered);
5) calling the Reign of Terror "cancel culture" robs the term of any specificity whatsoever and allows it to be applied to essentially any period of politically motivated mass killing.
To be clear, this is not an argument that "the left is good and the right is bad" but in favor of better and more coherent reasoning.
1) you used the term "the left", and you used it in a way that seems to be intended to include the modern American left. Thus, the only way I can understand your objection is if you think the Soviet Union wasn't really leftist, which unless I'm missing something is extreme revisionism.
2) Since the McCarthy purges were a direct response to the fears of the Soviet Union, saying that they can't be compared is a bit odd. But I mainly compared the latter to Nazi Germany.
3) So now you're boradening "cancellation" so that it's no longer restricted to speech. I think that's changing the topic, since I explicitly said the right is cruel in other ways than cancelling people (by which I meant, and I thought we all meant, for their words or opinions). But that aside...felonies? Are you actually saying firing people for committing actual crimes should be compared to cancel culture??? Or am I misunderstanding you?
4) I'll concede this point, even though I don't think it's in dispute that tens of millions died due to Soviet domestic policies, because I didn't realise it was in such dispute whether the Ulraine famine among other things was "mere" incompetence. I know hardly anything about this, partly because (as I said) hardly anyone talks about it.
5) You're going to have to elaborate on how the Terror wasn't the exact same sort of thing as modern cancel culture, but to a much worse degree. As far as I can tell they share all the same basic elements: the mob mentality, the frenzy for new victims, the purging of people who are insufficiently committed to the purge, and so on.
I appreciate the point in your last sentence, but I think this "both sides"ism can ignore the fact that while both sides do evil, certain particular kinds of evil are much more present on one side.
ClearChannel banned a large number of bands for anti-war views. The Dixie Chicks were banned by CC and everyone else for being disappointed in the President. Murdoch owned 146 newspapers around the world and they all supported the Iraq War. Maybe it was a coincidence that they all chose not to write about it.
I suspect you have a narrow definition of "cancelled".
"The Dixie Chicks were banned by CC and everyone else for being disappointed in the President."
This is widely sighted as equivalent but it is absolutely not what happened. The Dixie Chicks came out against President Bush and the core fan base of country music stopped wanting to listen to her (essentially case A2 from the article above, except widespread). A better analogy would be if Taylor Swift came out tomorrow endorsing Donald Trump and arguing that the election was in fact stolen from him. The vast majority of her fanbase (regardless of anything else they did) would instantly stop listening to her.
Gabriel Rossman of UCLA has written on the subject.
Your paper confirms that the Dixie Chicks were widely banned by Clear Channel for saying "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas" just before the Iraq War started. Your Rossman paper confirms that the radio stations were more likely to ban the Dixie Chicks depending on how close they were to a military base. Perhaps that was a coincidence.
The paper says that stations had some editorial control and chose to continue playing them but the vast majority stopped.
I maintain that you still have a narrow definition of cancelled.
I think your definition of "cancelled" is too wide. Probably the right answer is somewhere in the middle. In addition to the Dixie Chicks, as pointed out by the other comment, I also disagree with the Murdoch example. That's manufacturing consent (as described in the book by Chomsky and Herman), but not cancellation. One could argue that the threat of cancellation partly underlies manufacturing consent, but there are lots of other reasons that journalists avoided writing critically about the Iraq war.
"I have never heard of a company with an open policy of not hiring people with any type of conservative views"
Because they don't need an open policy - it's the default assumption.
The right is only more cancel-happy if you disregard the left's cultural hegemony. Yes, I'm sure in the Red Scare era it was pretty tough to be an openly Communist screenwriter, but it has always been *impossible* to be an openly Fascist screenwriter.
> even today they have major law firms openly announcing policies of not hiring people with pro-Palestinian views, whereas I have never heard of a company with an open policy of not hiring people with any type of conservative views.
A play I saw was an Israeli actress's last performance because other actors were refusing to work with her due to the current Gaza conflict. These things aren't always reported in the news.
There are boycotts of Israeli academic institutions and professors, regardless of their individuals views or relation to the war in Gaza.
Basically you aren't part of my alliance on speech, even though we might collaborate occasionally to fight left wing suppression of speech. If the balance of power switches, I'll end up allying with leftwing people to stop you from censoring them. (or if you don't identify as right wing, I'll probably end up defending whoever it is that you think are saying bad stuff that needs to be cancelled)
Whether this describes you specifically, Hanania and a lot of right wing people are very clearly not in it for protecting speech rights in general, but for protecting their own speech rights.
The reaction to people suffering consequences for being connected to pro Palestinian speech on the right made this very clear.
Yeah, indeed. I am not American or liberal, so I do not believe in a society that protect free speech at all. It is the sovereign who decide, and I want the sovereign to be on my side.
> The reaction to people suffering consequences for being connected to pro Palestinian speech on the right made this very clear.
Also the Disney affair. Who would have guessed that the right would become the champion of explicitly using government power to arbitrarily punish companies for criticism of government policy? That's like the most archetypal anti-Free Speech thing you can do.
Every society cancels stuff in the broad sense that every society has laws that people are expected to follow. So murder is "cancelled", theft is "cancelled", etc...
Not every society included speech in the things that should be cancelled. At a bare minimum, I would consider America during the 70s through 00s to be a society that largely respected free speech and there were very few things you could say that would cost you your job. This sadly seems to be fading in the last 10-to-20 years, as gradually more and more opinions are considered fire-able offenses.
I agree that much of what we cancel now are good things, but it is possible to have a society that "cancels" genuinely bad things (murder, theft, etc...) while still giving people free speech.
The analogy is not to things being outlawed, but to there being opinions and attitudes which will invite social shunning and ostracism. I think it's reasonable to say that basically every civilisation has had opinions you can espouse in the town square that would get you metaphorically tarred and feathered. Perfectly-protected, socially-encouraged free speech has basically never been the norm of any known large-scale society. Late-20th-century America got further than most, but far from all the way there.
This is only because the decades of not acknowledging homosexual sex as part of the human range is a stunningly effective example of cancellation, but it's more rightwing than left, so it doesn't fit the standard schema.
It has always been acknowledged as a part of human range. Even as far back as the Bible, where it's called an "abomination". And while opinions on that have changed in some parts of the world, they mostly haven't (yet) on another part of the range that the post mentions, pedophilia.
Opinions did change on pedophilia. Most pre-modern societies had vastly different views on the appropriateness of sexual activity between adults and youth. Homosexuality sometimes, too - ancient Greece and feudal Japan are good examples of both.
Thank you for saying the quiet part out loud. So much of "anti-cancel culture" (not all, but much) is really just people who don't like progressive ideas and have use "cancel culture" as a way to suppress those ideas without acknowledging their own censorship.
There may be many people who only oppose suppression of their own views, and would like to suppress their opponents' views, but that doesn't mean that their opposition to the suppression of their own views is itself a way to suppress the ideas of their opponents.
Also, they are right when they oppose the suppression of their own views, for all the reasons actually consistent opponents of cancel culture like Scott say, they are only wrong when they want to suppress their opponents' views.
I don't have a unified theory of how to treat cancel culture. But I think you definitelt cross the line when you begin punishing non-punishers, or insisting that other people take up a position between you and the thing you are canceling and no neutrality is allowed.
I think that “punishing non-punishers” is hard to define here. Is it “punishing” to vociferously criticize someone in public and demand they go away? Because that’s what a lot of cancel culture consists in, and it’s also a lot of the behavior that so-called cancel culture is acting against.
It depends on who you are vociferously criticizing I guess. Saying "I stopped listening to this podcast since they started inviting guests like X / speaking in support of Y" should be fine.
Attacking otherwise innocent people who are just associated with the podcast, like other guests or listeners is crossing the line I think. They have not themselves done the bad thing, they are merely one degree of separation from people who have, and they could have a hundred good reasons for that.
What about just calling for a boycott then? I don't know. Ideally I am OK with putting pressure on the guilty, and I am not OK with pressuring bystanders to make them put pressure on the guilty. Calling for a boycott is technically OK then, but it can very easily cross the line.
I don't claim this is a total solution, it's just where I am at right now.
"Is it “punishing” to vociferously criticize someone in public and demand they go away?"
In this context, I think it's clear that the answer is yes if you want them to go away because they're not actively on your side, and no if it's because they're actively against your side or values. Can you think of any situation in which the former attitude isn't completely toxic?
It sure seems like there is an important difference between:
a. Criticizing you for your expressed ideas, saying you are wrong, wrongheaded, a fool, a shill for Putin, whatever.
b. Trying to organize some kind of bad consequences for you outside of having me say your're wrong or call you names.
I think (a) is not the thing those of us who object to cancel culture object to. That's speech being responded to by other speech. It can still be plenty nasty, but it's nasty within the bounds of communicating ideas.
(b) is the place where cancel culture comes in. And there's not a clean line between those, because (for example) if you are an academic and I criticize your research in ways that makes your tenure committee decide your work is not very good, I'm causing a bad consequence for you--you don't get tenure. If you write a substack and I mock you and your ideas and convince lots of your subscribers to unsubscribe, that's speech but still imposes some consequences. But also, those seem kind of noncentral.
Suppose you find my political writing on the internet, and you disagree with my ideas.
So you contact my employer to let them know about my evil beliefs and ideas, make sure my kids' school hears about what a terrible person I am, etc. This seems pretty fundamentally different. You aren't trying to argue against my ideas with your own, even to the point of calling me an idiot or a monster. Instead, you are trying to screw up my life as a way of silencing me or punsihing me for having those ideas. I think this is a pretty central version of what people mean when they talk about cancel culture.
I agree with this, it's a good heuristic to regard "those that aren't with us are against us" as an attitude that indicates your movement has gone off the rails.
Straw man Alert: Your basic premise is wrong. Cancel culture arose during the #metoo movement as a broad boycott technique, with the aim to withdraw individual support from celebrities who had committed sexual crimes yet who remained very powerful within their industry, nevertheless. To attack it as if it were something else is the essence of the straw man argument.
I don't think this is really correct. For example, c. 2014- 2015 the "Racists getting fired" blog was dedicated to finding random people saying bigoted things on the internet and trying to get them fired from their jobs, typically jobs that had nothing to do with expressing opinions. The blog would then post their successes. A lot of random blue collar nobodies lost their jobs thanks to that blog.
The blog eventually got some heat when some guy changed his Facebook page to look like it belonged to his ex-girlfriend, then said some toxic things to rain down hell upon his ex. If he had been a little less sloppy he would have gotten away with it and her life would have been ruined.
Anyway, to me this is the clearest example of cancel culture. Trying to get people fired from jobs that have nothing to do with take-having.
This is ahistorical. Brendan Eich getting forced out as CEO of Mozilla because of his opposition to gay marriage is the canonical example of what we now call "cancel culture", and it happened in 2014.
- In 2006, Millersville University refused to issue an education degree to one Stacy Snyder. She was instead issued an English degree.
- She sued, arguing that her degree had been denied because of a photo she appeared in, in which she was drinking from a plastic cup and wearing a stupid-looking hat with a skull and crossbones on it.
- In 2010, she lost her case, with the judge noting that Millersville couldn't have given her an education degree because she hadn't fulfilled the requirements.
- The requirement she hadn't fulfilled was to gain teaching experience at a local school; she had been trying to do that, but the school barred her from its campus before her requirement was complete.
- The local school's formal complaint was that she was overly familiar with the students, interacting with them as a social equal.
- Evidence appeared in court that she had been badmouthing the school to the students there, which is a more likely reason for getting kicked out of the program, but wasn't the formal basis for it.
The photo doesn't appear to have been relevant to events in any way, except that it was Snyder's theory of why her university was wrong not to award her a degree in education. To the extent that cancel culture is implicated, it's only that Snyder appears to have believed in its existence enough to make it the heart of her very flimsy case.
Eich and Justine Sacco (both 2014) are much better examples, which is to say that they are examples.
"Donglegate", which is to me an iconic example of a cancel culture pile-on mess, was in 2013. As was the Justine Sacco affair. "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" was published in 2015. MeToo wasn't that prominent until the hashtag campaign started in 2017.
One of the things I found so darkly amusing about Donglegate is that the two guys shamed in the photo lost their jobs, but so did the woman who did the shaming. Nobody won here, but everybody lost.
I very distinctly remember seeing #CancelColbert trending in 2014 and feeling like some major vibe shift had occurred that I couldn't put my finger on at the time. At least for me and my exposure to it, that's definitely the beginning of Cancel Culture.
“Cancelled” was a term used in various subcultures to talk about celebrities who had said or done something that made you want to stop watching them, as though their show had been cancelled, even before there was any specific demand to cancel someone’s show.
Huh. Do you recall whether it was specified who was doing the cancelling, or whether it was presented as a random bit of fate? "He cancelled himself with that remark" vs. "He might as well have been cancelled, for me, after that remark" vs. "After that remark, he's cancelled."
One useful things that the FIRE guy's definition does is just declare that we're only talking about the recent wave of free speech limits when we talk about cancel culture. This neatly sidesteps everything from before 2010 that maps neatly onto what we currently think of as "cancel culture", obviating the need to incorporate that into our reckoning.
This is different from saying it "arose" at some time that you think is more right. It's a fundamentally arbitrary distinction, so one's choice can't be "right" or "wrong." Thinking otherwise is myopic.
Having arbitrary definitions is fine, provided you're aware they're arbitrary and acknowledge it.
What’s the point of rigorously defining it? So you can get some group to agree on the definition and then collectively police the boundary?
It’s a good question, honestly, but I think these mechanisms just don’t work due to technological advances and the fact that there are evolutionary pressures seeking illegible strategies. “Get a group of people to collectively enforce a norm” I think only works for recruiting crowds with excessive time and desire to control others. Mob enforcement basically only works to enforce stupid norms.
The “person at a large employer fired for saying something unpopular” is a problem with large scale employment in general. If you want to be free, I think you have to be self employed. This was the thesis of “the radicalism of the American revolution” by Gordon Wood: the presence of a large number of small business owners in America (think blacksmiths, printers), made people uniquely interested in self government. Most of human history has consisted of appeals to the authorities to make the bad people go away. I think that’s where we are headed in the absence of a thriving culture of entrepreneurs. Absent most people owning some business - where there are numerous customer relationships - I think you invariably end up in an place where businesses enforce whatever cultural norms attract the most aggressive mobs, which by definition are going to be unreasonable and controlling persons.
Because no UBI payment will ever get "delayed" or stuck in some bureaucratic hell for people who said the wrong thing at the wrong time?
All UBI does is centralise the power back to the state, precisely where you don't want it to be. Even if you believe you do want the power there... no really, you do not.
If you think centralized states having power is unacceptable, I've got bad news for you about who's in charge of most of the riflemen, as well as basically all the planes and tanks and nuclear weapons. Property rights exist in their current form because all that stuff is, push comes to shove, available for enforcement.
If you ask me, the problem isn't having a centralized state with monopoly over the legitimate use of force - beats the hell out of random banditry, which is the historical observed alternative. Real problem is the stochastic, irresponsible centralization of rent collection, through the medium of land speculation. Put simply, slumlords fuck everything up because they get the benefit of all those guns without paying for their fair share.
A Georgist land value tax would force said slumlords (and various other land speculators engaged in less visible but fundamentally equivalent sorts of villainy) to, in the most literal possible sense, stop wasting space. It does so impartially, without giving any busybodies new excuses to pry into what exactly the space is being used for - in fact, it permits many existing excuses to be abolished, and can fund UBI.
Point of non-means-tested payment (the U stands for "universal") is how bureaucrats in question can't and shouldn't know or care who's who, apart from bare necessities to confirm that an account is associated with a specific real person, or otherwise prevent outright fraud. Social security taxes and retirement benefits seem to do a decent job of keeping overhead low and policies apolitical, so we know it's possible.
I would also not be in favor of the US government owning all the newspapers, and am not advocating for that. My suggestion is basically just taxing land at a much higher rate, and many other things (including structures on the land) at a much lower rate, then redistributing most of the resulting revenue uniformly to all citizens, intended result being that whoever owns the newspapers wouldn't also have the power to capriciously render employees homeless and destitute.
There are many subjects which would not remind someone who is drowning, or engulfed in flame, of the various tactical differences between water and oxygen-rich air, but when discussing immediate plans those other subjects usually seem less relevant.
"What’s the point of rigorously defining it? So you can get some group to agree on the definition and then collectively police the boundary?"
To get people to think more carefully about their political positions so they can (hopefully) adopt better, more-consistent ones. One needn't even settle on some particular rigorous definition: pointing out the conflicts is often enough to encourage positive growth.
The point is to attempt to build a coalition to fight for meta level changes (i.e. freedom of speech) rather than just the object level (freedom of MY speech) which is what everyone does right now.
Cancelling is using the moral highground to bully somebody. Cancel Culture is when it becomes a group activity.
But you cede the moral highground as soon as you use it to bully others.
The paradox is that you can't take the moral highground against cancel culture bullying and use it to bully the cancellers...
But we need to emphasise that it's bullying. Call it what it is: cancel culture bullying.
Aldous Huxley said it best (Crome Yellow):
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
As a non-believer I have to admit I neither understand combat sports nor your comment. But that's just me. Don't bother explaining. As for watching grown men kick a ball around... Really?
I gotta, sorry. If you lack remorse hurting people can be fun. Common approaches to lacking remorse are sociopathy and alcohol, but social structure can do it too. What football players do to each other, for example, would be felonies if they did it in another context, but: everyone on the football field is a volunteer, and roughly as good as everyone else, and knows the rules; there are referees...
Good point (altho I believe a few preach tolerance). Don't forget atheists, political parties, the various human races, car drivers vs bike peddlers, electric vs ICE cars, Canon vs Nikon users, Macintosh vs Windows vs Linux, dog owners vs cat owners, in fact almost every group seems to claim some moral high ground. Seems to be the default human state: everybody needs somebody to look down on.
Personally if somebody gets heated about something I say I feel I've done a good thing and made their day. We should all try to spread a little happiness. :)
[Sorry, getting sarcastic, but there is often ill-concealed glee when people pounce...
I see Eric Berne's "Games People Play" is still available. Google NIGYSOB]
One thing I would distinguish about is mediation analysis versus root cause analysis. In the case of pedophilia, mediation analysis would be studying the effects of child molestation and root cause analysis would be searching for pedophiles/pedophile networks/child molesters to target.
Mediation analysis is not directly actionable because it doesn't inherently give you a leverage for action. In principle it can serve as information for priorities, though a lot of mediation analysis is poorly performed and thus mainly reflective of researcher biases. Presumably the point of having mediation analysis is to eventually use it, so if it is poorly performed and entirely dependent on researcher opinions, it seems like it would be more transparent to shut it down and replace it with opinions. (Though it would be even better to fix the research methods so it actually works, but nobody seems to be moving towards that, so that's kind of a hypothetical idea.)
Root cause analysis is mainly useful when the root causes are bad. Generally we agree that child molesters are bad, so we can agree to suppress them. Progressives think conservatives are bad while conservatives think communists and sometimes also progressives are bad. Really they are all correct about this BUT it's rare that someone's political orientation is the most important part of their activity (unlike child molesters, where it seems reasonable that if e.g. you've got some priest diddling children, he's a child molester first and a priest second), so the politics should be viewed as negligible and therefore can't constitute basis for removal.
One major exception is politicians, who of course are mainly oriented towards politics. If a politician has the wrong political opinions, it is appropriate to try making them lose their job, e.g. by voting against them or encouraging others to vote against them.
A major issue is that currently voters are gradually building up misinformation, making them less informed. It might be tempting to do mediation analysis to convince them to have better views, and then we're back to the whole question of cancel culture again. My proposal doesn't really solve this, but it seems like the focus on cancel culture needs to be narrower on how to solve this particular problem, rather than how to address cancel culture in general.
I guess maybe I didn't explain the issue with mediation analysis well enough.
Let's say you study child molestation and find it to be harmful. Ok, but what can you do about this? There's no child molestation dial you can just turn. In order to do something, you need to first perform a root cause analysis to find a variable you *can* perturb to reduce child molestation - the classical approach being to identify a child molester or child porn viewer and incapacitate them (by jailing and publicly registering them? Idk).
This individual approach might work for child molestation, but there's a lot of crime it doesn't really work for, e.g. Patrick McKenzie sometimes writes about fraud networks where the people who commit the criminal actions are barely involved and instead the masterminds have an entire organization to coordinate and recruit people. This is still solvable by root cause analysis, you just have to look deeper in what those organizations are and properly purge them instead of addressing the superficial bits.
All of this is oriented towards bad people, which makes it very cancel-ish. But this same principle applies to ordinary stuff, e.g. for factory safety you might search for places to put up fences so people don't fall or get too close to machinery.
This was related enough to my own thoughts that I'm replying it to your comment (love your work btw)
I think there is utility in having a succinct description of some of the norms that cancel culture breaks as a way to respond effectively, even though notm enforcement is kind of the issue in the first place.
Scott points to one: a barrier between people's professional and personal lives. I think a clarification to make it match our intuitions more is:
People who do not engage in Discourse professionally should be insulated from professional consequences for their private beliefs, except where:
They are elected officials
The "belief" is actionable policy and their profession gives them opportunity or authority to advance it.
So Bob the mechanic shouldn't be fired for posting on Instagram that he thinks gay marriage is sinful and eroding society or that trans women are groomers.
A blog writer would not be insulated from that though: their profession is engaging in Discourse. If they engage in Discourse that enough people don't like and get fired, it doesn't bother me or break the norm in the same way as firing bob the mechanic would.
Not would an elected officials be insulated from pro Palestine rhetoric.
Where the distinction gets a little more useful is in cases of actionable policy. I would have an issue with a social media mob demanding successfully that some appointed bureaucrat be fired for saying, not in their official capacity, that trans women aren't women. But if the same bureaucrat created a policy proposal document for preventing trans adults from receiving hormones, I am 100% okay with a social media mob demanding they get fired - this is literally just the machinery of protest and the only realistic mechanism we have to influence the appointed state armature. But if Bob the mechanic says we should prevent trans adults from receiving hormones, I don't think it's appropriate to target him, Bob is not in a position to forward policy.
Surely depends massively on how correct the opinions are and how they influence the job. E.g. police addressing addressed child molesters in this way seems good while teachers addressing bullied gay teens this way seems bad.
If a checkout girl says on tiktok she hates gays or hates rednecks, she shouldn't be targeted professionally - her job will determine if she's doing her job with appropriate customer service.
If the checkout girl harasses a particular gay or redneck, and that harassed person complains about it on social media, and social media responds that she should be fired, this isn't the same situation. Complaining in the public square is how (one of the ways) we deal with mistreatment.
If a criminal sentencing judge says Jews are disgusting, a social media mob to get him removed is fine - he's in a position where his personal judgement is actionable policy.
If a marketing director says at a party that Jews are disgusting, he shouldn't be targeted professionally.
Basically, if someone says X is disgusting and deserve punishment and they are in a professional position to advance that agenda, it is not the same thing as cancel culture to demand they no longer have that position, that's just politics.
It's cancel culture when some random rocket scientist at NASA gets skewered for wearing an offensive shirt. Even if he was a rampant misogynist privately, of it didn't come out at work then rocket science isn't a position to advance misogynist policy.
Let's say someone who writes for the blog at a political party which opposes gay marriage writes on the blog that gay marriage is sinful. In that case the party shouldn't fire it, but voters should vote against the party.
Let's say the political party instead is in favor of gay marriage. In that case it seems like the blogger isn't doing their job of representing the party, and they should be fired (unless the point of the blog is to explore alternative opinions, in which case it gets more complicated).
Let's say the party instead has a wide range of opinions on gay marriage. Presumably it would be a problem for him to just assert that this is the full party's opinion, but if it's framed as a personal opinion or something he's exploring, presumably it would be better for the party to orient itself towards productive discourse around it than to orient itself towards internal purgefights, until it has worked out some sort of informed position.
Though realistically you are probably thinking some independent blogger rather than a party-affiliated blogger? There's two questions in this:
1. How should readers decide what content to pay for?
2. How should Substack moderate its content?
From a reader perspective, presumably ideally you pay for information production that you consider valuable and unsubscribe if a blogger turns to destructive fake mediation analysis. It seems legitimate for you to share information about why the mediation analysis is fake and destructive. But it also seems like often the mediation analysis can be fake and destructive without being the main thing the blogger does (e.g. if Scott Alexander argued gay marriage was bad for fertility or something and thus shouldn't be permitted, that would be less important than his other writing), and in that case it still seems appropriate to support him. Plus often the information about why some mediation analysis is fake and destructive is itself fake and destructive, and in such a case it seems appropriate to send the protestors back to do their homework properly.
As for Substack's moderation, presumably they have to make their own calls about which bloggers are more destructive and which bloggers are more constructive, and favor the former. It seems implausible to claim that Substack is net-negative die to misjudgements made on that, and so bad for people to try to force Substack to shut down/lose payment processor access/etc.. The judgement will instead have to stay at Substack.
I think in general engaging in Discourse professionally just strips away the normal expectation you should have that your professional life won't be targeted for your private beliefs, the same way we have legal precedents about expectation of privacy in different circumstances.
If a blogger took an odious position and social media demanded that Substack remove it and Substack acquiesced, I may personally agree or disagree with the decision but I don't feel like it's the societal discourse destroying absolute-public-bad of cancel culture - the way firing that NASA scientist for his shirt or the random girl who posted the AIDS tweet on the flight was bad. Being engaged in Discourse professionally at all makes you allowed to be targeted for deplatforming by your audience.
I personally believe in a strong norm of the marketplace of ideas and leaving odious opinions available to be viewed for a number of reasons, but I accept that even for me there would be times that some persons speech was so odious or liable to danger or to bad policy action (read: bad outcomes) that id support a social demand that they be deplatformed (but not suffer legal consequence). This is something that must always be allowed if we will truly have freedom of association. I hope we use it sparingly. But there are correct times to do so
To be clear, when calling for someone to be deplatformed, there is an appropriate and inappropriate scope of the campaign. Petitioning Substack that they should remove the content because of their own policy, or at threat of their own boycott, or that they will attempt to organize a wider boycott, is fine. Attempting to use state power or threaten regulation, or threaten the job of individuals at Substack, or trying to get payment processors not to work with Substack, or doxxing or being violent against anyone anywhere in this chain, we should consider unacceptable by norm
I'm not super informed about either story but my immediate thought is participating in the aggressive pile-on in both cases is bad, though Matt Taylor should probably have been told by his boss not to wear that shirt on video (though he wasn't fired for it, right?), and I could buy that Justine Sacco should not be working in a PR position.
And both of them seem like examples where there was very little value to the pile-on. If I was running a social media company, I'd set off a qualitative investigation into the participants of the pile-on to figure out how to prevent similar things from happening. E.g. if there are certain types of users that should be banned, or if there are certain big users who can be negotiated with to stop, or certain UI changes that could discourage it.
> A blog writer would not be insulated from that though: their profession is engaging in Discourse. If they engage in Discourse that enough people don't like and get fired, it doesn't bother me or break the norm in the same way as firing bob the mechanic would.
A *political* blogger anyway. No reason to fire someone who say, blogs about knitting over that.
Sometimes an activist collects a large number of inattentive people who are ready to send a massive flood of negative energy towards good people for bogus reasons. Such activists are bad and should be incapacitated.
A root cause analysis is an appropriate tool for this. For instance, one can find the most effective such activists who have the least other valuable contributions and try to stop them, e.g. by negotiating with their platforms to find some way of removing them, or by suing them for libel, or similar. (Maybe it would be civilized to first try ways of negotiating with them to stop with their destruction, though I don't think this would work.)
Things that can drain the vitality of such groups would also be helpful, e.g. if one can find the root cause of the grievances that make people support the activist, and then address this root cause in ways that divert energy from the activist. That seems like a longer-term solution, though.
The most important part to make this not just another cancel culture is sound judgement (target bad people, not good people, and pick effective means, against important targets).
For me personally there is a somewhat bright line at A8, with a little bit of bleed into A7. You choosing what you do/don't listen to is totally fine and the idea of someone feeling you shouldn't have that freedom of choice here is a foreign concept to me. It is when you start trying to tell other people what content *they* should or should not engage with that I start to have a problem.
While I am not advocating for any sort of legislation to prevent such things, I am largely uninterested in participating in a social group where the group members try to control (even via soft mechanisms like social signalling) what content other group members engage with.
I think it is fine to say, "I personally liked X for reasons Y" and I am *generally* OK with people saying "I disliked X for reasons Y". The problem is specifically when they start trying to tell others what content they should/should not consume that is the bright-ish line.
Re: A7: My problem here is that this is an emotionally charged statement designed to give off a strong social signal. The message's content is fine, it is the delivery that I can see bleeding into A8. Saying it in a more metered way would make me not have a problem with A7.
Edit: To add a bit more color, I am fine with "Based on our history of interactions, I don't think you will enjoy X because of Y". Here you are just trying to make a good recommendation to someone you have a history with, but you aren't trying to control (implicitly or explicitly) what content they consume. I think I would even be okay with a generalization of this like, "I suspect most people will not enjoy X because of Y", though I think one must tread carefully here and avoid crossing the line into, "I think people shouldn't consume X, because of Y"
If your book review is describing your dislike of a book along with your reasons, I think that is completely fine. It is when your book review says, "you should not read this book" that it starts to get near the line (rather than "I don't think you will enjoy this book") and when you imply in some way that you will excommunicate or think less of a person who reads the book that you are clearly across the line.
I think one can still get away with "You should not read this book" as long as one makes sure to frame why in terms of criteria related to the literary quality of the book (eg "You should not read this book unless you like reading very linear detail-thin retellings and of someone's life expanded by lengthy quotes from contemporary newspaper, and also you have lots of spare time on your hands"). These are all valid criticisms of books.
I can say I often come across (especially book) reviews where it's clear the reviewer didn't like the author's politics/social beliefs but couldn't figure out how to really frame that in their review (or weren't even able to isolate that as the reason).
I am fine with A8. A8 you have not yet used leverage to compel anyone else to do something they are not already predisposed to do. Anyone who feels my argument is compelling may choose on their own accord to unsubscribe. A9 and A10 introduce forms of leverage but pretty weak. A11 is now a forceful attempt to compel spotify to take an action they would not otherwise take, and looks a lot like cancel culture
A8 through A11 are all just a spectrum of the same behavior IMO. It is a person trying to control the content someone else consumes using varying amounts of leverage/pressure.
* In A8, it is just the social pressure of someone telling you not to do something, which means if you then go and do it you will be burning a little bit of social capital with them (because you ignored their request).
* In A9 they are putting up their relationship with you as stake for their demand, so rather than just some small fuzzy social cost of ignoring you would incur a clear and extreme social cost.
* In A10 they are leveraging any social credit they may have with a third party to actively prevent you from consuming the content.
* In A11 they are leveraging social credit they have with a broader network of people to prevent you from consuming the content.
I think there are two important things about crossing from A7 to A8 that don't exist when crossing between A10 and A11:
1. It is a bright line. The person went from expressing their opinion to prescribing behaviors other people should take.
2. I don't think there is any *good* thing that comes from the As above A7 other than cancellation. For everything up to A7, there is significant social value in sharing opinions about content and experiences with others. Regardless of whether your sharing of experiences has any downstream effects, it can help calibrate people to each other's mental contexts and this is incredibly valuable all on its own. The additions from A8 on aren't adding value in other ways, they are *only* supporting cancel culture.
Another way to put (2) is that someone who says A8 could just as easily have said A7 and I think the world would be a better place (assuming you don't agree with cancel culture in general). Same goes for A9, A10, etc. None of them are adding value to the world, A7 was the last step that positive non-cancellation value was added.
I dont want to use leverage and pressure interchangeably. A8 has no leverage because there is no threatened punishment.
Leverage is an important distinguishing feature because it allows ppl with power to use that power to make others take an action they dont want to take. That is bullying.
Without leverage, it is advocacy, and the success of your campaign depends on the strength of your reasoning not your power base.
Pointing to leverage is how I rebut the argument that cancel culture is just another form of speech and if I oppose it, I am not free speech
My preference is to live in a world where people don't attempt to control the behavior of others through any kind of pressure or leverage, including light social pressure and implied minor threats.
Do you believe there is value to society in having people attempting to control each other's behaviors, rather than just information sharing and letting each person make up their own mind free from social pressure/leverage/coercion?
This is, of course, beyond the "socially agreed" forced behaviors like "don't murder" and "don't steal". Specifically the stuff that society has decided is not illegal, is it beneficial for society to have people trying to control each other's behaviors?
So when you say control, I think use leverage to achieve. If I tell you dont do this its bad here are all the reasons its bad. I dont think I am controlling you, even if I am quite aggressive in my pitch. If we werent talking about firing someone, thats just speech right? Absolutely i want the world were ppl advocate with speech.
Its still speech when we talk about firing someone though we might be more concerned with the motives of someone making that pitch.
A7 to me just has no element of control as it is presented above. In some other context like the speaker is your boss, fine thats leverage. I reject the idea that I fear punishment no matter how small of not following the recommendation of someone online.
For clarity, I don't advocate for any kind of legal constraint of speech. This is specifically a discussion about the tools utilized by social groups I want to support and participate in.
For me the line is between these two simplified statements:
A. "Don't do X for reason Y."
B. "I don't recommend X because of reason Y."
(A) comes with the implicit threat that the speaker will retaliate if you do not do what they say. (B) comes with no such implicit threat.
Imagine your mom says, "don't eat the candy." and "I don't recommend eating the cookies." The first comes with an implicit assumption baked in that the mother will retaliate against you in some way if you eat the candy. The second, on the other hand, comes with the implication that the mother is giving you a warning that you may regret your decision, but there will not be retaliation from the mother should you ignore the warning.
Language is fuzzy and this delineation isn't the case 100% of the time, but I *believe* it is one that is fairly pervasive in US English, or at least pervasive enough to serve my purpose here of illustrating where I see the line in the sand.
On the A examples, the cancel culture line is A8(organising boycotts because of people's opinions), with the true evil being A9 (enforcing boycotts under threat of boycotting non-boycotts). Personally deciding not to engage with something you don't like is fine.
This then gets you to what people who don't like cancel culture want, which is "don't fire/harass people because of their [non-work-related] opinions." The difficulty with that is that once boycotts start, basically any objection on the basis of opinion becomes work-related.
For the other examples, I think C1 isn't in this bracket; the NYT wasn't expressing a viewpoint that "We think Scott Alexander's name should be published," they were publishing it (the equivalent would the pedophile posting child pornography) which is an act in itself. I'd agree that writing an open-letter because of a general pro-doxxing stance would be a form of cancel culture, but that's not what happened.
For C2, you personally not buying the Atlantic is not cancel culture, but you trying to incite others to not buy it is.
The B examples highlight the rationale of all this. There will always be some opinions which are so odious that the price of advocating them is ostracism. The sin is trying to artificially drive other opinions into that category. Thus a company that fires an employee because otherwise no-one will buy their products (each making a personal decision) is broadly fine. But trying to pressure bystanders to join a boycott is where cancel culture comes from, and what creates the culture of silence where lots of people might think holding an opinion is acceptable but be too afraid to come out and say it.
Hmm, so Mozilla firing Eich wouldn't count as cancel culture, because they didn't express the opinion that he should be fired, but instead did an "act in itself"? Doesn't seem like a useful definition.
Suppose a bunch of key employees at Mozilla were gay and felt like they couldn't be comfortable working under Eich. Would Mozilla be right to fire Eich in that case?
Probably. If we're operating under the assumption that liberalism is doomed, there's no good reason not to escalate against political opponents that make you uncomfortable.
Suppose a company has a bunch of employees that aren't comfortable working under a female manager. Would the company be right to fire the woman?
Firing people for making coworkers 'uncomfortable' only encourages people to feel uncomfortable, especially when not tied to on the job behavior. The only fair solution is to have an explicit objective policy covering acceptable on the job behavior and execute it fairly.
>Personally deciding not to engage with something you don't like is fine.
How is there a distinction? Me and a couple thousand other people don’t like you and also don’t like people who like you. We have decided not to engage and to make sure anyone who is like-minded hears about why we have made this decision.
It’s really just people personally not engaging with what they don’t like and sharing their opinions with others all the way down.
For what it's worth it seemed instinctively obvious that A10 is when it crosses the line.
But getting to the real point: your argument mostly rests on "where do we draw the line" doesn't it? And isn't that a bit of a Fully General Counter-Argument against pretty much anything? What's the difference between shooting an innocent black man and executing a genocidal middle eastern dictator? What's the difference between concentration camps and taxes? What's the difference between a grain of sand and a heap? Unless you think *all* of these answers need to be meticulously worked out before we can opine on any of those issues, isn't demanding that here the very definition of an Isolated Demand for Rigour?
But actually, I don't find the line drawing exercise too difficult in this case. The question that destroys most of cancel culture/wokeness is "who decides?" Who decides what's bigoted, or what's unacceptable? As soon as you frame the question, it becomes obvious that the wokeists' answer is always "I do!" And they lose all credibility forever.
Any actual principled answer would lead to a reasonably fair and stable situation that may not be perfect, but would be an absolute fundamental difference in kind from cancel culture. For example, you can't criticise gay marriage because the Supreme Court has declared it a human right, and you ALSO can't criticise gun rights for the exact same reason. Or, you are defined as an extremist if and only if you support a view that has less than 20% popular support in polls. These wouldn't all be great approaches, but they'd be fundamentally stable and fair. Good luck finding a single person who supports such actual principles.
The *essence* of cancel culture is defecting from any pretense of a consistent and democratically determined *principle*, and just having "whether I like it or not" as your highest law. Everything else is window dressing.
I suppose this is the problem. A8 seemed to me to obviously be the start of the problematic behavior. The problem is when you start telling other people what to do in response to speech
This argument proves too much. In case A2, Scott decides to unsubscribe from a podcast that promotes pedophilia, because he doesn't like pedophilia. According to your definition, since that was an action decided by "whether I like it or not," Scott is trying to cancel that podcast.
I think you do have to look at actions rather than motives when coming up with a principle like this, otherwise it just turns into a fight over Our Consistent Principles vs Their Idiosyncratic Personal Tastes. The people who support cancellation for supporting gay marriage will say they're just upholding universal moral principles about family values, the people who support cancellation for racists will say they're just upholding universal moral principles about equality, etc. etc.
In practice, "cancel culture" seems to mostly mean "punishing speech that doesn't deserve to be punished, or punishing speech more than is merited". Getting somebody fired for writing pro-paedophilia articles isn't really cancel culture, because writing pro-paedophilia articles is a very bad thing and it's reasonable to punish people who do this. Conversely, getting somebody fired for calling a woman "bossy" is cancel culture, because calling a woman "bossy" isn't very bad and the punishment inflicted is grossly disproportionate to the offence.
I think people often struggle to define cancel culture because everything nowadays is supposed to be based on impersonal rules or processes, without involving any value judgements. We can't just say "Calling a woman bossy simply isn't the same as advocating for paedophilia, and it's absurd to treat the two alike"; we have to pretend that both cancellations are equally bad (which is absurd), or that they're both justified (also absurd), or try and launder our value judgements through some purportedly more objective standard, like harm (which inevitably end up being gamed -- "The presence of this speaker on campus is causing us great emotional harm, therefore he must be disinvited").
I don't agree with this interpretation. There is not universal agreement on morality, and we want (at least I want) to live in a reality where different moralities can co-exist as much as they are compatible and compete in the marketplace of morality (may the best morality win). By saying that "X is very bad and acceptable to cancel over" starts with an implicit assumption that there is agreement about what set of things are bad enough to cancel for.
I suspect many people would say that anyone advocating for color blindness is doing such a bad thing that they deserve to be cancelled, but there are many others who disagree with that moral position. I don't think either group should try to cancel the other just because they disagree on morality.
But we totally fully agree on a wide number of things, across most/all societies. Cancelling someone over murder is totally something we do, and it's totally okay to do that in any culture. Every culture also does way worse than firing people for murder, we send the murderer to jail. I doubt there's anywhere you would find social or criminal rules against buying household food, or similarly anodyne activities.
What we're struggling with is the grey areas where there isn't a strong consensus. The progressive left is trying to expand the list of items that should be treated like crimes (even if not as bad as murder), while those being accused of these new crimes are very much against it. The reason this became such a big deal is that rather than just advocating for the new social norms, mobs were able to get the norms enforced without the norms first having become a consensus.
Having rules and social norms in a society to curb certain behaviors is quite different from rules and social norms that try to curb speech or thought. While I generally believe we should curb as few actions as possible so there is maximal opportunity to explore alternatives, I feel much more strongly about speech/thought for the reason @timunderwood9 mentions below.
I personally agree that both speech and thought should get a lot more leeway, but it's too hard to make that actionable in a lot of society. Some people have jobs that require them to censor what they say. The boundaries used to be clear about who these people were - politicians, company leaders and PR people, school teachers, etc. If my kid's teacher posts about legal but shameful things, like doing legal drugs or visiting a legal prostitute - or worse, advocate for adult-child relationships - I may care a lot about that and I think it's legitimate for the employer to care about that too.
Social media makes it possible for everyone to see everyone else's (publicly shared) views, so a lot more people are being scrutinized than were before. Although I think this is very bad and should stop, I can think of some edge cases where I find it tricky - a writer for a popular show that shares socially shameful views may have an impact on that show. In the 90s that person would have gotten very little publicity and likely been ignored. That's a new reality, and often sucks. It's why I have no social media and post anonymously.
So yeah, speech and thought should be much more free than they are, but even in my ideal society I would still care about the speech of certain people and would almost necessarily react in a cancel fashion to that speech.
Your teacher example is very good, but I think we can handle that in some societies without any sort of cancel culture. If you don't like the way a teacher is teaching your child, then stop sending your child to that teacher. You can share your experience with others, and that is also acceptable. It only crosses a line when you say something like, "if you send your child to that teacher I won't be your friend" that I think it switches to cancel culture. Of course, this breaks down because many societies have a socialized education system with little to no freedom of choice of teachers, and this provides some very interesting insight!
Perhaps one of the underlying issues is that freedom to choose who you interact with is necessary for a functioning society *without* cancel culture. When people do not have the freedom to choose who they interact with, then cancel culture is the *response* to that problem. If you can't change your child's teacher, you instead try to get the teacher that "society" assigned to you fired and (hopefully) replaced with someone you like more.
Perhaps this is why democracies tend to deteriorate into what is essentially a battle of cancellation and people don't even really try to talk about their own merits anymore. Since people do not have the freedom to choose their government, they must resort to "cancelling" the government they dislike in hopes that something they dislike less replaces it.
In that case the problem is the legal requirement to send a student to school and the default being a public school. If all schools were private it would be much easier - stop going to that school. Most people do not have the money to go to private schools. A school that has multiple teachers may be able to move students to another teacher. This should work fine for most problems - teacher speech that doesn't make them persona-non-grata to the whole community. If a teacher is promoting adult-child sexual relationships, there's a good chance the entire community is going to be against that and the teacher would have zero students if the parents can make that decision.
The pro cancelling position on arguments in favor of pedophilia is designed to intentionally make us stupider by making it impossible to consider particular options. Even if a view is probably bad, it is a good idea to be able to actually hear the arguments in favor of it, so you can actually know that they are bad. You should not be confident that they are bad if you have not heard them, and you will not hear them if anyone who says what they are gets severely punished. Thus to avoid making yourself and your society in general stupider, you need to let people say what they actually think.
I think this gets at one of the divisions in discussions around free speech:
Some people care about this because it is a matter of personal rights
In many ways pedophilia is a bad example, because of how strong society feels against it. Even in a much more just society that is willing to hear someone out on their arguments, A1-A6 example will still leave that guy with very few friends and unlikely to find and keep a job. Even a far less divisive area of research will find a mentor telling someone to pick something else. That's not cancel culture, that's just good advice for his life. If he chooses to stick with something that far outside the Overton Window, he's signaling that it may not be intellectual curiosity but personal interest (implying he's a pedophile, rightly or wrongly) and that makes it even harder to justify.
I consider pedophilia is a good example, for the reason you stated. 😁 It lets you know whether a person's proposed rules are content based or not. If it is not content based, the proposed rules should be the same for pedophilia and yoga pants in public. If it is content based, then their rules will depend on the specific behavior in question.
I'm a fan of rules that are content agnostic as much as possible. Freedom of speech in US law, for example, is quite explicit about being content neutral (with a very small number of explicit exceptions). I feel like these are much better rules to run a society by than content-specific rules, because content-specific rules end up with no end of fighting over shades of grey.
I very much agree that we need content neutral rules about speech. At some point, though, society can change some legal rules and it's no longer neutral to support certain things. It's not legal to solicit a prostitute, despite that being pure speech. We can discuss whether that's a good idea or whether it's effective at its purpose, but by changing the rules behind something (making prostitution a crime) we can change the nature of the speech to something that is allowed to be content-specific, anti-crime. If racism was a crime, then racist speech would be considered a crime. Pedophilia is a crime (and society very much wants it to remain so), so speech about pedophilia can run into some problems that even offensive and controversial non-crime speech does not.
FWIW, I think criminalizing speech in *any* context should not be allowed. Soliciting a prostitute, offering to sell drugs, or even asking someone to murder (mainly for consistency/simplicity) should not be illegal, even if engaging in prostitution, selling drugs, or murder is illegal. We should criminalize acts, not criminalize talking about or planning acts.
If you want to stop crime before it happens, then criminalizing planning seems like a good idea, but I don't think the benefits of stopping crime in the planning phase (which rarely works) is worth the cost on society of a more complicated rule system and a suppression of free speech.
I see your point, but I have doubts it would work in practice. And you know people are going to push that boundary very very hard, and it's nice to be able to stop people who are threatening some illegal activity where we have very good evidence they are going to carry it out.
Finally someone more of a free-speech extremist than me! I think conspiring to commit a crime is logically also a crime, but making abstract arguments in favor of crime is not.
Out of curiosity, at what point do you consider 'planning' to end, given the example of a murder? Because if society can't do anything until the trigger is pulled (metaphorically or literally, as the case may be), then there is a serious risk.
So if you catch a guy pouring gasoline around the perimeter of your house, and then he says (awkwardly, around the book of matches in his mouth) "you can't arrest me for arson, I didn't even get it lit yet!" you think the cop's response ought to be "he's right, you know, the worst he'll face is a fine for illegal dumping" ?
Soliciting e.g. a professional assassin definitely isn't pure speech, it's also an indication of intent to take some sort of action. If the action is illegal, and has serious irreversible consequences, responding proactively to that intent may be justifiable.
My problem with the opening vignette of the movie Minority Report comes down to one word: "you're under arrest for the *future* murder" when they ought to have said "for the *attempted* murder." Literally grabbed the guy's arm with a deadly weapon mid-swing, that's as clear an attempt as it gets. That whole precog thing could've worked fine if they'd simply stuck with all the existing legal definitions. Catch somebody premeditating? Just send them a form letter:
"We have reason to believe you're intending to murder [VICTIM_NAME]. If they die before [DATE] you will land in jail less than an hour later, and be thoroughly investigated as a prime suspect.
"On the other hand, if you abandon any plans you have which could result in their death, no further action will be taken on our part; if you come forward voluntarily and identify co-conspirators, you may be eligible for amnesty regarding other related crimes.
"In the unlikely event this letter has been sent to you in error, we apologize for the inconvenience. You might want to consult OSHA guidelines on preventing dangerous accidents, just in case."
Minority Report got around this by saying that crimes of passion gave very little notice, so it was a rush to get to the murder site. Pre-meditated murder showed up when the planning took place, so that could likely work better (though it really was "future murder" they would get in trouble for). I think it was on purpose for the movie to not call it "attempted" because that was built into the dystopian nature of that society. They are leaning into it being wrong for the viewer, and "attempted" wouldn't get that point across.
I would have no problem with police sending such letters to people planning something, nor using their planning as evidence for a conviction should something bad happen. It creates an incentive for the would-be murderer to try to *protect* the would-be victim if they can.
I think this is quite different from arresting someone because they talked about killing someone, but didn't actually go through with it.
The disgust reaction is a basic survival instinct, and training yourself out of it by listening to arguments for disgusting actions doesn't make you smarter.
Is this even possible? I can imagine someone restraining their disgust reaction (as US law requires a great many people to do), but not eliminating or even mitigating it.
It works like any kind of desensitisation. The more you entertain disgusting thoughts ("Maybe raping six-year-olds is OK, actually"), the more desensitised your mind gets, and the more willing you are to entertain further disgusting thoughts. It's like the intellectual equivalent of someone who works with raw sewage all day until he no longer notices the smell, or a porn user whose tastes imperceptibly get more and more extreme until he barely reacts to stuff which would have horrified him a couple of years ago.
Aren't those examples more like someone directly observing pedophilia, rather than reading abstract arguments about it?
The logic you proposed suggests people might be desensitized by merely reading about how "sewage is good, actually", which contradicts everything I've seen or read.
The disgustingness of raw sewage comes from the physical accidents -- the smell, the sight, the feel of it -- so it's fairly easy to consider it in the abstract, without thinking about these things. (Though somebody who spends a lot of time thinking about the smell and feel of raw sewage probably is going to end up with a pretty weird psychology.)
With paedophilia, on the other hand, the act is disgusting by its very nature, so it's hard to consider even abstract arguments about it without feeling disgust on some level. (If you doubt this, try engaging a friend in a dispassionate conversation about sewage treatment, and then try engaging them in a dispassionate conversation about the ethics of paedophilia, and compare their reactions.) This is one reason why it's good to have strong norms against discussing paedophilia publicly -- you're not only desensitising yourself, you're desensitising everybody who hears you, whether or not they want this.
My view is that child molestation/abuse is very bad. Pedophilia or being attracted to children is a condition that cannot be helped, like homosexuality, and pedophiles who do not act on their urges are to be pitied not vilified. Acting on their urges with real children, should result in immediate and harsh criminal penalty
That's a definition that really begs the question about what deserves to be punished. By that definition, nobody is pro-cancel culture, even the activist who wants to fire every author that calls a woman Bossy. They would believe that because that causes harm to Women, it deserves to be punished
<i>That's a definition that really begs the question about what deserves to be punished.</i>
It involves a value judgement, but that doesn't make it question-begging.
<i>By that definition, nobody is pro-cancel culture, even the activist who wants to fire every author that calls a woman Bossy. They would believe that because that causes harm to Women, it deserves to be punished</i>
Maybe nobody perceives themselves as pro-cancel culture, just like nobody perceives themselves as pro-tyranny, or pro-murder, or pro-injustice, but that doesn't stop them from being meaningful terms.
I will disagree and oppose firing people for writing pro-pedophilia articles (unless it was their job to write such articles and they wrote them poorly, or their job was to write anti-pedophilia articles and they did the opposite).
There are good reasons to categorically oppose certain forms of cancellation (e.g. firing someone for off-the-job speech unrelated to the job, or denying web hosting services) regardless of the opinion expressed.
If the norm is that all forms of cancellation are justified against sufficiently abhorrent speech,
- we risk that some valid opinion becomes thoroughly suppressed if society decides it's sufficiently abhorrent. If society makes that mistake, it's very hard to correct it, because arguing that it's a mistake requires arguing in favor of the suppressed opinion, which itself gets you in trouble—except if you argue it based on a content-independent opposition to speech suppression.
- Any decision-maker (e.g. employer) that refuses to yield to a demand to suppress some particular speech implicitly says that the speech in question isn't sufficiently abhorrent. Anyone who argues that it shouldn't be suppressed says the same. That may already be a PR liability or a source of ostracism, especially in a society where the speech in question is on the verge of becoming cancel-worthy.
- To convince anyone not to support suppressing some opinion, you have to go into an object-level debate and convince him that the opinion isn't sufficiently abhorrent. In a society where the opinion in question is already considered highly suspect, you likely won't win that debate in the relevant people's eyes.
If we established a norm that some forms of cancellation are unjustified against any opinion,
- you could bring up this norm to oppose the suppression of any view you care about, without having to defend the view on the object level to some extent or give away that you support it to some extent, which could make you look bad.
- As a decision-maker (e.g. employer), if a cancel mob targets you, you could refer to your principled stance to never suppress views by e.g. firing people from unrelated jobs, without appearing like you don't the view in question isn't abhorrent.
- People who do consider some view you care about abhorrent would be somewhat more inclined to still defend the right to express it, because eroding the norm would make it more likely that views *they* care about will also get suppressed.
For the A's, it seems to be there's a pretty clear line between A8 and A9. A8 is expressing an opinion. A9 is putting out deceitful statements about this podcast and pressuring others to punish it. 1000 people doing A8 would not murder a popular podcast, but 1000 people doing A9 would.
For B2, I don't understand the conflict --- he has a side project which is acceptable but mediocre research, and it gets some positive attention; why would you think about doing anything?
For B3-B5, the journalist is not part of cancel culture if he truly is unbiased, but the hecklers are. It's still not an easy question, but the nature of the moral quandary is "should you do a personally beneficial thing that will enable others to do something unethical." which is not related to cancel culture. It's similar to things like whether to open-source a software package that could be used for both good and evil.
C1 and C2 are both about people pressuring corporations for the actions of those corporations. This is perfectly legitimate. It is not about punishing a corporation for not punishing an employee for behavior outside their job duties. That's cancel culture.
B1 is the only one I struggle with. I would suggest requiring him to distance the university from all his side work. Tenure exists exactly to enable this kind of thing, but obviously the grad student is not tenured.
I think you have misunderstood A9: you sound like the unforgivable part is that the statements are “deceitful”, but I think in Scott’s formulation they are the honest opinion of the person making them, and the only thing that distinguishes A9 from A8 is the step from saying “you should unsubscribe as I have” and “you should unsubscribe or else I will block you.”
It seems like a really small step to be such a bright line, but of course the point is that they are all small steps.
I think it's both, and that makes it a large step. Calling it a "pedophiliia-promoting show" is at best disingenuous. Regardless, A8 to A9 is where the jump happens from expressing personal preferences and opinions to coercion and mob tactics.
If it was instead the less aggressive "I actively wish to not interact with people who like a show that platforms a pedophile," then that for me is right on the edge.
Fair. I'll grant that A7's "would platform a pedophile" does sound a little gentler than A9's "promotes pedophilia".
I wonder if Scott was conscious of the fact that A8 kind of hides that shift. Would one personally unsubscribe for platforming a pedophile, or does it have to happen so much (and is one time enough?) that one concludes the show is actually *promoting* pedophilia?
And again, maybe we are niggling uselessly. I don't think Scott was hoping for a consensus about where to draw the line, but rather hoping to show that there isn't one.
I think that to the extent that coalition-building is the concern, that purpose is best served by just explicitly saying what the coalition you want is.
Rather than searching around for some objective principle that delineates exactly who is in and out in a way that is clear and that no one can argue with or be confused by, just say exactly what are the kinds of people and kinds of statements you want freer speech for.
“No one should be punished for supporting a mainstream political party or for accurately reporting the results of their research.” What about paedophiles? “We aren’t defending paedophiles, this is about allowing normal people to participate in democracy and do science.”
The distinction isn’t explicitly principled but it doesn’t need to be. A group or a movement is made up of many different people with different kinds of moral frameworks. You’re trying to coordinate them towards a common objective rather than necessarily a common philosophy.
"No one should be punished for supporting a mainstream political party" is sort of ambiguous.
It could either be taken to mean 1. any MAINSTREAM political party is by definition acceptable to a major part of the populace, so in some sense it's "OK".
OR 2. the "sheep defense": it's unreasonable to expect everybody to be prepared to be a martyr.
The Nazis were a mainstream political party in 1930's Germany. But I agree "No one should be punished for supporting a mainstream political party" but I guess it depends on the party and how far the support goes...
I didn't take Scott's post as trying to say that any kind of platforming of pedophilia should exclude one from the coalition, but as using pedophilia as a stand-in for other typical targets of cancel culture like racism, but without the partisan valence.
"I’m slightly confused about this, because all Lukianoff’s examples are about government officials; my impression is that the First Amendment mostly doesn’t constrain private businesses."
I think this should say "none of Lukianoff's examples"?
The line is at A5-A6. Not because of the gradation in pushback, because "I don't think they should platform a pro-X activist".
For me the line is at trying to stop other from diffusing the opinions you find offensive. Not stopping listening/supporting those with such opinions (because you listen/support what you want), or not diffusing/promoting those opinions (you advocate what you want). The later is not cancel culture, the former is (a term I find quite well chosen because it's largely self explanatory).
The border will always be a little muddy, but it's a quite classic symmetry issue like freedom stop at the freedom of others, or do to others what you'd like them to you. Exactly the same kind of tradeoff.
I disagree with this -- I think the line has to be located after A6. Private personal listening/purchasing decisions, with no attempt to coordinate those actions with anyone else, are the essence of individual freedom. Someone unsubscribing from the podcast because their horoscope said something about "Make a change to free yourself from negative influences" would be equally stupid, but I don't think worthy of censure.
Let me clarify a little bit my line: I do not think A6 should be punished, or is morally wrong, or even discouraged. But it's already cancel culture. I do not like cancel culture, but I do not like paedophilia either. You can still talk about both, think both are good idea, even say so in public. But you can not molest, rape or abuse a child. Nor (in my opinion) cancel. A-6 can be classified as cancel culture. It's not a cancelling action (and can not be, because the only difference with A5 is the internal motivation, which being, purely internal, should probably never be used in deciding if something is allowed or not (even if it is, in most justice system, for other things - and i am uncomfortable with it).
I agree with you that, should cancel culture be 'criminalized', it can not start earlier than A8: the first concrete act of cancelling....and A8 still can be interpreted as an 'advice', so this is cancelling without any constrain, even attempt at a constrain. I do not want advices to be a problem, even bad ones (even if, right now, some already are, in fact with very serious punishments, in many liberal democracies ).
A9 is the first cancelling act with a hint of constrain/menace. So if anything has to be prevented it's at A9 and after, no earlier.
This means A6-A8 is acceptable cancel culture to me ;-)
Purely internal factors like motivations are sketchy when used to decide whether something is *allowed* (i.e. not punished), but they are fine as factors deciding whether something is wrong, or whether it's a bad idea (e.g. because it does more harm than good to society).
We can say that it's morally wrong to make certain purchasing decisions, but it would be wrong to punish people for them, as that would violate their freedom (in this case, it's also practically unfeasible).
We can also say that those purchasing decisions aren't morally wrong, but they make society ever so slightly worse, and we can encourage people to refrain from making those decisions. A criticism of cancel culture at the level of A6 can be read as doing just that, and if people didn't make that criticism (perhaps based on your argument), then the only opinion expressed about the matter would be the one encouraging people to stop purchasing the podcast.
Indeed. Morally wrong is also an individual decision. It is also completely free and without consequences. It's at the encouragement/discouragement level that things have to be decided (OK? To what extent?)
A1-A6 all have to be fine. A society where social norms push people to subscribe to a podcast that they personally find offensive is worse than the alternative. A7/A8 I even think should probably exist because it's too hard to police and there's too many useful things there (like movie critics saying a movie is bad). A9 is where I think it's reasonable to start drawing lines, and A10 especially falls into all the bad definitions of cancel culture.
A7 and A8 are permissible in themselves but cause for further scrutiny, since somebody making a few subtle A9 autocatalytic threats would usually be making a lot of noise on those levels first.
I'd say A6-A8 shouldn't be *policed* (i.e. people shouldn't be punished for them, socially or otherwise), but we should try to convince people not to do them, perhaps with specific pushback against the person engaging in A7 or A8.
By social punishment I mean something stronger than that, harming someone in informal but material ways, or at least ostracizing them with the aim of punishing them or similar.
This all may be red herring territory. If A5 is the case, and one is unsatisfied with the pushback, it should make one consider what the pushback ought to be. This can then be publicly communicated to the podcast and others; there used to be "Letters to the Editor" or people who called in to make a point. Maybe the host wasn't as quick-thinking or forgot something; followup fills in these gaps. Having the discussion reinforces our values.
While one should feel fine canceling their subscription if the show violates their moral/ethical standard, anything beyond this (i.e., A5) is unwillingness to think and engage. It is bad culture and makes culture worse as it spreads.
I've long thought of the health of a culture (or individual) in terms of how many action-reaction "tiers" they have between (0) standard of moral badness that would have you shoot someone on sight, and (n) standard of moral badness that would have you reject lifelong marriage. In my best efforts, I've managed to get close to 40, and yet I think I've known quite a few people who have no more than seven. Your examples just about perfectly replicate my thought process with this exercise.
I understand the desire to define it, but actually I think we need to zoom out here and say "If the zero tolerance policy I am pressing for is universally accepted, to what extent can I protect my extended family and friendship network? Do they all neatly fit into the party system?"
I have known people who gleefully applied zero-tolerance policies directly to their own extended family and friendship networks, then complained in a vague not-actually-planning-to-do-anything-about-it sort of way that they ended up lonely as a result.
I'm sure there are people like that, I also think there is a foggy middle where most people live their lives and form only loose connections with political tribes.
What I mean is, most of the pro-cancel-culture types hardcore enough to be worth worrying about probably aren't going to be slowed much by that "zoom out." Those with something better to do, personal connections they consider worth defending, wouldn't be trying to burn down society by screaming at strangers on the internet.
Or are you imagining the anti-cancel alliance as zero-tolerance? That would be silly.
Every now and then some animal rights activists release a load of mink and everyone else thinks it's stupid. Perhaps you can't stop the crazy people but if everyone else has a consensus that still seems useful, possibly in a nebulous way but we're dealing with quite a nebulous idea.
> My impression is that everyone wants to allow A1, and anti-cancel-culture people near-universally oppose A12. Everything in the middle, I’m not sure. So where’s the line?
In this specific case somewhere between A11 and A12 for me.
(Also I think there’s a big leap there, could be a 100 numbers between pedophilia and bossy).
One of the things, in practice, that’s happening is there’s a cancel culture largely for the left - particularly the academic left but it doesn’t affect the right.
It looks more comprehensive than it is because some left wing feminists who have had moderate fame (like Bindel) are actually cancelled and other liberal feminists, like Rowling, are monstered on Twitter to a certain degree, which is not the same thing.
To a centrist or right wing comic like Chapelle or Gervais being anti trans is part of the appeal. Dawkins is touring away.
If we were looking back at an era, say the late Roman Empire, where the emperor could not be criticised in the academy or the senate but there were massive gatherings at the theatre to see him being ridiculed every day we would probably not consider it a totalitarian regime.
Rowling is a super special case because she is so fantastically successful and rich that it is basically impossible to cancel her in the strict sense you seem to insist on. If everybody were that immune we could just say it’s all free speech and we should just thicken our damn skin.
I think this is where my intuition diverges. On an admittedly non-linear scale of severity from 1 - 10, I'd put "fired from current job" at like.... 3. If you get blacklisted from your current field and none of your friends will speak to you, you're pushing a 5. Mind you, getting anywhere on the scale is definitely bad! But if we're talking about how much damage collective group action can inflict, "cancellation" is on the low end of the scale.
I suspect part of the definition of cancel culture is that the "cancelling" must be disproportionate to the "offence". And that is such a matter of judgement that no definition will ever be sufficient to adjudicate this for every case. But I guess this is normal for terms that are used to criticise rather than describe.
Off topic but this is pretty anachronistic (unless you're talking about solid seal stamps). The first postage stamp in the world was the Penny Black in Victorian England, introduced in 1840, well after the 12th century.
Host: “Welcome to our podcast on Siberian stamp collecting in the 12th century!"
Producer, whispering: "Stamps weren't used until the 19th century, and Siberia was only occupied by illiterate herders and hunter gatherers until the late 16th century."
Host, after a lengthy pause: "Welcome to our podcast on pedophilia!"
There's got to be a difference between expressing something like "CPS should take away the children of stay at home fathers" and "I think the ideal family arrangement is for the mother to be more involved with kids". The former is an actual threat to the people it targets. The latter is a general statement about a broad scope that wouldn't take precedence over any specific situation.
Likewise, "it should be illegal to get HRT" is a threat in a way that "it's probably better to check for comorbidities and not rush into treatment for a new dysphoric patient" isn't.
These are issues of scope. Different size scopes are best viewed with different tools. If you are talking to an individual, a broad "men are generally more like this" statement is kind of useless in the face of what that specific individual is telling you. If you zoom out and are talking about society (or your specific community/institution/etc), that broad statement is more applicable and is something that leadership should heed.
People are very bad about differentiating these scopes and the correct tools and frames to use for each one. For example, when you talk about being mad at "The Atlantic", why aren't you mad about the specific person who wrote that article? Add in the editor and other people involved in the direct decision if you like, but if you talk about "The Atlantic" how is this different from seeing that the writer was a man and now being angry at all men? Or American and being angry at all Americans?
That sort of guilt by association is another big drawback to cancel culture. You should scope your upsetness appropriately to the people who were directly involved and leave everyone else out of it.
What's the difference between the size of the staff of the Atlantic, 4 billion, or 330 million? I'd say his possible scope error - and of course he may also be mad at the writer and editor - is much, much smaller than your proposed ones.
"The Atlantic" is an organization that employs specific people. At some level the decisions that those people allow *IS* the feeling of the organization. When The Atlantic hired and fired Kevin Williamson, The Atlantic was saying that they didn't want to allow/promote his type of thinking through their medium. I'm not a fan of that decision (namely hiring and then firing, I'm perfectly fine with them never hiring him in the first place), but it's clearly the organization's right to do that.
If they printed an opinion, that's the organization's opinion. This is different than a post on Facebook or X, where the default is to allow anyone to post anything, while only removing stuff that crosses certain defined lines. I don't think Facebook or Mark Z. supports some stupid right wing meme because it shows up on someone's Facebook feed, but I do think that Jeff Goldberg agrees that it's okay to print something if The Atlantic prints it.
I disagree with this. The Atlantic is a brand name. Certain people have worked under that brand, and they do make decisions about what gets published or not. But there is a spectrum from something like a party platform, where everything is vetted and can be presumed to align with the brand, and a social media network where people can just post whatever.
Conor Friedersdorf works as a staff writer for the Atlantic and almost certainly disagrees with the article that angered Scott. He writes articles that would have a different perspective. It would be just as wrong to read one piece by him and assume that this is The Atlantic's opinion as it would be to read the one on noise and racism and assume that is The Atlantic's official opinion.
There is some information about The Atlantic in the decision to not deny an article's publication but in the spirit of opposing cancel culture, I would like the range of opinions that are acceptable to say and/or publish to be broader, not narrower.
The Atlantic has an editor-in-chief who could reasonably read through, and more or less unilaterally approve or reject, every single word they print. Facebook doesn't, and logistically couldn't, and has a distinct legal status accordingly. Libel posted on Facebook isn't Zuck's problem, as the owner of a common carrier, the way it would be for the owner of an edited publication.
What The Atlantic prints falls within its Overton Window, by definition. A racist screed by a neo-nazi would not be printed there, and everyone knows that. The specific process for this is the Editor-in-Chief (Jeff Goldberg) reviews what gets printed and has final say. In turn, his boss(es) decide whether he has a job. Whatever "The Atlantic" is, a brand, a company, whatever, it acts as a single entity with an opinion. The leaders can change, and therefore the opinion. I highly recommend people reconsider a publication or other source when a change in that leadership takes place. While a particular formulation is in place, I think it's more than fair to consider that the publication's perspective.
If you want to be upset that they published something that you think should fall outside the Overton Window, you can do that.
I think you should be much, much less upset at someone deciding that an opinion is not outside the Overton Window than the person who wrote the opinion, and therefore, most of whatever ire exists should be directed at the specific writer.
This seems to endorse Facebook, 𝕏, et al. view that they're platforms immune from liability over the content they … disseminate (read as: "publish") even while they exercise editorial judgment. I reject this view: either they're content-neutral platforms, only taking down material when literally ordered to by the government, or they're publishers responsible for their content just as much as The Atlantic, The New York Times, et al. would be.
While I agree with your position in terms of what happened in the Twitter Files, I think there's room for a clear third category. Clear terms of service with what isn't allowed, but no vetting outside of that. They can remove racial slurs or swear words, or porn - things that clearly have some neutral public policy goal, but not moderate beyond that. So if someone complains that a Republican made fun of a Democrat, or vice versa, that doesn't get moderated by Facebook, because that's not one of their clear criteria. If they want to moderate to that level, they lose legal protections that currently exist.
All the current moderation is being justified as an exercise of "terms of service." Do you believe the "clear third category" you propose will be any different?
Yes, if Section 230 were changed to make it clear what moderation was allowed. Right now social media companies are living in the best of two worlds - complete immunity for it not being their own speech, but significant freedom to moderate as well. I would make them pick between the two, and if they choose the freedom option, they would be much more limited on what they can moderate. Maybe not all the way to full 1A, but closer to that.
Ah yes, porn, a famously easy-to-define category of content. There's no way a rule against porn could be exploited to, say, censor the discussion of LGBT issues.
But also, there's an even bigger problem, which is that many websites *exist* to provide politically biased moderation. /r/conservative is a subreddit specifically for conservatives, which aggressively bans liberal opinions. If they had to be completely neutral on politics, the subreddit wouldn't exist - it would be a copy of /r/politics. But at the same time, the mods of /r/conservative shouldn't be held legally liable for every far-right crazy who posts about how they want to shoot Joe Biden.
This is true for basically every website with a comments section, including this one. Scott Alexander is pretty tolerant about who he allows to post here, but he still bans people occasionally, and a lot of times it's over their political opinions (or at least, being really obnoxious with their political opinions.)
There's no way to allow a website to curate its community and subject matter without allowing politics into the moderation decisions, and no way to have user-posted content at all without giving websites immunity for it not being their own speech. And that's true whether it's a small blog or a giant social media platform.
We may not be able to 100% define all porn, but we can definitely create some pretty solid rules that will remove almost all of it, while only leaving some edge cases - such as classical art, sex education, etc. If LGBT issues is indistinguishable from porn, that sounds like an LGBT problem, not a labeling problem.
Your preferred rules would kill small, independent forums that have some moderation but don't vet all comments in advance. They would likewise make it impossible to have Facebook pages or groups, subreddits etc. with some moderation but without vetting all comments in advance if the administrators of the Facebook group, subreddit etc. could be held liable.
I'd support using liability to strong-arm the biggest social media sites into refraining from *site-wide* moderation of content that's not illegal (my proposal: sites with a very high traffic of user-generated content only get the liability shield if they don't engage in site-wide moderation; there can be moderation in subcommunities if they are individually below the traffic threshold and anyone can create them and decide their moderation on an equal footing, independent sites below the threshold get the liability shield like today).
But forcing sites of any size to choose between full liability (which practically requires thorough pre-vetting, unaffordable on the scale of a forum or a comment section like this), and no moderation at all at any level (which would only allow sites full of spam and trolling) would be ham-fisted. It sounds right in the sense of poetic justice ("if you choose what you publish, you are responsible if you publish illegal stuff") but it would do enormous harm in practice.
> A minimum viable product for moderation without censorship is for a platform to do exactly the same thing they’re doing now - remove all the same posts, ban all the same accounts - but have an opt-in setting, “see banned posts”. If you personally choose to see harassing and offensive content, you can toggle that setting, and everything bad will reappear. To “ban” an account would mean to prevent the half (or 75%, or 99%) of people who haven’t toggled that setting from seeing it. The people who elected to see banned posts could see them the same as always. Two “banned” accounts could still talk to each other, retweet each other, etc - as could accounts that hadn’t been banned, but had opted into the “see banned posts” setting.
I'd view this moderation-without-censorship as reasonable for platforms to enact without become publishers of everything they DON'T specifically moderate into the "opt-in" setting.
Then they could just force users to choose between not seeing the comments the platform wants to suppress for e.g. ideological reasons, or seeing a flood of spam and trolling, with the interesting comments the platform wants to suppress lost amid it.
They could, yes, but since I claim to want a neutral platform without censorship, complaining that comments I don't want to see are being allowed would be grossly hypocritical.
I feel there are several separate problems and they have different causes and solutions:
A) A number of people believe in a weird and obviously false Tabula Rasa view that denies basic reality and wants to censor or fire everyone who points that out no matter how reasonable their opinions are.
B) Lots of people in the West refuse to interact with half the population who hold different but moderate and mainstream views including in Academia.
C) There are a small number of people who hold weird or unpleasant views but are generally harmless. Scientologists, Quakers, Jacobites, Stalinists
D) A share of the population is paranoid and believes that their enemies are well coordinated and if they are allowed to express themselves terrible things will happen.
E) Some views are moderate, but expressing them is seen as an indicator that the holder secretly believe far more unpleasant snd extreme views, so you get a taboo treadmill.
F) There are bad people who want to cover up their corruption or fraud etc and want to restrict free speech for rational but nefarious reasons.
I mean Jacobites, if you deny the legtimacy of the rightful monarch you are bad and dangerous, but if your politics revolves around being angry at something 335 years ago, it is also harmless and irrelevant.
James the Shit and the Wee German Lairdie were both illegitimate. Lady Anne Stanley was the rightful monarch after Elizabeth died: Henry VIII's Third Act of Succession was still valid law, and it specifically named the descendants of Henry's younger sister (Mary, Duchess of Suffolk and Dowager Queen of France) as next in line after Henry's line was exhausted. If I'm reading the genealogy charts correctly, Anne's granddaughter Elizabeth Brydges was the rightful monarch at the time of the 1715 rising.
Henry kept changing his mind on the succession, and the interference after his death by various parties left the issue muddy, to say the least.
Do we take Edward's (heavily influenced) decision to name Lady Jane Grey as his successor as valid or not? What about Elizabeth's decision?
The text of the Third Act seems not to mention the children of his younger sister, who had incurred his displeasure by her marriage without royal consent to Suffolk. It was her grand-daughter, Lady Jane Grey, who was manoeuvred onto the throne (and then very hastily off it), so I think any claims in her family line to rights of succession would not have been well-received.
"The act, which gained Royal Assent at the close of Parliament in February 1544, established the new line of succession as Edward, then any children he were to have, then a son Henry VIII might have with Katherine Parr, that potential son's possible children, then children from marriages after Queen Katherine, if any, then Mary, Mary's children, if any, then Elizabeth."
Any provision for "and if none of them have kids or the kids die, who gets the throne" seems to be "whatever is in the King's will or letters patent".
"be it therefore enacted by the authority of this present parliament, that the king's Highness shall have full power and authority to give, dispose, appoint, assign, declare and limit, by his gracious letters patents under his great seal, or else by His Highness' last will made in writing and signed with his most gracious hand, at his only pleasure from time to time hereafter, the imperial crown of this realm and all other the premises, to be, remain, succeed and come, after his decease and for lack of lawful heirs of either of the bodies of the king's Highness and Prince Edward begotten, and also for lack of lawful heirs of the bodies of the said Lady Mary and Lady Elizabeth to be procreated and begotten as is afore limited in this act, to such person or persons in remainder or reversion as shall please His Highness, and according to such estate and after such manner and form, fashion, order or condition as shall be expressed, declared, named and limited in His Highness' letters patents, or by his last will in writing signed with his most gracious hand as is afore said; anything contained in this present act or in the said former act to the contrary thereof in any wise notwithstanding."
So what did Henry's will say?
"Henry VIII made a final revision to his last will and testament on 30 December 1546. It was signed using the "dry stamp", a device in use since 1545 and under the control of Anthony Denny and John Gates. It confirmed the line of succession as one living male and six living females. It began with:
1. Edward
2. Mary
3. Elizabeth
Then the three daughters of Frances Grey, Duchess of Suffolk, who was the second child and eldest daughter of Henry VIII's younger sister, Princess Mary:
4. Jane
5. Katherine
6. Mary
Finally the daughter of Eleanor Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, who was the third child and younger daughter of the king's younger sister, Princess Mary:
7. Margaret."
We know what happened to Jane; Katherine, the second daughter, copied grandma by contracting a marriage without royal consent and was imprisoned by Queen Elizabeth; she had two children (again, later declared illegitimate) and the younger died without issue. That leaves the elder son:
"While imprisoned in the Tower, Katherine gave birth to two sons:
Edward Seymour (1561–1612)
Thomas Seymour (1562/3, Tower of London – 8 August 1600).
...In 1562, the marriage was annulled and the Seymours were censured as fornicators for "carnal copulation" by the Archbishop of Canterbury. This rendered the children illegitimate and thereby ineligible as successors to the throne. Nonetheless, this did not stop their being courted as potential heirs to the Crown."
I think that once your scheming family has tried leap-frogging the conditions in the will by getting Jane onto the throne while Mary and Elizabeth were still alive, that makes future claims from that branch of the tree very shaky, whatever the legal situation.
The third daughter, Mary, *also* made an unwise marriage and incurred royal displeasure and eventually died without issue.
So that brings us back to the second, surviving daughter, of Mary, Duchess of Suffolk - Eleanor Clifford, and her children. Eldest child was Margaret Stanley, who died before her cousin Elizabeth. Margaret's eldest son was Fernando, who died suddenly and mysteriously, but not before fathering children, and that brings us finally to Anne Stanley.
This is where it gets murky, because Anne only has a claim *if* we accept that Katherine's kids were illegitimate and had no claim. If, however, Edward Seymour is legitimate, then he (as son of the second daughter) had the prior right.
So we've got a situation where there are several potential heirs floating around, and the very situation that drove Henry VIII's marital adventures - the desperate need to have sons so he could establish a dynasty to solidify the Tudor claim to the throne and prevent civil war between rival claimants - was rearing its head once more.
No wonder James VI of Scotland looked like a better bet; he was a man (not yet another one of these women whose husbands would be trying to be kings by virtue of their marriages), he was already a king himself, and by making him the heir, the dream of uniting the kingdoms of England and Scotland under one crown would come true.
That's about the size of it. Lord Beauchamp (the Edward Seymour in question, not to be confused with his grandfather Edward Seymour (Duke of Somerset), his father Edward Seymour (Earl of Hertford), or his son Edward Seymour) is legally considered illegitimate as of 1603. His parents had been unable to produce a living witness to their purported marriage or identify the priest who performed it, so Elizabeth's council declared the children illegitimate and fined Hertford £15,000 for the crime of "seducing a virgin of the royal blood".
It was only after James took the crown that the Seymours were able to find a priest willing to testify to having performed the ceremony; he might have been the actual priest, but the circumstances strike me as suspect. James's backside was securely on the throne by this point, and he had an heir and a spare, so he allowed Hertford's sons to be slotted into the line of succession after his own kids (Henry, Charles, and Elizabeth) and his English-born cousin Arabella Stuart. Political considerations may have also figured into this, as this was post-Gunpowder Plot and there was some suspicion that Anne Stanley was a closet Catholic.
Arabella, incidentally, had also been seriously considered as a potential heir for Elizabeth. Her claim, like James's, comes from descent from Henry VIII's older sister Margaret. The legal arguments for her being ahead of James were:
Arabella was English, and generally only English subjects were permitted to inherit English titles at the time. When the succession was settled in favor of James, this was handwaved away with the legal fiction that Scotland had been a vassal state of England for a few years in the 13th century.
Arabella's descent from Margaret Tudor was via Margaret's second marriage. On his mother's side, James was descended from Margaret's first marriage, which was contracted via a treaty (the 1502 "Treaty of Perpetual Peace") that supposedly (I have been unable to confirm details of this, since I can't find an English translation of the treaty) excluded their descendants from the English succession. James was also descended from Margaret on his father's side, this time from her second marriage, but his claim on this side was junior to Arabella's: James's father, Lord Darnley, was the younger brother of Arabella's father the 5th Earl of Lennox. This argument was dealt with by ignoring it.
As it happens, Arabella would wind up secretly marrying William Seymour (one of Lord Beauchamp's sons) in 1610. James ordered both of them arrested. They tried to flee. The authorities caught Arabella, who would later die in the Tower of London, but William escaped to the Spanish Netherlands. James eventually allowed William to return and restored him to favor after Arabella's death. William would wind up inheriting the Seymour titles, serving as a minor Royalist general in the English Civil War, and even getting his great-grandfather's duchy restored to him after the Stuart Restoration.
Early in Elizabeth's reign (particularly in 1563, when Elizabeth was sick with smallpox and not expected to survive), Henry Hastings, 3rd Earl of Huntingdon had been in the mix as a major candidate for the succession. His claim came via descent from George, Duke of Clarence (the ill-fated middle brother of Edward IV and Richard III) by way of George's similarly ill-fated daughter Margaret Pole. I'm not sure what the legal argument for him had been over the several candidates actually descended from the then-current dynasty. The political arguments were that all the other major candidates at the time (Katherine Grey, Mary Queen of Scots, and Margaret Douglas Stuart) were all too female, the former two too young and too unmarried, and the latter two too Catholic.
There were also a few European Catholic potential claimants distantly descended from the House of Lancaster, most notably Infanta Isabella (daughter of Phillip II of Spain and Archduchess of the Spanish Netherlands) and the Dukes of Parma. I don't think there was any serious chance of any of them taking the throne, except maybe if the Armada invasion had succeeded, but fairly late in Elizabeth's reign English Catholics were semi-privately talking them up as candidates and some of Elizabeth's councilors were hedging their bets by kissing up to Isabella.
The whole thing was an ungodly mess, and Thomas Wilson (writing in 1600, near the end of Elizabeth's reign) had the right of it when he said "This crown is not like to fall to the ground for want of heads that claim to wear it, but upon whose head it will fall is by many doubted." It went to James for the reasons you raised, plus the simplicity of the core argument for his claim (male-preference primogeniture), and also James being Protestant but not too Protestant and spending the last couple decades of Elizabeth's reign cutting deals, making promises, and generally running for King of England. And succeeding to the point that when the Earl of Essex attempted a coup against Elizabeth's councillors in 1601, part of his stated justification was to ensure that James would be the heir, accusing the Cecil faction of cahooting with the Infanta. Cecil, despite sending one or two sycophantic letters to Isabella to keep his options open, was actually at the center of the (successful) plot to ensure a smooth succession for James.
I think Hastings really had no chance, what with the Pole connection. Elizabeth's father, Henry, had had a damn good go at exterminating them, mostly on the basis of her son's activities: Cardinal Reginald Pole, who was *very* loudly and publicly against Henry's messing around with the Church and declared separation from Rome.
The Poles also had equally as good, or even stronger, claims to the throne as against the Tudors, due to their Plantagenet blood and descent directly from Clarence. Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty, had a much less clear claim and that was a very strong motivating force behind his, and his surviving son's. desire to have sons of their own and establish a clear line of descent.
When Henry had no legitimate sons and was in the midst of his marital troubles, he had a genuine fear that the Poles claim would be pushed forward. Margaret Pole wasn't helped by the fact that her sons got caught up in the tangle of treason (or alleged treason) plots that were constantly swirling around, and she was a game old bird who took no shit from anyone, so she maintained her support of Mary (Henry's only surviving child by Katherine of Aragon) in the teeth of Henry declaring her a bastard and demanding her fortune back.
(As an aside, Henry had a habit of being parsimonious, not to say miserly, with other people's money. He would demand back gifts and jewels from an ex-wife and have them re-purposed and re-gifted to the next one. All the time spending lavishly, not to say wastefully, on his pet projects. Demanding back his daughter's jewels and patrimony was totally in line with his spiteful nature).
All that contributed to Henry finally imprisoning and then executing her. After that, being put forward as a candidate for the throne was just, or even more likely, to get your head lopped off as to have a crown placed on it, if you were a Pole descendant.
Henry really caused a lot of the trouble himself, by declaring his daughters bastards and not eligible to inherit. Because he never managed to get the horde of hardy and healthy sons he hoped for, he was forced into re-legitimising them, and that final will (and how much was his own idea and how much was down to the jockeying of nobles for power in the wake of his death is hard to decide) just made it even more confused.
The Tudor problem really was "too many daughters, not enough living sons", but Henry made it worse by his treatment of his children. He didn't *have* to declare Mary a bastard, though that was down to legal requirements about cutting her off completely from any claim to the throne. Catholic doctrine permits, in the case of an annulled marriage, that the children are not illegitimate. He could have used her for marriage alliances with other European powers, but of course that would lead to fears that Spain or France or wherever would then try to lay a claim on the English throne.
But marrying her to an English noble of a great family would have at least stabilised matters until he got that long-desired son. Everyone of course expected that Edward would get married and have children of his own, so his early death was one more shock that the Tudor dynasty didn't need - and Henry's will now opened up an entire range of claimants, due to the addition of the children of his sister Mary being included in the succession.
Now there was every incentive to "play the game of thrones" and for cousins to backstab cousins, court alliances, and plot and scheme. The fact that Mary's grand-daughters kept making the same bad marital choices (from the viewpoint of allaying rather than stoking royal fears) didn't help one whit.
Reading about Anne Stanley, my God, the poor woman. In Henry's time, there had already been some marital scandals* among the nobility but this one takes the cake:
"In 1630, her second husband, the Earl of Castlehaven, was arrested and charged with being an accomplice to her rape by a servant. He was also accused of sodomy, found guilty and sentenced to death.
Anne Stanley's testimony against her husband was crucial in ensuring his conviction and set the precedent that a wife could give evidence against her husband. After the trial, she lived a very secluded life; her reputation had been severely damaged by the scandal.
...In 1630 Lord Audley, Lord Castlehaven's son, appealed to the Privy Council stating that his father was planning to disown him. Audley claimed that his father had encouraged his (Audley's) wife Elizabeth to have sex with Henry Skipwith, a favorite servant of Castlehaven's. Should Elizabeth become pregnant by Skipwith, Castlehaven planned to make this child his heir, thus depriving his own son of his inheritance. Audley also stated that his stepmother Anne Stanley behaved in a lewd manner and had taken servants as her lovers.
The Privy Council started an investigation in November 1630 and interviewed family members and servants at Fonthill Gifford. Elizabeth Audley admitted to having been coerced by her father-in-law into having a sexual relationship with Skipwith. According to Elizabeth Audley, her mother Anne Stanley had been raped by one of the servants at the instigation of Lord Castlehaven. When questioned about this, Anne Stanley testified that soon after their marriage, Castlehaven had declared that as a husband he had absolute control over his wife's body, and that she was obliged to do whatever he demanded. He had ordered her several times to sleep with one of his servants, but she had always refused. Eventually, Castlehaven had ordered the page Giles Broadway to rape her in his presence; he had assisted in the rape by restraining his wife. Anne Stanley stated that she had made a suicide attempt after the rape, but she had never discussed the incident with anyone.
The inhabitants of Fonthill Gifford told the Privy Council's investigators that Lord Castlehaven had sexual relations with both male and female staff, including the footman Lawrence Fitzpatrick, and that he was a voyeur. He showered his sexual partners with gifts and had his eldest daughter marry one of his favorites, who had joined the household as a page. Anne Stanley's account of the rape and her subsequent suicide attempt was confirmed, also by the alleged rapist Giles Broadway."
*Such as that of the Duke of Norfolk and his treatment of his second wife, where he openly moved his mistress in to take her place (and probably had a few more mistresses on the go as well):
"Thomas Howard's marriage to his second wife, Lady Elizabeth Stafford, which had apparently been mutually affectionate at first, deteriorated in 1527 when he took a mistress, Elizabeth Holland (died 1547/8), whom he installed in the Howard household. Lady Elizabeth formally separated from her husband in the 1530s. She claimed that in March 1534, the Duke of Norfolk 'locked me up in a chamber, [and] took away my jewels and apparel'. Howard then moved her to Redbourn, Hertfordshire, where she lived as an actual prisoner with a meagre annual allowance of only £200. She also claimed to have been physically maltreated by Howard and his household servants."
> C) There are a small number of people who hold weird or unpleasant views but are generally harmless. Scientologists, Quakers, Jacobites, Stalinists
I think that, while some Scientologists are indeed harmless, Scientology in general is a litigious cult and is therefore quite dangerous. True, their power had been severely broken in recent years, but that only makes them comparatively less dangerous, not safe. I don't think this applies to Quakers, Jacobites, or even Stalinists.
Scientologists defend their own interests, while Quakers will always be aligned by definition with a country's enemies whether they are the Kaiser, Nazis or Houthis.
I am very much with Orwell on all pacifist movements.
"Pacifism. Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that ‘according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be “objectively pro-British”.’ But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious ‘freedom’ station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.
I am not interested in pacifism as a ‘moral phenomenon’. If Mr Savage and others imagine that one can somehow ‘overcome’ the German army by lying on one’s back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen. As an ex-Indian civil servant, it always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi named as an example of the success of non-violence. As long as twenty years ago it was cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the British government. So he will be to the Japanese if they get there. Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force. But though not much interested in the ‘theory’ of pacifism, I am interested in the psychological processes by which pacifists who have started out with an alleged horror of violence end up with a marked tendency to be fascinated by the success and power of Nazism. Even pacifists who wouldn’t own to any such fascination are beginning to claim that a Nazi victory is desirable in itself. In the letter you sent on to me, Mr Comfort considers that an artist in occupied territory ought to ‘protest against such evils as he sees’, but considers that this is best done by ‘temporarily accepting the status quo’ (like Déat or Bergery, for instance?). a few weeks back he was hoping for a Nazi victory because of the stimulating effect it would have upon the arts"
> I can’t tell whether or not he’s advocating an implied “we should hold private business to the same standard as the First Amendment holds the government” here.
FWIW this is my read of the linked essay: when you're evaluating a firing, you should apply all the same tests the Supreme Court does when it considers whether the government had the right to fire one of its employees. I do not see how to generalize this to the bullying-people-off-of-Twitter case, where there's _also_ a lot of caselaw but it all says that personal insults are allowed.
But maybe we should distinguish firings from other kinds of cancel culture anyway? When one person cancels their subscription to your podcast, or calls you a dick on Twitter, it isn't cancellation by anyone's standard. When a million people do, things maybe change. To treat those cases differently in a moral sense, we have to impose a coordination requirement: before you call someone a dick on Twitter, you have to figure out collectively how many people "should" call this person a dick, and then check and make sure that not too many other people have done the same thing. That's pretty chilling!
On the other hand, in the firing case there's just one corporation and probably just a few people making the decision, so the coordination costs are low. Instead, the conflict is with at-will employment, which (with a few carve-outs) says that companies can fire anybody at any time for any reason.
The subscription case is an interesting middle ground: the podcasters aren't your employees, but you do pay them for something you want, and if you're not getting it it makes sense that you shouldn't pay them anymore (suppose they switch from Siberian stamp collecting to Mayan dentistry). Maybe the rule is that you should treat canceling a podcast like firing an employee: do it if they're not delivering what you want, but don't if their actions don't affect the podcast. This view blesses A2 through A12, but forbids A1.1 ("you discover that your Sumerian stamp collecting podcast host also has a pro-pedophilia podcast, but he keeps them strictly separate. You unsubscribe") and requires a facts-based analysis for A1.2 ("the host has a pro-pedophilia podcast, and when you learn that you suddenly remember some odd stuff he said in the stamp collecting podcast, that might in retrospect have been about pedophilia").
I don't think this makes a lot of sense, just TBH.
When the supreme court considers whether the government had the right to fire one of its employees, it uses tests like the one in Pickering "to arrive at a balance between the interests of the [employee], as a citizen, in commenting upon matters of public concern and the interest of the State, as an employer, in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees."
Later Cases (Connick) have recognized that the test in Pickering focusing on "the right of a public employee "as a citizen, in commenting upon matters of public concern," was not accidental. This language, reiterated in all of Pickering's progeny, reflects both the historical evolvement of the rights of public employees, and the common sense realization that government offices could not function if every employment decision became a constitutional matter."
The *public* nature of the employee's statements as contrasted by the quasi-*private* nature of the government acting as an employer is the whole point of the tests. To put it another way: the tests we're talking about here recognized *the right of a private employer to fire people for what they say*, even for silly reasons like "office politics". So, I don't see how a test could treat a private employer the same way as the government, for the purposes of this analysis.
Part of the test for what the government can do is considering what private employers are able to do.
I'm not sold on Lukianoff's framework either, but I don't get your objection to it. To be concrete, here's the kind of analysis I imagine doing when I'm "treating a private employer the same way as the government":
1. Walmart fired a cashier for privately wishing death on Donald Trump. That's definitely legal, but was it Cancel Culture?
2. It's Cancel Culture when a private company fires someone for a reason, and the government wouldn't have been allowed to fire them from a public job for that reason.
3. So: can a government employee be fired for privately wishing death on Donald Trump?
4. Rankin v. McPherson says no.
5. So yes, the firing was Cancel Culture.
(n.b. I haven't actually read Rankin v. McPherson, I'm just accepting Lukianoff's summary of it for the sake of the hypothetical).
I can understand not liking that outcome, or disagreeing that that's the right process, but what's incoherent about it?
I think the issue is one of circular dependency. If the government test says the government can fire someone when a private company would fire someone for similar speech, you can't then have the rule be private companies can fire someone when the government could for similar speech.
Sure you can. Private company firings need to meet some conditions C, public firings need to meet C plus some additional conditions D. Cancel Culture firings are those which either don't meet C or don't meet D.
If you still disagree, try to construct a specific example. Is there a firing where this process loops forever, or gives two inconsistent answers?
The point is you need to define C without talking about public companies. If you're hand wavy about it then either you've done nothing or you prevent all firings.
So we're trying to decide "when does a boycott become cancel culture", sounds like.
In the case of A, my own personal opinion is that it starts shading into cancel culture from A9 onwards. A8 is calling for a boycott, and that's something people can decide if they want to do or not for themselves. Starting to put sanctions or penalties on people for not doing as you want them to do is starting to cancel them. "I'll block you, and I'll get my friends to block you, and I'll have you put on a block list, and if anyone asks why you are blocked I will explain it's because you support paedophilia, and you have no right of reply to any of this".
In the case of B, the real-world consequences seem to be "your grad student will go on to attain a doctorate, become a trustee of a trans youth activism charity, continue to attend pro-paedophile support conferences, and only be thrown under the bus by the charity once it gets it own troubles due to being investigated for other issues. Even then, some will continue to defend him":
The problem being posed to us here is "if the activity will negatively affect the university, should the professor tell the grad student to knock it off, or else?" and probably most of us would say "yeah, sure", *but* suppose it's not about paedophilia, it's about the word 'bossy'.
Again, personal opinion? If the bad stuff is illegal/immoral, you're within your rights to tell him knock it off, or at least do it in a way that strongly differentiates his work from the university. The journalists should be willing to write the story, be it about paedophilia *or* bossy, *but* they should be fair-minded as possible when reporting - no "this guy wants to rape kids" *or* "this guy wants to chain women barefoot and pregnant to the kitchen sink". The job is about reporting factual instances of activities in the real world, but not to be an activist for getting your preferred outcome.
In the case of C, "it would personally warm my heart if the Atlantic failed as a business and everyone associated with it died of starvation" - I think that's a perfectly normal reaction 😀
On your own private blog or Substack, it's your rules. You can choose what content you allow, how you handle disputes, everything. Nobody is being forced to read it and if they don't like the way things are done, they can leave. You are not obligated to give free advertising to the Atlantic or any other publication or media outlet or blogger or 'vote for us in this competition'.
The instances of "Thousands of stay-at-home fathers get angry and write in saying they’re cancelling their subscriptions" is a boycott, not cancelling. If the CEO says "you frickin' idiots are costing us a fortune, we're firing your dumb backsides", that's a business decision. It becomes cancelling if there's a campaign to doxx the journalists or cause personal and reputational harm, by organised action, to them. Saying "I'm not buying your crappy magazine any more" is not cancelling, and neither is "those idiots should apologise for their offensive remarks". The CEO can choose to defend and retain them or not, and if they get fired, that's the economic power of boycotts.
"(Does this mandate that the current real-world CEO of the Atlantic hire a writer who wants to pen an article about how stay-at-home dads are pathetic failures who should lose their children? Why not? How come it’s okay to chill this opinion ab initio, but not post facto?)"
Again, we've had real-world examples of "media outlet announces hire of new journalist, certain parties blow their tops, and the hiring is rescinded". That is cancelling and it is cowardice on the part of the media outlet involved. If the person was good enough to be hired, and if you hired them *specifically* for their spicy takes, then backing down like that is bowing to cancel culture.
I don't think we'll ever have a clear, bright line and clear-cut definition. There will always be fuzzy and edge cases. It's going to be one of those "I know it when I see it" instances.
> In the case of A, my own personal opinion is that it starts shading into cancel culture from A9 onwards.
Same here.
Although A9 arguably includes people wearing T-shirts saying things like "I only have sex with vegans", which seems OK to me as a way to spread veganism.
I don't object to the T-shirts as any kind of cancellation, particularly as they serve the useful purpose of warning others "This person is appallingly over-bearing, avoid at all costs".
A1-A6 is obviously fine. Individuals have freedom of association and freedom of economic choice; these are not cancelling in any sense.
A7-A12: This is slightly tricky and I think rather depends on how you want to define "wrong". On one level I would support the legal right of any individual to engage in any of these actions (even A12), in the same way that I would support the right of an individual to, say, deny the holocaust. That doesn't mean I think they're correct, kind, or sensible to do so! I wouldn't like, and would attempt to push back against, and probably wouldn't be friends with, most cases of people doing A7-A12. I think I would say that anything from A8 onwards could loosly be described as a cancelling attempt.
B1: Oooh. I think it's OK to have a view on what more junior staff in your own academic department are working on. I think either of these courses of action are in fact OK; you are entitled to judge an employee by the quality of their work, where that includes the relevance and rigour of their research, and the way they present that publically.
B2: Ideally you have an employee evaluation system that takes the same action here as B1. This is probably a pipe-dream, but it's the ideal. Given that peadophilia is in fact pretty bad for children, the first papers must in fact be fairly bad, so if this second lot are the same quality they must also be pretty bad and adding little or nothing to human knowledge. So you should probably tell him to stop, or get rid of him.
B3: No, you shouldn't write the article. It's not likely to improve anything for anyone and very likely to do the opposite.
B4: As B3; no, except this is obviously even more trivial and not worthy of a news story.
C1: I am not a huge fan on petitions, and would probably never sign one. I don't think signing one is fundamentally immoral, but you should consider what the likely effects might be.
C2: Your refusal to read or link to the Atlantic is fine. See A1-A6; individuals have freedom of association and economic choice. You are entitled to make your own decisions for any reason or none.
P3 is correct, essentially. Bosses are allowed to fire their employees for being rubbish at their job. That's not the same thing as accepting all cancel culture. If they were fired for expressing an opinion privately, outside the context of their work (whatever that opinion was), I would strongly object to the CEO's actions.
For me, A6 is the beginning of cancel culture: The guy unsubscribe not because he do not like the platform, not only because he do not like paedophiles, but because the platform diffuse an opinion he do not like, in a clear opposition to the principle of freedom of speech. The action (unsubscribing) is not objectionable, but the goal [ of restricting the information given to others, because one do not like this info] is.
Like all beginning, even from a very anti-cancel-culture point of view (mine ;-) ), it's not really morally bad, it's clearly in the grey area: The action (unsubcribing) is perfectly OK, it's the goal that seems wrong, and this is in fact unknowable as reason for unsubscribing is not public, maybe it's known to the unsubsciber alone (it's just there to show the gradation). Still, this show (for me) it can theoretically be classified into cancel culture.
I'm somewhere between P1 and P3 myself: the dads can certainly get *angry*, but it's unwise to shoot messengers, in the same way it's unwise to do many other things just because you're angry. P2 is right out, unless, y'know, the publication made some explicit promises beforehand on the matter.
Defining what constitutes cancel culture becomes slippery and circular is because what cancel culture really is is enforcing a system of morality via social pressure. I imagine this has happened many times over the course of human history when a social group is attempting to gain or consolidate power over others. The obvious examples are religious enforcement (inquisitions, witch hunts) or more recently communist or fascist struggle sessions. The pedophilia examples are going to be relatively straightforward because pedophilia is already widely considered immoral. It only starts to “feel” excessive when It’s a moral stance you don’t already agree with, which is ultimately relative. This can be harder to see in our relativist, post-modern, liberal enlightenment society but would be much more obvious if you reimagine your examples with explicitly religious terms (let’s say arbitrarily Christian, Islamic, whatever - firing someone because they say Muhammad is not the true prophet)
Emphasis: our current system of morality is Enlightenment Liberalism (science, focus on individual rights, equality, acceptance of other’s beliefs, universalism, etc). If this was switched to Sharia law it would “feel” pretty intensely like cancel culture. The examples given are more difficult to untangle because they are only subtly (but meaningfully) different than our current accepted system of morality. Think Catholicism vs Protestsnism.
I might be giving away that I'm a lawyer, but I think there's kind of a vague three or four part test towards determining if we're dealing with cancel culture. Let's use criticism or attempted cancellation of a football player to walk through the examples.
First, are the critics part of, or connected to, the group they're criticizing? The people criticizing the player--are they fans of the team? Football fans in general? They have no connection to football at all except they heard about this guy's transgressions and they want to punish him? The more of a connection you have, the less likely it is to be cancel culture.
Second, is there a nexus between the proposed punishment and the action? With the football player, are you saying he needs to be kicked off the team because he's a bad player? Or are you saying he needs to be kicked off the team because of some off the field activity? The less of a nexus, the more likely it's cancel culture. This is why you always see people making tenuous connections--"how can you trust this guy to be a teacher when he's shown bad values and therefore might not be nice to all his children."
Third, is there secondary criticism going on? By that I mean, are the critics limiting themselves to going after the player? Or are they saying that if someone else (like the league, or the team) doesn't punish him, they'll punish that other actor? Or are they going another level removed, like going after the sponsors, to pressure the team, to pressure the player? Basically, where do we fall on the spectrum between "I personally will make different choices" and "I will force everyone else to make different choices." The more removed you get, the more it's cancel culture.
Fourth, and finally, is what they said or did really that bad? This is obviously the squishiest and least objective, but still, if you try to get someone fired for something pretty unobjectionable, that's more likely to be cancel culture than if they did something truly heinous.
There might be other broad guidelines, but I think that usually when you see people criticizing cancel culture, they're identifying that a critic falls into one or more of those buckets. And really, I should be clear that I'm kind of using "cancel culture" as a synonym for "bad" here. As in, I think if your criticism falls into those buckets, it's more likely to be a poor use of your time and a behavior I want to see less of in the world, and when I call something cancel culture, I'm really trying to send that signal of moral judgment, rather than identifying it in a taxonomy (this is a very common tactic in politics I think--assign some set of obviously bad actions a label, and then when you run into other actions that you don't like but are less obviously bad, you fit those new actions into the label and take advantage of the bad vibes associated with that label. Very similar to the noncentral fallacy Scott has discussed before). The discussion of an act's moral rectitude is I think a lot more important and interesting than whether it falls into the label of cancel culture, which is really just an argument about how to define cancel culture--and again referencing Scott's previous work, remember that categories were made for man, not man for categories.
One interesting thing is that you can have a reaction that only meet the fourth bit of the test, yet intuitively the response is not likely to be regarded as cancel culture in a pejorative sense. If a football player said "I'm a massive Nazi fan, I want a massive holocaust 2.0 where we kill almost everyone alive for being a subhuman. I also support all rapists and murderers everywhere and would encourage my fans to commit hate crimes and steal from their elderly relatives" Few people would find calling for his sacking objectionable- or even boycotting the team if they don't sack him.
I think there's a very important tricky bit hidden in with "[...] are the critics limiting themselves to going after the player? Or are they saying that if someone else (like the league, or the team) doesn't punish him, they'll punish that other actor?" The tricky bit is, are they pointing out the player because of perceived hypocrisy on the part of the league? Is their real goal forcing the league to change its standards, especially when it comes to other speech?
My recollection specifically with regards to the Colin Kaepernick affair, part of the complaint was that the league had cracked down on other players showboating and wearing unauthorized apparel and that by allowing only him to violate the rules for his cause, the league was in effect endorsing his cause. If the league had come out and ended the rule for everyone regardless of cause, the end result would have been less animosity overall. Colin Kaepernick himself is ultimately an entertainer. People are allowed not to like him for his public persona. As long as they can perform, plenty of athletes do very well with a hated public persona (they're called 'heels').
The problem is that it's hard to identify when someone is using the situation to force the institution to change its policy, because admitting to doing so weakens your case. These issues are paid attention to because of the amount of furor people generate over being offended.
You can't rigourously define "cancel culture" any more than you can rigourously define any other sort of culture.
Looking for a non-conversial example here... the Dutch have a cycling culture. They do a lot of cycling. How can I turn that into a rigourous definition? I can't. The Dutch don't cycle everywhere under all circumstances, nor are they the only ones who cycle. I can't define a certain metric of cycling kilometres per person per year that separates cycling culture from non-cycling culture. But that also doesn't mean that it's a meaningless statement when I say that Dutch culture is unusually bicycle-ish.
Cancel culture is made up of normal things -- the thing where you get annoyed at someone who does or says things you dislike and you use social or economic power to punish them. It's just a matter of degree -- the problem we're pointing to when we say "cancel culture" is the problem that the social punishments are becoming bigger and the triggers for them are becoming more slight -- instead of boycotting the local butcher because he has "I luv paedophilia" signs in his windows we're suddenly boycotting the baker because he failed to denounce the fact that his sister wrote a letter in support of the guy who didn't denounce his mother who tweeted that (etc etc)
I'd say up to A8 is fine and A9 onwards is when it starts to get iffy. It's the difference between only taking personal action against stuff you dislike + recommending others to do the same with no coercion vs coercive behaviors applied to third parties. A9 would be fine if the person just blocked people who kept listening to the show without announcing it.
Making the announcement, even if it is completely true, creates a distortion and that's what is bad. It's in a way similar to situations in finance where you can be dinged for market manipulation if you publicly precommit to a trading strategy that other high sophistication participants can build around in such a way that it leads to higher profits for both you and them at the expense of the common man.
An example is e.g. if you're in a market which has two market makers competing to provide to a bunch of customers then the first company publicly saying "we will only trade in the first half of the day but during this time we will aggressively penny any orders from the second firm making it impossible for them to make money, the second half of the day is free for them to make money" is very illegal because it screws over the customers once the second market maker takes the hint (now at any point in the day there's only a single market maker present who can widen the spread and squeeze out more money from customers). This strategy would be fine from a regulatory point of view (don't quote me, this is not financial or legal advice, IANAL etc. etc.) and pretty shitty from a money making point of view were it not for the public announcement and precommitment which turns it into a form of tacit collusion.
On similar logic to that market manipulation issue, though, a thorough alliance against A9 might need to push back against A8 somewhat as well, for tactical incentive-gradient reasons.
Ah yes, the great debate of liberalism goes on... which rights should be more protected than others? Someone's right to say what they want? (Anything they want?) My right to try and get someone who said something I hate fired because I don't think people who say that should have it easy? (Or I think silencing them will reduce criticism of my position, which if left unchecked my turn into gov policy against me? think: rights to HRT or smthg). But what if I'm wrong and that strategy backfires? Was I in the wrong even though I was ignorant?
I suspect what Scott's (and most people in this convo one way or another) are really trying to get at here is mapping out the short and long term consequences of different actions people make, and the consequences of reacting to those actions in different ways, and then spreading mechanistic knowledge on how to most effectively judge/respond to actions other make in a utility-maximising way so as to bring society & discourse down to a more stable state that is less likely to cause emotional distress to its members.
1. I think maybe cancel culture is just the combination of a world where many more connections are known, and a world using the copenhagen interpretation of ethics.
2. The more straightforward value of Diversity of opinion can be achieved by subsidizing the amount so that the marginal cost of subsidy equals the marginal social value of diversity.
3A. On guilt by association: Seems improper to not allow people to update on the totality of evidence but it is possible that humans are bad enough at updating on this kind of information that they are better of not.
3B. Threat to cancel: This is people threatening X to cut their connection to Y, seems like this is bad for the reason threats are generally bad. Note that its often hard to distinguish between Guilt by association and Threat to cancel.
4: there is something to be said for locality/unbundling/decoupling as neceasary for society to work, but sadly the world doesn't obey those rules, eg the atlantic bundles many writers together, peoples private lives and work lives are connected. Which makes it hard to make rules that enforce such decoupling, but if everything ends up coupled then action/functioning becomes impossible, eg how it makes it easier to hire if one can ignore peoples private lives.
The human impulse to loudly shout down a viewpoint they disagree with (and even to wish negative consequences on the holder of that viewpoint) is not new. Certainly not something that bubbled up in 2014-2017 due to some political "moment." What changed is that social media became sufficently robust and integrated into our lives that the loud shouting down could travel widely and be heard by everyone. And the social media tail now wags the mainstream media dog. Thousands of voices can now bandwagon a viewpoint in a way that simply was not possible in a like 1983 or 1949 or 1912 even if those voices were all saying that same thing back then but just to their one neighbor or whoever.
This is not a new problem of human nature (it is an ingrained feature of human nature) it is a problem with the way voices are amplified and distributed (for good and bad) by social media and the internet more broadly and an anti-cancel-culture coalition will probably have more luck focusing on the distribution issues and how social media operates (e.g. optimizing for engagement) than they will with changing fundamental human nature.
I gave Claude (the AI) Tim Urban's book "What's Our Problem" and your article here and asked it how it thinks Tim Urban would define Cancel Culture:
--------------------------
Tim Urban doesn't provide a single, concise definition of cancel culture in "What's Our Problem?". Instead, he discusses it as part of a broader phenomenon of illiberal tactics used by what he calls "Social Justice Fundamentalism" (SJF). However, based on his discussion, we can piece together how he characterizes cancel culture:
1. Part of a broader set of coercive tactics: Urban sees cancel culture as one of several illiberal methods used to enforce ideological conformity, alongside other tactics like mandatory trainings and forced speech.
2. A form of social punishment: It involves using social pressure, often amplified by social media, to punish individuals for perceived transgressions against a particular ideological orthodoxy.
3. Disproportionate response: Urban emphasizes that cancel culture often involves reactions that are disproportionate to the alleged offense, sometimes for actions or statements made years in the past.
4. Threat to free speech: He frames cancel culture as a threat to open discourse and the free exchange of ideas, particularly in academic and professional settings.
5. Digital cudgel: Urban describes cancel culture as wielding a "digital cudgel" - using the amplifying power of the internet and social media to exert pressure on individuals and institutions.
6. Lack of due process: Cancel culture often bypasses traditional processes for addressing grievances, instead relying on mob mentality and public shaming.
7. Chilling effect: Even when not directly "cancelling" someone, the threat of cancellation can lead to self-censorship and a chilling effect on free speech.
8. Ideological enforcement: Urban sees cancel culture as a way of enforcing adherence to certain ideological positions, particularly those associated with SJF.
9. Institutional capture: He discusses how the threat of cancellation can lead institutions to capitulate to demands, effectively allowing activist groups to capture and redirect institutional power.
10. Erosion of liberal norms: Urban frames cancel culture as part of a broader erosion of liberal democratic norms and institutions.
While Urban doesn't provide a single definition, his characterization of cancel culture aligns closely with the definition provided by Greg Lukianoff that you mentioned in the ACT post. Both see it as a recent phenomenon involving campaigns to punish people for protected speech, resulting in a climate of fear and conformity.
Your definition of Cancel Culture is probably aligned with the difference between his idea of High Rung and Low Rung political thinking.
But looking at the Claude response there's something specific that it highlighted for me. Point 6 Lack of Due Process.
You got very angry at The Atlantic for their post about noise.
I'm someone who sleeps with ear plugs in, I'm more sensitive to sound than my partner is. I've also got some kids and they are LOUD.
I usually work in another room with noise cancelling headphones on, so I resonate with you.
Side note: My partner, she's much more sensitive to smells. She's also more likely to detect an actor from how their face looks and I'm more likely to detect them by their voice.
Anyway. Point 6. Lack of Due Process.
I think that's something that's missing. You can for example contact the Atlantic and let them directly know you are offended by their post.
They can then flag the post for review and see if it should be modified, removed or some extra qualifiers added.
E.g Changing their article to say something more like "There's an unfortunate level of noise in a city, but having lots of people together is how knowledge and information is shared faster but also how humans bumping into each other more often leads to a more interesting life" and basically have them admit that they prefer the noise and hustle and bustle of city life compared to the boredom and silence of being in the country. But maybe they could reflect on the fact that social media, Short form (e.g Tiktok) videos and the like are all likely making it harder for people to sit in silence. But there's a power in silence. There's also some people who are charged up by it. Possibly similar to the introvert vs extrovert scale.
I haven't read the article you talk about, but I'm guessing that basically they could have a more nuanced perspective.
If you try to cancel the entire newspaper which was founded 166 years ago, for a single post, then you aren't actually letting them detect the flaws in their processes and maybe they'd been trying out some AI generated articles or letting a newbie who's a smart phone addict write whatever they want because it's the bosses son.
If they are cancelled, they don't have a chance to evolve and refine. There's bound to be outlier articles on anything that size and also bound to be ones that get missed through the Quality Assurance processes.
I personally think it's cancel culture when you actively ask others to cancel their subscriptions. It's even worse when you ask others to not just block, but also attack the newspaper.
But I'm not a Social Justice Fundamentalist. I have seen the work of plenty of people who've been "Cancelled" and still love their work, even if some of the things they do or sometimes what they've said wasn't very nice. But maybe I've not been angered enough.
Actually I saw that Cancel Culture got some pushback when they tried to cancel James Gunn for some stupid tweets something like 10+ years ago. Then people saw that he's changed and has also done some really great work.
We shouldn't live in a world where people delete their tweets and Facebook posts when they are a week old because they are scared that whatever is considered morally outrageous has changed and their old posts might get them cancelled. Instead of being able to show how they've changed as a person and no longer believe those things.
As an example I grew up with my Dad telling me things about Vegans not being possible and they cheat and basically hating on them. But then I met some and looked into it myself and changed my mind and now am good friends with a very ardent Vegan.
I'm also friends with gays, trans and other types of people from various races and don't really get offended by any of that. Yet I've had a conversation with family members who can't understand how people would vote for Barack Obama because he's black and thus genetically less intelligent. This was a bewildering line of reasoning to me but when I tried to ask them more about it they didn't want to delve deeper and explain any nuances. Very low rung alt-right thinking.
But I was also a part of some activist groups just at the start of the cancel culture SJF style of thinking and saw how that was also an alien type of thinking to me.
Both are low rung.
Sorry, I know I've not helped you define Cancel Culture enough. Just trying to add some context.
"If you try to cancel the entire newspaper which was founded 166 years ago, for a single post, then you aren't actually letting them detect the flaws in their processes and maybe they'd been trying out some AI generated articles or letting a newbie who's a smart phone addict write whatever they want because it's the bosses son."
That is a very reasonable idea in general, but it wouldn't work in this specific case; the authoress was nominated for a Pullitzer Prize for this very article (https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/xochitl-gonzalez-atlantic, under "Let Brooklyn Be Loud"), so it doesn't seem likely that the Atlantic will remove or review the post because of Scott Alexander's opinion, or any of ours for that matter.
I am perfectly fine with A1-A6, they are all personal choices. I am ambivalent about A7 and A8, but against A9-12. "Against" or "fine with" are all based on ideas of social norms - I don't want to make A10 illegal, as that would be similarly bad to what I'm against in the first place.
As we're mostly talking about jobs (everyone seems to agree that you can stop being friends with someone whose views you hate), I think it's important to categorize different jobs in regards to speech, especially public speech.
The most important category is the press. The New York Times chooses what to print, and it's not an easy process to get something in that newspaper. Random people cannot do it, and nobody can do it without the express permission of the NYT. So anything that the NYT prints is something that they objectively chose to print. Because both the NYT and any journalists who write for it are expressly producing material for public consumption, it is not wrong for the public to share what was written, even in a negative light. This will have the natural (and morally okay) result of people subscribing or unsubscribing. It's the NYT's choice what kinds of subscribers to seek, and a business decision to platform some kinds of content over others.
The opposite of that kind of job would be the Home Depot-type employee. Unless they work in PR, they have very few duties that are meant to be public, or shared with the public. The pay rate, job description, whatever, all indicate that this position is not intended to deal with the national news or be held to national news standards. It is morally wrong to promote this person's opinions to a national audience, or to try to get this person fired.
Leadership at any organization would face higher scrutiny, with the bigger and more nationally known, the more okay it is to talk about their opinions. Big companies like Boeing or Disney, and their leadership, can and should expect more scrutiny than small businesses (especially so small that they are akin to attacking the owner-operator running them).
To me, there are no hard lines here, just a long sliding scale.
"But the more work we put into solving these questions, the more robust an anti-cancel-culture coalition will be. "
I disagree. Political coalitions often keep ideology somewhat vague to maintain disparate groups, or groups with differing levels of the same position, on the same side. The second-wave feminist movement had women who wanted to work traditionally male jobs, women who wanted to rewrite the whole power structure, and women who wanted to exterminate men (remember Valerie Solanas?), but they worked together and got the right to work. Environmentalists disagreed on whether they wanted to regulate pollution or destroy capitalism and go back to the land, but they worked together to pass things like the Clean Air Act. "Black Lives Matter" was such an effective slogan because it brought together people concerned about police brutality and people who wanted to defund the police entirely.
The only movement I can think of that stayed ideologically pure and got what it wanted was the pro-life movement, but they were relying on the judicial system and even then had to make themselves part of the larger conservative movement first.
tl;dr: you don't win by being ideologically rigorous, you win by getting lots of people on your side. (In a democracy, anyway; to the considerable degree the US is non-democratic, you win by getting *powerful* people on your side.) I would instead think about the people who don't like cancel culture (which includes me, by the way) and find a broad enough statement that attracts as much as possible of :
1. a broad coalition of people who don't like it (people who fear at the HR commissar, for instance)
2. powerful people whose interests are threatened (Harvard was free to abuse all sorts of right-coded groups but a little antisemitism scared the donors)
For your Atlantic-bashing-stay-at-home-fathers, this doesn't really represent the modal case. Oftentimes the firing for an unpopular opinion occurs in the absence of any evidence that the expression hurt the bottom line.
Examples:
Tom Cotton Op-Ed leading to the firing of James Bennet, largely driven by internal employee pressure.
Hachette firing Kate Hartson, their last editor who was willing to publish books by Trump/other conservatives (which were extremely popular moneymakers, one of them the best-selling political book on Amazon).
For that reason I don't think replacing the actual beliefs with pedophilia is very enlightening. Very unpopular views don't get cancelled, they just get quietly ignored and die for lack of oxygen.
Similarly I think boycotts aren't really relevant here. A boycott only works if a large fraction of the customer base thinks the same way about an issue and sees it as important enough to change their purchase preferences. A lot of cancel culture moves involve getting someone in a position of responsibility in order to get rid of the offender, long before an organized boycott is in place. Don't most of these firings occur on the order of hours to days?
I personally think the objectionable cancellations almost always involve a principal-agent problem.
On paper Hachette book is supposed to make money from publishing books, so when its management fires an editor for (profitably!) publishing the wrong kinds of books, that's obviously acting against the organization's stated goals due to the political leanings of the person making the decision.
Universities are supposed to be places of free inquiry and education, which is why they are so often embroiled in cancel culture. There's no customer demand to accommodate, the culture has the whole concept of tenure, meant to shield holders of unpopular ideas, and students are supposed to be challenged with new ideas. So pretty much any firing with a political aspect fits the bill.
If James Bennet was fired "largely due to internal employee pressure", that is evidence that him staying in the workplace would have been detrimental to employee cohesion, hurting the bottom line (even if it is hard to quantify how much). Imagine if coworkers had complained that he smelled bad, or that he left the toilet lid up, or that he painted his desk green when yellow would have been much better, or anything else anywhere between "fully justified complaint that any decent person will agree with" and "crazy and irrational nonsense". If such complaints were numerous and persistent enough then it *is* definitely justified for management to discipline him, not morally as a ruling about what is the best desk color, but practically as a way to quell workplace unrest.
Of course you can slippery-slope that argument into violations of anti-discrimination laws ("I don't fire you because you're Black, but because other employees are racist!"), but "ran an op-ed by Tim Cotton" is not a protected class. If you think it should be, virtually everything is, and then the only philosophically-consistent rule is "no firing unless for cause with clear causation between your actions and the harm suffered by the company"; the fraction of people advocating for that among the "anti-cancel coalition" is virtually zero.
Similarly, did Hachette fire Hartson because its executives are fire-breathing wokistanians, or because they made the calculation that yes, the alt-right books sold a lot, but it made other books sell less via reputational effects and it was net-negative on the whole?
In the past, the Times employees would not have felt any cohesion problems from Bennett publishing an op-ed they disagreed with. The premise of opposing cancel culture is that being so upset about it is on some level a choice (in a way that being bothered by an obnoxious smell is not), and people (especially those working in institutions that are all about expressing different ideas, like newspapers and universities) should make a different choice. That’s the “culture” part.
The other thing missing from your analysis is that even if the employees being upset hurts the Times’ bottom line, that doesn’t settle the question: for his continued employment to be negative-EV, the bottom line would have to be hurt MORE than it’s hurt by the paper not being able to publish certain op-eds, along with other changes to the content of the paper.
It's difficult to square the "reputational effects" angle for Hachette with the fact that they were using a separate imprint already precisely to avoid those (If you go look at the books on Amazon, the listed publisher is "Center Street", not Hachette).
> We all love book publishing, but we have to be honest — our country is where it is in part because publishing *has chased the money and notoriety* of some pretty sketchy people, and has granted those same people both the imprimatur of respectability and a lot of money through sweetheart book deals.
Emphasis mine. Note how the accusation is putting profit above higher considerations.
It's true that you can't easily operationalize this kind of line drawing into the law, and I'm not suggesting we try, but it is still pretty easy to spot in practice for informal judgment. The people doing it rarely bother dressing up their decision in terms of the financial impact of retaining vs. firing an employee.
True, there will always be a "profit motive of the gaps" for a private employer.
Which is why it's easier to point at cancellation when it's happening in universities, whose whole social value is supposed to be getting free-thinking people to pursue the truth, and shielding them from the social consequences thereof.
The NYT is no longer willing to be bullied by its staff, so it turns out the people complaining about their coverage of, for example, trans issues, are unable to actually convert their frustration into anything actually affecting the paper.
Your second paragraph isn't a slippery slope scenario, it's a description of what actually happened with the groups of people switched out. The NYT editor was fired because he published an op-ed from a conservative politician, which pissed off all of the leftists working there (so basically every employee). It would be exactly the same if he published an op-ed from a prominent black man at a paper where the staff were all racists. Protected classes only exist as the byproduct of the Civil Rights Act, which as evidenced in other ACX posts leads to bad law and bad outcomes. If you accept the James Bennet case under the rationale that firing for employee morale is acceptable, it is equally acceptable to fire an employee because other employees are racist and it causes problems for them to work together.
I feel like letting coworkers decide whether your employer should continue to employ you is one step shy of mob violence. The workplace isn't a democracy; if you want to have a coworker fired, you better have some kind of policy violation you can point to. "Cohesion" isn't a compelling reason.
The definition specifically mentions "campaigns". Therefore an individual making their own choice not to listen doesn't fall under the definition (as long as they don't make that choice out of fear of how they might be perceived were they caught listening by someone else). If they then try to influence others not to listen, however, then it may fall under the definition.
Pedophilia may be widely accepted as a bad thing, but freedom of speech means someone has the right to advocate for it if they choose to. That doesn't mean you have to listen to or agree with them. Choosing not to listen to someone is not cancel culture, organising to influence others to punish them or to ignore them can be cancel culture.
A1 to A6 are clearly not cancel culture under the definition. You haven't organised any sort of campaign, you've listened to what they've said and decided you aren't going to continue listening. They still have the right to say whatever they want. You still have the right not to listen.
A7 and A8 are edge cases, and might depend on how many followers you have. If two people read it, maybe it doesn't matter, if two million read it then maybe it does.
A9-A12 are part of cancel culture since there is a clear campaign. A10 is perhaps not, since Spotify is a private platform and can have whatever content rules they want. If advocating pedophilia is against their rules I think you'd be fine informing them of the content.
B1 & B2: There is no campaign here. The student has the right to publish papers saying what they want, but you (or the university) is under no obligation to fund that. If you stop them because you think the papers are generally bad or immoral, then its clearly not cancel culture. But if you stop them only because you are afraid of a backlash then it is cancel culture.
B3: The article itself is not cancel culture, its just an article unless you specifically call for the guy to be fired or action to people. The reaction of people to it, and the campaign they organise, is cancel culture.
B4 & B5: If you fire them because of the public response or because of fear of one, it is cancel culture. If you do it because of your own reasons - you personally find it immoral or whatever - then it isn't.
C1: The petitions are all forms of cancel culture. But you are asking about morality here. The definition of cancel culture does not say it is immoral or not. In some cases perhaps it is, in others perhaps it isn't. But freedom of speech is not about morality, people have the right to say immoral things.
C2: Again, morality is here. The definition does not mention morality. If you personally decide not to mention The Atlantic again in your blog then its not cancel culture. If you organise a big campaign to get lots of people to boycott The Atlantic to intimidate them out of writing such articles then it is.
I think there's a couple of general points here. The first is the association you seem to make between freedom of speech and morality. Its not at all clear that link exists. Speech does not have to be moral. You can say all sorts of immoral things and you still have the right to say it if you invoke freedom of speech.
Secondly, people are free to speak, but others are equally free not to listen. There's no obligation to listen to anyone, nor can you even listen to everyone.
And third, not all opposition to free speech falls under cancel culture. The definition speaks specifically of campaigns that intend to intimidate people out of speaking freely. There are other ways to oppose free speech that wouldn't fall under such a definition.
i guess a final point is that cancel culture itself should be protected by freedom of speech. Even organising against cancel culture is itself a kind of cancel culture.
This article's examples ably show why "cancellation" is, at its core, "speech or exercise of freedom of association I think is a disproportionate response to other speech," and is often "speech or freedom of association I don't like in response to speech." The line you're trying to draw here is "what is proportionate?" I think it's impossible to be for free speech without embracing free association and the right of others to say speech you disagree with, even in response to speech you agree with. Most complaints about cancel culture I've seen privilege the initial speaker over the response speech.
I agree that there's lots of speech I think is a disproportionate response, and I think the best way to respond to it is to say so (and to say why). I'm for "more speech" solutions.
The problem is when disproportionate speech carries disproportionate material consequences, such that few want to cross the line because the consequences are too scary. Then there’s not as much speech that will check the disproportionate response.
I strongly believe that the problem with "cancel culture" is not the category of actions like "complaining on social media", "calling for someone to be fired", "circulating petitions", "firing people for the opinions they express", etc.
There *exist* things we'd all agree are okay to complain on social media about. There exist situations where it would make sense to fire someone for their publicly expressed opinions, where that's relevant to the performance of the job.
A communications director for a company should be fired if she publicly insults that company or its customers. Making a good impression is her job. And I'd definitely call for firing, e.g. a teacher at my kids' school who made anti-Semitic remarks in public -- a teacher's job is taking care of & teaching students, which is incompatible with hateful views towards any of those students.
The problem with "cancel culture" is entirely about disproportionate and inappropriate responses to people's opinions. What counts as "inappropriate" or "disproportionate" is, unfortunately, a judgment call, but that's unavoidable. Some questions do have to be decided that way!
Let's think about a prototypical "cancel culture" situation -- comedian makes an arguably offensive joke.
In a lot of cases I think it's fine to be offended and not watch that comedian, even if some people think you're being oversensitive. It's also fine to complain on your personal social media account that you can't stand that darn comedian.
It's probably bad to start a coordinated campaign to make sure the comedian can never find work again. It's *definitely* bad if the comedian's works are all deleted from streaming services so nobody can ever find them again -- that's destruction of information and I seriously disapprove of that.
What if the comedian isn't just "arguably offensive" but very, very beyond the pale, like a pro-pedophilia activist? Then yeah, I'd actually support circulating petitions and news articles with the goal of getting him de facto banned from mainstream entertainment! But it's still protected speech, so he shouldn't face any *legal* penalties.
See how case-by-case this is?
It actually relies on judgment calls about what ideas belong in the "public square." My moderate common-sense view is that Republicans/conservatives and their views are *obviously* part of the "national discussion" just because they're *so numerous*, and it's not fair for even more liberal/progressive cultural zones like media and academia to totally exclude them from the range of legitimately debatable opinions. But that doesn't mean there are *no* views that it makes sense to coordinate to exclude.
Yeah, most of the time when students protest a speaker being invited to campus, that's dumb. A conservative anti-feminist may be *controversial*, but that's in some sense a view that lots of people legitimately want to debate and compare to other views. On the other hand, I could imagine there being *someone* so crazy (maybe a pro-pedophilia advocate) that I might actually worry it harms the public discourse for them to be given the prestige of an invitation to speak at a major university, and I could sympathize with a (peaceful) protest trying to prevent them from coming. Or not -- maybe by the time there's a student group that wants them to come, trying to silence their views is counterproductive. It's complicated.
We should definitely (in the US) stick to the 1st Amendment, and I wish more of the rest of the world had similar legal protections. But once we're in the zone of "what *private* responses to objectionable speech are Not Cool", I think we need to be honest about the fact that there are totally types of speech reasonable people object to and are entitled to respond to in various ways!
I like the suggestion that the problem is disproportionate over-reaction to whatever thing was said. And with comedians, the social convention is that they are permitted to say *slightly* offensive things.
Way before the current concern over cancel culture, in 1993, comedian Julian Clary got into big, big trouble for telling a joke about fisting Norman Lamont. (Who was actually in the audience when the joke was told, and so might be regarded as having taken on the risk that he might get roasted as part of the stand up routine). (The punch-line might require familiarity with UK government procedures to get, and be incomprehensible to Americans)
I've argued elsewhere in the thread that there are good reasons to categorically oppose certain kinds of responses to people's opinions, like firing people for opinions expressed off the job from jobs where their opinions aren't inherently relevant (as it is for e.g. an opinion columnist), regardless of the content of the expression. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lukianoff-and-defining-cancel-culture/comment/66291041 In short, it allows us to oppose "cancellations" without having to go into an object-level debate about the controversial subject involved; and with such a norm, an organization can defy a cancel mob without having to thereby implicitly assert that the opinion expressed is at least not very beyond the pale.
Firing a teacher for making antisemitic remarks off the job is sort of like shooting the messenger, even if it would be desirable to not have teachers with antisemitic views because they may act in a biased way towards Jewish kids. The vast majority of teachers with antisemitic views will refrain from discussing them in public if doing so gets them fired. So firing teachers who express such views off the job is not a viable way to significantly reduce the number of antisemitic teachers; instead, they will just keep quiet, and still be biased against Jewish kids if they would otherwise be. It just prevents us from assessing how many teachers are antisemitic. Absent a significant, job-related benefit, we should default to not firing people for views they express off the job. Of course it's another matter if the teacher expresses antisemitic views while teaching: speaking to the children is the core of the job, the employer can of course have expectations about it.
Well, I suppose if we fired people for antisemitic views in a few especially sensitive jobs, we could hope antisemites would prefer to choose jobs where they can speak their minds, so it may actually reduce the number of antisemites in those sensitive jobs. But that would require that we actually don't fire antisemites in other jobs. Also, most jobs require one to work with customers, students or at least co-workers; one could use that as an excuse to fire anyone who expresses views that indicate he might be biased against some of them from any job, but then we're back to the point of shooting the messenger.
Why would you support trying to get someone very beyond the pale, like the pro-pedophilia activist, banned from all mainstream media? If it's really so beyond the pale, chances are he isn't convincing anyone. (Also, chances are he wouldn't get published in mainstream media even just because of a lack of viewer demand.) Or if some view is currently very beyond the pale but you think an exponent might be able to convince many people, how can you be sure it's not because it's actually correct, and you'd be convinced too if you listened to him?
I'll give a rigorous definition: Cancel culture is the hypocritical practice of censorship by libertarians. It's distinguished from ordinary censorship in that those doing the censoring are betraying their previous commitment to free speech.
This is confusing, in the US, because both major parties are currently confused as to whether (and how much, and of what issues) they're libertarian versus authoritarian. In the past (say, 1950s-2010s) the Republicans were the authoritarians: they had a positive vision of morality, and were mostly willing to push against US legal libertarian institutions (the Bill of Rights, traditions of journalistic independence, etc). People ought to live a certain way, and it's good to use power (of various kinds) to make them do so.
In that same time period, the Democrats were the libertarians: they had a negative vision of morality, specifying mostly what _shouldn't_ be done, and they fought to defend and uphold US legal libertarian institutions. We shouldn't use power to force people to live how we want, people should be allowed to speak out against institutions.
Starting around 2014, for what reason I do not know, powerful segments of Democrats found that they actually do have a positive vision of morality. There is a right way to live, and we should use various forms of power to make people live that way. Republicans, who traditionally agreed with that general thesis, but disagree with the Democrats' application of it, needed a term to express the sense of betrayal and hypocrisy they felt. Us millennials grew up hearing about this political party boldly protesting for the right to print criticism of the Vietnam War; now that same party is calling criticism of the war in Ukraine "Russian disinformation". That's not even original, it's just synonyms for the "Soviet propaganda" label Republicans were putting on Vietnam War criticism in the 70s!
If you try to define "cancel culture" as the violation of some specific libertarian code of conduct, you'll run into problems with cases of Republican censorship in the 50s-90s that meet your definition, but clearly aren't cancel culture. That's because the determining factor for "cancel culture" is the perceived hypocrisy. Cancel culture is the violation of any libertarian code of conduct regarding speech, by a person, group or institution who has committed to upholding that code of conduct.
My definition is agnostic as to the particular libertarian code of conduct being betrayed, except that it have to do with free speech. It's agnostic as to the particular forms of power used to betray it. The necessary ingredient is that somebody who deliberately cultivated a reputation for libertarianism betrays it with authoritarian actions.
So it wouldn't be cancel culture for a nice silver-haired old Nixon-era lady to write a letter to the editor of her local paper saying she doesn't think people should be allowed to publish scientific defenses of pedophilia. She's always believed in censorship, this is normal for her. We expect this. But it's absolutely cancel culture for a young tech bro to write an email to the dean of a college saying people shouldn't be allowed to publish scientific defenses of pedophilia, after he's been on the Internet for ten years making libertarian arguments against liberals who are trying to shut down scientific criticisms of trans gender affirming care. He's being a hypocrite.
Same violation of libertarian codes of conduct; he's doing cancel culture and she isn't.
Cancel culture is a culture-wide phenomenon, not individual actions. Big surprise!
It's totally fine, as individual, to refuse to pay for products you hate or to work with people you don't like. It's necessary even! If we want good products and pleasant coworkers. Cancel culture is a set of trends across the whole society:
- It's life-and-career-ruining to be accused of something from a narrow list of sins, even falsely. It's not particularly dangerous to accuse people of those sins falsely, and in fact can benefit your career.
- People refuse to pay/hire not because of personal dislike, but because someone told them to.
- Companies are changing policies not because of popular demand and direct profit motive, but because they think they will lose investors/clients, who themselves don't object to old policies but are afraid they will lose ratings/partners, who themselves don't object but fear... (anti-CC people usually don't say "people should defend free speech at personal cost", they say "get woke, go broke")
- An opinion that majority of people hold somehow can not be said in public.
It's even sometimes fine to personally contribute to those trends! If a friend you trust says a particular company is biased against your race, it makes sense to just hire another company without checking. But if too many people do stuff like that, we get critical mass of power given to complainers and end up with a cluster of opinions/orgs who hold the power to irrevocably ruin your life comparable to the government, and therefore that power should be put in check with something comparable to First Amendment.
...
...
Also, maybe don't equivocate pedophilia and CSA? It doesn't help anybody. Seems like you either don't know the difference, or didn't take to heart a lesson from Politics is the Mind-Killer - don't use politically charged examples to make an unrelated point.
Back in 2014 Matthew Klickstein, who’d written a book about old Nickelodeon shows, came to NYC to give a lecture (I think perhaps as part of NY Comic Con). My friends were very excited, and the proposed lecture was very popular, at least with my demographic. Shortly before the lecture, Klickstein gave an online interview where he came across very badly. He was a little whiny, a little unlikeable. He didn’t like shows everyone else liked. He said something (IIRC) about how he was bad getting his point across orally. After the interview my friends got upset. They all decided not to attend the lecture. In some online spaces, not attending the lecture became the default position. Everyone decided not to go. Catching wind of this, the sponsors canceled the lecture.
At the time I thought this situation was weird. Already I was familiar with the concept of people losing jobs for bad jokes (Justine Sacco) or beliefs (Brendan Eich), but Klickstein had said nothing actually offensive. Maybe he was constantly almost offensive, though. He didn’t signal he was one of us. He criticized “girl” shows and valorized “boy” shows. He was (in the language of the time) insensitive. And the response had been what was in effect a boycott. People on Twitter or Livejournal or wherever we were hanging out in 2014 exercised gentle social pressure until no one was going to the lecture. It was a successful boycott.
When I would bring this weirdness up to my friends, the ones who had participated in and furthered the online boycott, they thought nothing weird had happened. It turned out, with the new information they had, that they didn’t want to see the lecture. The lecturer seemed unpleasant, and why pay to hear someone unpleasant be unpleasant for a hour? His shows were not their shows, so even the subject matter was different than they had anticipated. “You will not enjoy this lecture that is on a topic you don’t care about” seems like a perfectly good reason not to attend a lecture.
Even the social pressure, which at the time was gentle (“you’re not going to that, are you?”) in contrast to what it would become (“unfriend me now!” or Warren Ellis’s famous statement that anyone who disagrees with him on punching neonazis should also be punched). I once had a group of friends and one of us (we learned) had never read Hamlet; we mercilessly mocked him until he read Hamlet. I don’t really feel bad about that, so why should people feel bad with their much smaller and less cruel persuasion of others to avoid a lecture they have reason to believe would be no fun.
I had never intended to go to the lecture (not being a Nick-head); how was I any different from people who decided later not to go to the lecture.
This was my edge case. I felt uncomfortable at the time, but when I tried to articulate it I had a hard road. Everyone seemed reasonable, and yet the result of their reasonableness was an uncomfortable result.
Ultimately I think Klickstein got canceled because he signaled he wasn’t one of us, and this is what I think is most pernicious about cancel culture so-called. Canceling real out-there yahoos (Nazis, for example) has never been controversial for most Americans. Reducing “everyone outside of a particular marketing demographic” to the status of out-there yahoo is something that we didn’t have the luxury of even trying before our marketing demographics took over our identities.
Back in 2014 Brendan Eich got canceled for a mainstream position that millions of other Californians held. It just wasn’t a mainstream position in one of “our” spaces, so we got rid of him. But you still hear academics say that they are cautious in their speech at a faculty wine and cheese, while down the street frat boys are saying whatever they feel like and everyone knows it; but it’s had to police their space and easy to police our own, so we watch for anyone who steps out of line, while ignoring the overt outsiders beyond the Pale.
Eventually of course we decided that “our” space was everywhere we looked and we entered the late-teens hellscape of demanding everyone be one of us—or else!
Of course, cancel culture got associated with a particular demograhic, but a rival demograohic has always been happy to cancel the Dixie Chicks, or anyone who complains about a cop’s funeral, or that lady who took a “wacky” picture at Arlington. But they hate cancel culture! But they love keeping their demographic pure, so they, too, will harm anyone who steps out of line, assuming they have to power to do it.
As long as we value the purity of our marketing demographics more than a generalized value of free expression, we’ll be stuck with these cancelations.
(I tried to say a lot very fast and I haven’t done the best job. But I’m groping towards something here.)
The Dixie Chicks were "cancelled" for things they said in their public persona as entertainers, to their audience as entertainers, and it was that audience which "cancelled" them by refusing to give them money.
The left is constantly bringing up this one example. It's just about the only example they can find unless you go back to McCarthy, and even then it doesn't really qualify.
I don’t think the Dixie Chicks are the worst examples of cancelation, but I can’t say they don’t count. But if you want people ridden out on a rail by the right for personal moments unrelated to their job, I’ll offer Lindsey Stone (2012) & Jacqueline Guzman (2022), alluded to in my post though I was too lazy to look up their names.
Please note that I am not trying to make a claim that if you add up every cancelation that the right has done exactly as many as the left, or that one side’s cancelations are better or worse than the other’s.
I, for one, am just pleased to finally see an instance in which Scott overreacts to something on an emotional level and can't just decide to step back to the rationalist objectivity. It makes me feel a little better about my failings in that regard. 😜
Kidding aside, The Atlantic is really good about publishing a diversity of viewpoints. I hate when people diss the publication because of one thing they said, because I guarantee you it's not the official stance of The Atlantic and that there are a ton of staff writers who find the position equally absurd as you do. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them has already said so in an article.
It 'helps' that the author of that braindead piece got dragged because she'd also written about moving to the countryside for a time to write her book in peace and quiet.
Seconding the support for The Atlantic. The quality of any individual article varies wildly but overall the contrast and variety makes up for it.
I'm not sure this is sufficient, but part of the issue is I believe people are being punished for positions that are held by either a majority or a very sizeable minority of the polity. This doesn't apply to pedophilia, but if someone is canceled for an opinion held by 40% of Americans that seems like a problem (even if that opinion might actually be wrong).
But that just leads inevitably to the tyranny of the majority. I wouldn't want to live in a society in which a peaceful religious minority don't feel safe practising their religion or prosleytising for it.
And as rationalists are so keen to point out, many opinions which are currently widely-held (e.g. "women should have the right to vote", "black people are entitled to the same human rights as everyone else and should not be kept as slaves") were once extremely unpopular and could land you in huge trouble for expressing them in public. The whole point of the First Amendment is to protect the expression of unpopular opinions, because popular opinions (for the most part) require no protection.
I do agree that something has gone badly wrong when people feel uncomfortable expressing an opinion that probably 90%+ of people in their immediate vicinity would agree with, although I don't think this has much bearing on the cancel culture debate.
You make a good case for free speech and reducing cancel-culture-ish responses. All I'm saying is that's the case for even MORE openness and, as you gave the nod to at the end, that's even more reason to not punish people excessively for fairly mainstream beliefs. I tend to agree the criteria I outlined doesn't go far enough, but it's alarming when even that criteria isn't being met.
As far as definitions go, I think we can define cancel culture in a way that's analagous to blackmail. What makes something blackmail isn't merely threatening to reveal something bad about someone -- it's perfectly legal to say "you said you would fix my pool if I paid you so if you don't finish fixing it I'll tell everyone you aren't trustworthy" because the negative information shared is sufficiently connected to the claim being made against them (claim of right) but if the threat was "finish fixing my pool like I paid you to do or I'll tell everyone about how you cheated on your wife" that's blackmail.
I'd argue that the definition of cancel culture needs to be similar. It is an attempt to use tools of social pressure to enforce compliance with certain desired speech patterns that's sufficiently unconnected with the speech in question. And yes, on one side is choosing not to pay to read content that expresses objectionable views on the other is getting someone fired for their job bagging groceries for there non-work related tweets. But in between there is certainly a grey area.
But I also want to argue against the idea that we should try to define that too clearly. Indeed, I fear any attempt at too sharp a definition here might even be harmful. The issue is that we all naturally do feel that the more unacceptable the remark the less closely connected the response needs to be. And that's fine.
We can agree directionally that maybe things have gone too far and too much speech is being harshly punished without needing to try and agree on precisce boundaries of those notions. That just bogs down into unhelpful hypotheticals. I'd argue it's enough for a coalition to point to a bunch of examples -- we mean to oppose things like this -- without a need to delineate exactly where one thinks the boundary needs to be.
This sounds logical, but it would backfire in practice. A racist lecture by a biologist, geneticist is directly related to their job, yet is more harmful than grocery baggers being racist. Jordan Peterson is widely believed because a clinical psychology professor is likely to be right about male and female brains? Doing the relevant job implies expertise which implies authority which implies responsibility.
But firing a geneticst for saying things we find objectionable about genetics isn't cancel culture. It's a problem because it violates academic freedom but that's a different concern.
If you were running a center for treating gender dysphoria not a university of course you should be able to fire someone like Peterson for endorsing a view at odds with the job you want him to do.
There are multiple ways punishment for speech can be bad and trying to push them all into one term doesn't help.
For the As - A10 is when it crosses over into clear-cut cancel culture, in my opinion. It's where this situation stops being about a specific podcast, potentially just an one-off, and threatens to grow cancel culture in general by impacting a major platform in Spotify. I think one of the main things that strengthens cancel culture are getting platforms directly involved at all. It's this sort of thing that leads to all sorts of normal words being literally unspeakable on YouTube now, a ridiculous and embarrassing state of affairs imo. If a particular YouTuber talks about rape or pedophilia in a way that you find morally egregious, and you decide to unsubscribe from them and strongly encourage others to do the same, fine. But don't go to YouTube itself directly about it, because that results in ridiculous things like the words "pedophile" and "rape" now being borderline banned in general on YouTube.
For B1, I think it's fine to quietly fail to renew his contract. The first option is also maybe fine, but I'm less confident there.
For B2, if you want to distance yourself from pedophile discussion in general, I think it's fine to quietly fail to renew his contract.
For B3, you could write a generalized anti-pedophile article that doesn't mention the student or his activities specifically. Yes, people "on the ground" at the university will likely figure out what's inspiring you here, but this might be enough to keep it "in house", and not get people outside the university involved. This seems less cancel culture to me while still enabling him to fight back against something you strongly dislike.
For B4, I would encourage researching the student's work and maybe doing such research on the effect of the word "bossy" yourself. Come to your own conclusions, and act in accordance to them. If you end up disagreeing with the student, then same as B3, write a generalized anti-calling-women-bossy article without mentioning the student or his activities specifically. If you end up agreeing with the student, great. You can choose to openly agree with him, risking your reputation some, or you can choose to just quietly enjoy the student's writings. Maybe send him an anonymous letter of support.
For B5, same as B4, though riskier than B4 so somewhat more understandable if you choose to not get involved personally.
I largely agree with your feelings towards the Atlantic. Making decisions on what you alone are going to read/not read, talk about/avoid is not cancel culture. That's just being a normal human being, honestly. If you started a general boycott against The Atlantic, in the sense of encouraging all of your friends and readers to not read it, I think that's also fine. Similar to how A10 is crossing the line, I'd say crossing the line here would be going after The Atlantic's advertisers, or places that advertise The Atlantic.
I think there's two areas where cancel culture gets truly nasty and detrimental:
1. Getting average everyday people fired from their jobs for something they said/wrote outside of work.
2. Getting platforms/advertisers/business partners involved. It contributes to a cultural trend that strengthens cancel culture considerably. (this is distinct from getting your friends/loved ones/readers involved)
An analogy I'd use is this - a standard boycott is like standard warfare, getting platforms/advertisers/business partners involved is like dropping nukes or using biological warfare. It's a severe escalation and it raises the likelihood of severe "collateral damage".
To me, the single important distinction is separating the obnoxiousness of the idea/thought/utterance from the individual uttering/agreeing/allowing it. Cancellation is about retaliation against human beings for things they are deemed to have countenanced. There are all sorts of degrees of countenancing, from actually writing to agreeing with to not actively opposing, but none of them matter. Oppose the sin, not the sinner.
That leaves open the question of institutions, which, since they are composed of individuals, but represent ideas, lie partway in between ideas and people. All the hard cases are at that level. But you can (at least in theory) punish the Atlantic or MIT or the Ford Foundation without punishing its employees, including those that lead the organization. One should try to do so, recognizing that there will inevitably be edge cases here.
To me, the simplest case is the work of art by an obnoxious person. I don't care if Tolstoy was a rapist or if Woody Allen is/was a pedophile. I can enjoy the art as if I am ignorant of the person or persons who created it. I don't care if a corporation (or its owners/managers) uses the profits from its useful product to carry out activities I find repugnant. The law exists to punish the behavior if the behavior violates some public interest and that's fine.
Also, I kinda feel like your essay about first making sure you have a sufficently broad coalition before trying to coordinate to punish dissent really addresses what's really going on in these cases.
I'd argue that in practice very little opposition to cancel culture really stems from any conviction that certain kinds of punishment are inappropriate regardless of the view expressed. Those debates do sometimes happen but they are usually framed as either concerns about implicit government censorship, monopoly power accomplishing the same effect or in terms of particular other rights like academic freedom.
In reality, almost all objections to cancel culture are really of the form: our society hasn't sufficiently agreed that view is so far beyond the range of acceptable content as to warrant that level of punishment. And I say that as someone who thinks cancel culture is incredibly harmful and counterproductive.
However, it's harmful exactly because it targets viewpoints that our society hasn't broadly agreed are unacceptable to express. Indeed, when we have that broad agreement there isn't the same epistemic danger because we just aren't as threatened. We don't feel the norm against paedophilia is under threat so there isn't pressure to stop the publication of a study that, say, shows people recover from the abuse better than we previously thought (bc no one sees it as defending the practice just some nice news). And it doesn't result in the same kind of unfortunate backlash -- including expert distrust -- nor ruin lives as much for similar reasons.
So I really think the right move here isn't to try and identify what social punishments aren't ok but rather to try and push for norms about not trying to suppress views via punishment unless you really do have broad agreement across society broadly.
I don't know that this deserves to be reified as the *definition* of "cancel culture", but I think one common and important component that doesn't get enough press is that cancellation tends to involve not just people voluntarily choosing to take their business elsewhere but harassing others who choose not to. e.g. Cloudflare would prefer to be ideologically neutral because their business is not actually based on content at all, and only buckled in some extreme cases like The Daily Stormer and Kiwifarms because of extreme boycott pressure. University speakers are often prevented from speaking because of the threat of riots and the inability or unwillingness of university staff to guarantee the speakers' safety regardless of who wants to hear them speak. Or, to take an example in the past that nearly everyone would agree was wrong, Jim Crow laws were *laws*; a restaurateur who wanted to accept patrons of all races would be prohibited from doing so until such laws were repealed.
It's true that extreme anti-cancellation stances can often be reduced to some weird declaration that someone should be required to actively support something they don't like, don't agree with, or even find abhorrent. But I think it should be easy to say that if *other people* want to patronize something you don't like, don't agree with, or actively find abhorrent, that actively interfering with or even forcibly preventing their own decision to associate is another matter. Along those lines A8 might bother me a little bit but not enough to say it's wrong, while I consider A9 importantly on the wrong side of the line. Meanwhile for the other examples I tend to go with your P3. Even though that fails to condemn a lot of stuff I find actually bad, this bad stuff should often be opposed on other grounds such as that the "unpopular" position is often more "unpopular with a handful of way-too-online cranks who are good at being loud and consequently get more deference than their economic impact would justify." I'm not convinced you can fully escape the object level here, which is probably the reason Cancel Culture has been hard to pin down.
Jim Crow is an important example but I think you’re incorrect about how the laws worked, at least in most cases. As I understand it, Jim Crow laws governed public spaces (like Rosa Parks’s bus), but individual businesses were legally free to serve to anyone (though in practice they were not free to do so because of how other customers might have reacted). That’s why the Green Book existed, to point Black travelers to the few businesses where they could get served. But if I’ve got that wrong please correct me!
I don't know enough about the landscape to speak to how good or meaningful the alternatives are, but I distinctly remember the activism having a rough undercurrent of "sure would be a shame if I, an IT professional, tell my employer that you're platforming [whatever KiwiFarms was accused of being at the time] and go to an alternative." The only part I could see doubting is just whether those threats had teeth, something I'd need to do some research to find out.
If it was easy for them to switch to an alternative, then the same should have been true of KiwiFarms. One thing the CEO of CloudFlare despaired over was that he had the power to remove sites from the internet.
I think you are spot on. The question is not tolerance, or diversity of opinion, but purity. The idea of eternal damnation for having done one questionable thing once. It's not letting people have a bad hair day and fuck up.
Please consider that it is cancel technology, not cancel culture. Have you read The Blank Slate? In the 1970's Wilson or Herrnstein could not teach courses due to angry student mobs. Then smartphones happened.
Note that back then Herrnstein carefully avoided the topic of race. But in the 70's any talk of inborn traits was seen "fascist", not because of racist connotations but because of appearing to conserve inequality.
My point is I don't like those arguments that are like "here is this bad new thing" and then it turns the same exact thing happened 50 years ago. It was even the same bad terminology "Racist Wilson do not lie, we charge you with genocide." (I mean the weird over-use of "genocide".)
I wish these debates would more often point out where the term comes from - Twitter activists had begun, in the early 2010s, to say of celebrities accused of bad behavior "they're canceled." It's a minor semantic and historical point and yet I think a loaded one.
Seems to me, this is a critical part of the definition:
<i>Cancel Culture is the uptick, beginning around 2014 and accelerating in 2017... </i>
Along with the other aspects of the definition which require specificity, that condition requires verification. How is that "uptick" measured? How is this trend differentiated the baseline of similar events which took place prior?
The reason I point to that is that I think that "cancel culture" has existed for a long time. Perhaps what's largely different is who is getting "cancelled." Groups of people who previously had the power to "cancel" are now seeing that they can be targeted. Groups of people who previously were targeted by "cancelling" and had no power to "cancel," now have attained such a power.
So it's not an advent of a cancel culture, but a different form of the same thing. That isn't a justification either way.
Cancel culture seems like it's part of free speech. And since I think almost all kinds of speech should be allowed, I just have to accept that cancel culture is part of it.
It is part of free speech. But some uses of free speech are discouraged by the culture (being rude, say), and some of us are arguing that our culture should discourage canceling in a similar way.
Cancel culture is when you try to deny "neutral platforms" to people you disagree with. Neutral platforms are places that would otherwise be agnostic to the opinions you hold/express: your job, your website hosting provider, your payment gateways, your restaurants, your landlords.
By that measure, A6-A9 are gray areas (depending on, among other things, how much social power you wield and the nature of the objectionable content), and A10+ are definitely cancel culture.
Approximately nobody would deny your personal right to associate/disassociate with any particular individual, or to your right to express value judgements about them. It's just statements of the form "because someone hold a particular opinion, they should not be allowed on this <neutral platform> or <neutral platform> should disassociate with them" that goes into cancel culture territory.
Of course there is bound to be some gray areas about what neutral platforms are, edge cases and a poorly defined boundary as to when you go from "small business/podcast/forum" to "neutral platform" (c.f. social media bias/censorship). But the vast majority of cancel culture cases are far more clear cut.
I think this is a big part of it. However, I also think it was a clear and unambiguous example of cancel culture when people were demanding that Brendan Eich step down as CEO of Mozilla because of his opposition to same-sex marriage, even though Mozilla has no pretensions of being a neutral platform.
I think there is the presumption that your workplace are neutral places that don't normally care what opinions you would hold as long as you can do your job. Platform probably wasn't the best choice of words.
But again, is even that true? Imagine you're a Jewish guy working for a company, and the company hires a guy with a huge swastika tattoo on his bicep, which he proudly displays at every opportunity. I wouldn't expect you to just take that lying down and take the attitude of "hey, as long as you finish your TPS reports on time, what you do on your own time is your own business". And this is speaking as someone who's aggressively opposed to cancellation campaigns of all kinds.
I would take that attitude. That won't stop me from striking up a conversation with that guy. It's one thing if the guy's rude to me or harassing me, but for all you know the guy could be a devout Hindu or Buddhist. Or he could be an Indian who just really liked Hitler. Or he could be a white supremacist who counts Jews as white.
Even if he's an actual honest to God antisemite neo-Nazi...if he doesn't have a problem with me personally, sees me as a valued coworker and doesn't want to get me fired or anything, why should I defect here and wish the same upon him? There's a symmetry here.
Many of your examples seem to be explicitly covered by Lukianoff's definition. For example, A1-7, there's no campaign, so no cancel culture. 8 and 9 bring in other people, but still no "people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished". A10 you start asking for deplatforming, whether a campaign of 1 counts as a campaign I could concede is a matter of debate, but by A11 it's a clear campaign for deplatforming, and so meets the definition.
Or take C1, people petitioned the NYT, not to fire the author, but to withhold certain information. Without the request of "fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished," it doesn't meet the definition.
Is it necessary to precisely draw the line if we can all agree on the direction we need to push it? Even if we did draw a line (and I think it's somewhere around A8/A9 for what it's worth) are we going to solve the coordination problem of getting everyone on board?
I think the premise of this relies on some bad assumptions about the cohesiveness and steer-ability of social movements. To be fair, you did say "I’m not demanding that anyone solve these questions before opposing cancel culture", so maybe we aren't so far apart.
Social pressure to enforce norms has been around as long as society itself and is probably required to have a functional civilization. I think the real issue is social media, which ends up amplifying and twisting this normal social function into something out of control.
I think the key principle that’s missing is that we need a norm against secondary boycotts. That is when you boycott someone for engaging in business with someone else and is already illegal in a labor context. This would ban the behaviors listed in A9 and above, and really hit at the most damaging parts of cancel culture.
It seems like a big part of what people mean when they talk about "cancel culture" is that the social penalties for the view being expressed are out of proportion to the objective number of people who actually disagree with that view.
That is, pretty much everyone loves to hate pedophiles, so you'd expect a comedian who says something supportive of pedophilia to lose most of his audience as a consequence. But the population is roughly evenly split on whether "Men can become women" is a correct statement, so you'd expect the public reaction to a comedian who denies the validity of trans identities to be similarly split, and to generally balance out. But that's not the pattern that people observed during the "cancel culture" era.
So, maybe part of the definition should be something like "A cultural climate where people feel unsafe expressing beliefs which are known to be widely-held by the population."
But that just leads inevitably to the tyranny of the majority. I wouldn't want to live in a society in which a peaceful religious minority don't feel safe practising their religion or prosleytising for it.
And as rationalists are so keen to point out, many opinions which are currently widely-held (e.g. "women should have the right to vote", "black people are entitled to the same human rights as everyone else and should not be kept as slaves") were once extremely unpopular and could land you in huge trouble for expressing them in public. The whole point of the First Amendment is to protect the expression of unpopular opinions, because popular opinions (for the most part) require no protection.
I do agree that something has gone badly wrong when people feel uncomfortable expressing an opinion that probably 90%+ of people in their immediate vicinity would agree with, although I don't think this has much bearing on the cancel culture debate.
Unfortunately I think you have to abandon the dream of being content neutral here. It’s good that we have content neutral *legal* protections on speech, and there should be a high bar for imposing social sanction on speech, but I think it’s ok to say, “I am in favor of certain tactics when used against (sufficiently) bad things but not against good (or in sufficiently bad) things”. I think your Atlantic-fires-the-editor example is one of those.
The most offensive/insidious cancel culture is going after someone's employment because of a position they held elsewhere. This seems to me categorically different from opposing the issuing of an argument from a particular publication, even seeking to see it hurt financially, but *stopping there*. Which doesn't make that good, necessarily, I'm just saying I see a natural division there and think we should be able to have a consensus that trying to make it so no one who ever expresses a non-approved opinion can earn a living is wrong.
While this post asks good questions, I think it underestimates how widespread cancelling is in human society – “you said/people report you said something I don’t like, so we’re not friends any more” is a day-to-day part of any human society.
It’s worth recalling that, in slightly less recent history (and in suitable places in the US), one might lose their social circle or their livelihoods for sentences such as “Das Kapital, by Karl Marx, has been influential in economic thinking”, “I enjoy Dungeons and Dragons”, or…
I’m certain that, since their creation, every newspaper has been subject of hate mail campaigns and that in over a century, they’ve been good at handling them.
Thus I believe the article misses the actual specificities of what it defines as “cancel culture” – which I believe (from afar) are less about principle than implementation.
Specifically, I think that the main instrument of “cancel culture” as defined here is the Twitter mob (or an equivalent) which has the following specificities:
1) it removes all Trivial Inconveniences to expressing one’s discontent at the source,
2) it makes it easier to form, spot, and join echo chambers (and to spot people who didn’t join it).
3) the Internet mob is non-local and can hunt from any corner of the world (and can include bots rather than real people!),
4) everything on Twitter is public speech (which used to be de facto restrained), so that performativeness is incentivized (for worse in this case, in a race to callousness).
5) it’s easier to find dirt on people online,
6) pretty much all of the above mean that it’s easier to dehumanize the victim and thus be harsher on them.
In other words, my thesis is that “cancel culture” (as defined here) exists because canceling is how human communities work, and that technology makes it trivially easy to do this on a disproportionate scale.
For cancel culture to work, two things are required.
1. Speech is used to call for a punitive non-speech action.
2. The punitive non-speech action is taken.
The critical step is the transition beyond speech to tangible action (boycotting Walmart, or firing Fred).
'Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.' Cancel culture is moving from name calling to using sticks and stones.
Cancel culture arose from the accidental but inevitable discovery of how new technology allowed calls for action to go viral. Through the obvious-in-hindsight errors, society is figuring out what the new limits are. This blog being part of that process.
With cancel culture, whats emerging is an instinctive response to be skeptical of actual punitive calls to action. We are already skeptical of non-punitive calls to action ('buy Ivory soap because we support #CurrentThing!'), so this is a simple extension of an already evolved skeptical behaviour. Similarly, for banner ads eye tracking shows that we go out of our way to not look at them, let alone click on them. The mere fact of the ad is itself cause for irritation.
That is the emerging response. Tolerate the speech, be highly skeptical of, and irritated with, the call to action. At any rate, that is my approach.
If it's illegal, the police should decide whether or not to handle it. Otherwise, you be you and I have no obligation to play along.
I agree this is a tricky area. I don't have good answers to these questions, but in the interest of making a small contribution, I would stress that I think some reference to the Overton Window is important. Opinions outside the OW (like the pedophilia advocacy example) already don't enjoy the kind of liberal, free speech principles of tolerance, best-response-is-more-speech, turn-the-other-cheek reactions that attitudes inside the OW get. I think what irks people about cancellation is when it seems like a deliberate attempt to use some type of pressure campaign to shrink the OW by claiming to be offended/endangered by someone expressing opinions that were perfectly mainstream and milquetoast up until five minutes ago.
"I think what irks people about cancellation is when it seems like a deliberate attempt to use some type of pressure campaign to shrink the OW by claiming to be offended/endangered by someone expressing opinions that were perfectly mainstream and milquetoast up until five minutes ago."
Exactly this. Even if some people are genuinely offended, what makes it cancel culture is punishing people for expressing mainstream opinions.
I think the proper way to frame this is to ask, what are people "allowed" to do within a given context? Here we have three situations which could each have their own rules. (1) a podcast where people may dislike or be offended by the content (2) an employer who has an employee with controversial side interests, and (3) a journalism outlet publishing articles that offend some readers.
How do each of these work? I think it comes down to the relevant decision makers following their incentives. In the first example, whatever medium hosts the podcast can decide whether to keep having them. Of course, if they get rid of the podcast the hosts could keep recording it and try to find another platform. In the second example, there could be legal or company/university policy issues, but I think the employer should be allowed to fire or not fire the employee based on his own cost/benefit analysis. In the third case, media outlets are basically businesses, although they may care about their intellectual credibility as well, and they can decide what to do about this article and writer based on what suits their purposes.
This answer may not seem satisfying, but there's no perfect way to resolve these situations. Like everything, they involve flawed human beings following their own incentives, and while we can declare that things "should" go a certain way, that's just not how the world works.
None of the hypotheticals seem to be particularly germane, because they all seem to focus on the question, "should I actively support speech I don't like." But most "cancelations" are people being fired for expressing their views, or businesses being boycotted for their owners expressing their views. My refusal to eat at a diner whose owner wears a MAGA hat is a far cry from me canceling my subscription to a publication that is in the business of advocating views I don't like.
A better hypothetical is this: I own a dry cleaner in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1957. It comes to the attention of local residents that I donate to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Is it ethical for local residents who oppose civil rights to boycott my business?
> A coalition works best when people believe that if they support other members’ pet causes, those other members will support theirs
I don't think a coalition in this sense is what we need, then.
The ideal situation is one in which people shut up forever about this entire category of thing so that people don't have to worry about it anymore, don't have to keep track of people's opinions, don't have to censor themselves out of fear and so on.
If we actively support the pet causes of people who are hurt by cancel culture, the people who support cancel culture will actively oppose us, and some people in the "please everybody shut the fuck up already" will passively walk away from us.
To me a lot hinges on whether the cancellers have a stake in who or what they are canceling. Are they an Atlantic subscriber or an X constituent or a Y attendee or a Z shareholder or employee? In my mind, the more stake someone has, the more reasonable it is for them to protest and take action about something they disagree with at an institution, and the more we should take their opinion seriously. It's when people who have no stake successfully exercise power, e.g. X mobs who had never even heard of the institution in question, that it becomes most problematic. Those people don't care if they are advocating to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I dunno. Even if I didn't attend University of Wherever as an undergrad or postgrad, or wasn't a staff member of University of Wherever, or wasn't an alumnus, or otherwise any kind of stakeholder - I wouldn't think it would be completely unreasonable of me to feel somewhat concerned if University of Wherever hired an outspoken pro-paedophilia activist as a tenured professor. Maybe that makes me a snippy busybody, I dunno.
Notably, many of the most high-profile cancellation campaigns of the past decade *don't* fit your pattern e.g. Mozilla staffers calling for Brendan Eich to be forced out because of his opinions, NYT staffers calling for the head of whoever okayed the Tom Cotton editorial etc.
Would Moms for Liberty be strengthened as a coalition if their members spent a lot of time and energy trying to rigidly define exactly what woke/pornography was?
My assumption is no. So much so, I would assume that someone within the organization who started to push for these ideas was an enemy agent.
I don't have an answer here. But after seeing cancellations happen in my private live, and also firing people for acting poorly, Some guiding principles for me:
1. A campaign against an elite that has beliefs shared but a large percentage of the general population. This should be resisted. Example the firing of the head of Firefox. This was wrong.
2. A campaign against someone saying something likely to be true or partially true but inconvienent. We can't survive as a culture if this happens. Examples girls hounded off the Leah Thompsons swim team. Liz Chaney being cancelled as a republican.
3. A campaign clearly based on lies should be resisted vigerously. Example JK Rowling, Jessie Signal, Everytime I google what they said, clearly their critics are dishonest.
4. Campaigns clearly motivated by self interest and power seeking.
Liz Cheney is a bad example. She was "cancelled" not for expressing "inconvenient" opinions but for working with the enemy against the Republican party.
Everyone can order all actions from least to most reprehensible to them, and (to simplify) cancel the top N actions.
Most people are willing to accept that people order actions differently from them, but if they think others are cancelling for "trivial" (i.e. low down on the list) actions, they get worked up about that
Individually, it is in your interest to cancel any action you view as even somewhat "bad"
But as a society we want to limit the total cancellations. So when we see someone cancelling for something trivial - we get mad (classic tragedy of the commons problem)
So the way to "fix" CC is not to align values with everyone else, but to promote constraint and trust in others
>I agree that this is a good first step, but I’m worried about more detailed edge cases. For example, what do we think of the following situations?..
Come on.
-- It looks as though you didn't even read the definition you're supposedly responding to. The definition requires a campaign. *Most* of your examples don't describe a campaign even arguably, and are not edge cases by that definition.
-- Any definition is subject to this sort of "can you really define it" problem. We all know the meme about defining a sandwich. But when it matters, we generally know what sandwiches are, and the edge cases don't actually come up very much. The examples of cancel culture that people *actually talk about* almost never include the ambiguity in your edge case examples.
-- Rationalists have a habit of talking themselves into being quokkas, and a habit of taking things overly literally. Creating a petition to not get you doxxed isn't cancel culture for the same reason that getting a plumber fired because he keeps installing pipes made of cheese isn't cancel culture--Metz isn't doing his job properly, and is harming people (and specific identifiable people, not "children" or "women"). It's true that Lukianoff didn't include a clause saying "not if someone is hurting specific identifiable people", but common sense says that it's implied. Common sense is useful, and you may need to get some more.
-- The edge cases aren't going to affect your ability to create a coalition one bit. Everyone short of the lizardman constant knows what cancel culture is (You may be in the lizardman constant.) The people who complain about not knowing what it means are being *dishonest*--they know what it means, but are nitpicking the definition so that they have an excuse to deny it. You will not be able to convince them by getting a better definition, because they're dishonest, and you know, dishonesty works that way. Not understanding dishonesty is being a quokka.
You seem to be making a pretty good point, but your repeated use of "quokka" probably detracts from that. I don't know what that means. I doubt most people know what it means. A quick search shows it's an animal of some sort, and there's no mention of it being anything like how you're using the word. So the internet at large doesn't even acknowledge this is a word that might be used in any sense except this animal that isn't anything like a human.
It's a reference to a Twitter thread by Zero HP Lovecraft about "rationalists'" vulnerability to bad-faith actors (archived here: https://archive.ph/Vzsnp), well-known enough in this community to be alluded to without explicit citation.
Relevant extracts:
"The quokka is a meme animal that lives on Bald Island on the SW coast of Australia, where it has no natural predators. If you visit this island, it will fearlessly walk up and try to hug you. …
"The quokka, like the rationalist, is a creature marked by profound innocence. The quokka can't imagine you might eat it, and the rationalist can't imagine you might deceive him. …
"And rationalists, bless their hearts, are REALLY easy to lie to. It's not like taking candy from a baby; babies actually try to hang onto their candy. The rationalists just limply let go and mutter, 'I notice I am confused'. …
"The main way that you stop being a quokka is that that you realize there are people in the world who really want to hurt you. There are people who will always defect, people whose good will is fake, whose behavior will not change if they hear the good news of reciprocity."
I think a lot of it hinges on liberty. People should be free to do what they want, as long as doing that thing doesn't prevent others from doing that they want.
For example, unsubscribing from a newsletter is fine, that's your choice. Trying to get the newsletter taken down is questionable - it prevents others from having the freedom to subscribe.
However, if that newsletter is too heinous (e.g. calling for the murder of a group of people), then it's okay because the newsletter itself is trying to remove people's freedom to live.
Of course there's still plenty of grey area for adjudication in this definition, but I think it's a good heuristic.
People are free to do what they want. But freedom of action is not freedom from social consequences for action, and never has been. This is not a new phenomenon. People got cancelled for being communists, for being anti-war activists, for hating the police, and for ordering Swiss on a cheesesteak.
The shift has been in average people’s platforms becoming larger, so that more people are exposed to whatever socially unacceptable view you feel you must express. Also, equally, that some of the kinds of ideas that were broadly socially acceptable have rapidly shifted to very not at around the same time as the first thing.
I think what you say is broadly right about how things currently are, but also there's an increased desire to shut people down. In my original comment though, I was making an argument about how things ought to be.
There's no world in which I should not be morally justified in cancelling a subscription because I don't like their font choices. I should be allowed to say "hey this font choice hurts my eyes and it bugs me and I think this magazine should stop using it." I should be allowed to say "I think people should stop buying this magazine until they change their font."
What I can "morally" say isn't at issue. That's just me creating my own speech. What's at issue is 1) people are completely unwilling to make the distinction between advocating for something and learning about it, and it's a cultural sickness, and 2) we've all embraced a totalizing harm-reduction culture where the second I say "I have a disadvantage and you should listen to me due to that disadvantage" all counter-argument is seen as brutal, non-empathetic suppression of a victimized person.
What should happen is I say "Everyone stop subscribing to this newspaper until they change their font because it hurts my eyes" and people say "that stinks and maybe I'm going to like this newspaper 0.02% less but that doesn't rise to the threshold of impacting my actions in any way." Instead of "oh if I decide to care about this fringe issue that most people won't care about it'll make me look way more caring and empathetic than others."
My impression is that people often think in terms of typical examples rather than definitions -- "I know it when I see it". It makes it harder to set policy because the boundaries are fuzzy, but then the question becomes how much of the coalition will go along with each example.
Here's a true anecdote. I have a friend who had a summer job at a think tank after the Pentagon Papers were stolen. At the end of the summer he packed up his stuff in a cardboard box to take out to his car. The guard told him he wasn't allowed to take cardboard boxes out, so he set up an empty cardboard box on the other side of the guard's station, carried his stuff by hand from one box to the other, and left with full approval. It turns out that this was the policy implementation of "never let that -- the Pentagon Papers -- happen here."
"Is a cardboard box" *is* a definition. The guard is disallowing the box based on a definition, not based on the guard's judgment of "I know what a Pentagon Papers incident looks like".
In fairness, that probably did give the guard a much better opportunity to observe exactly what else was being taken than if it had all stayed in the box.
- Is the motivation to punish the speaker, or something else, like that you're genuinely uninterested in their product? Only the former is cancel culture-y.
- Is the opinion of the speaker relevant to the product? Is publishing opinions (in particular, curated opinions along some editorial line) the core business of the company? If so, it's not cancel culture. This closely parallels the bona fide business requirement exception to anti-discrimination laws, e.g. a movie production may seek an actor of a particular race and gender.
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Further options re: The Atlantic and stay-at-home fathers:
P4: The thousands of stay-at-home fathers, who are personally affected, and were likely genuinely emotionally disturbed, were morally fine. However, the millions of people and other journalists and sources, who aren't personally affected but also put pressure on The Atlantic, are in the wrong; their actions are more of a calculated attempt to punish The Atlantic than an inevitable emotional reaction.
P5: The objection to cancel culture isn't a moral condemnation but a descriptive assertion that it's bad for society overall on the net. It can be an attempt to convince would-be cancellers that it's a bad idea. (Either because it may cause people to miss potential good arguments that stay-at-home fathers should change their lifestyle—even if the article in question was bad, firing the author may make others afraid to write on the topic—or because it normalizes cancel culture with negative effects on the discussion of other topics.) It can be an attempt to convince others to put an opposite incentive on The Atlantic, i.e. to unsubscribe *if* they fire the journalist involved, or to subscribe if the journal resists the pressure.
(Since The Atlantic is an opinion magazine, my view is closest to P3, with a side of P5.)
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"Cancellation" for sexual harassment isn't necessarily a separate issue from cancellation for speech, some instances of (supposed) sexual harassment only involve speech.
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If you support a Republican’s right to criticize transgender people, unfortunately realistically you can't rely on his support your right to say you wish the Trump assassin hadn’t missed. However, you have a common cause with him against getting cancelled by people further left than either of you. (Likewise, if right-wing cancel culture became prevalent, people of different stripes would have a common cause against getting cancelled by people further right than either of them.)
A take I've found useful is that the actual question is defining what speech should be considered acceptably within the bounds of public discourse and what should be considered "beyond the pale" and not an acceptable idea to even be discussed in public without an understanding that there may severe personal consequences if you don't appropriately hedge.
This isn't something you solve once. This is a constant negotiation argued out in the public sphere. In the 1970s there was a period when making the pro-pedophilia argument was at least possible for some people as part of the general "we're questioning all our traditional understandings of sexuality". This discussion was had and the public decided, "Okay that's enough pro-pedophilia talk, back in the "we're going to shun you if you talk about this stuff" cage with that, and that's where it stands. (And it's a mark of how firmly it was shoved that even just saying this as an example I gotta clear my throat and say I agree with that decision.)
So I think it's more helpful to think about it as a series of circles with "totally harmless topic" in the center and each circle out you get increasing levels of scrutiny for wanting to have a debate or discuss the topic. Cancel culture is when it seems like the circles are being squeezed tighter around the center in a way that leaves people constantly blundering out over circle boundaries they didn't actually mean to cross.
This approach has an obvious failure point that any group trying to gain power and influence decides views they disagree with are "beyond the pale" and acts accordingly. It also doesn't provide a framework for deciding what is or isn't acceptable, other than what most people think at the time. Which is not very useful.
I think the problem becomes simpler when, instead of just observing cases in the wild and trying to classify them one-by-one, you talk to individuals participating in cancel culture and ask them why they're doing it.
I've done this, and I've found most people in cancel culture have a radically different worldview from liberals. They are explicitly anti-democracy, class essentialist, and pro-conflict-theory. They know their views are in the minority, and don't care. They believe that letting the majority decide what our society will be like is immoral. They believe it is impossible to persuade the majority to their point of view, because people are unable to think outside their class (whether that class is economic or racial). Therefore, they believe there is no such thing as honest debate, and that all disagreements are settled not by persuasion or compromise, but by propaganda, intimidation, and violence. They believe that this is how all civil rights advances in the past have been made--that, for instance, the destruction of institutional racism in the south was accomplished not by exposing its unfairness and brutality to the public, but by using the media to silence the majority which did, and still does, hate blacks. They believe society advances only by the oppression or destruction of the common people.
Furthermore, they don't believe legal systems are just. They believe that laws are tools of the powerful, and that the principle of "innocent until proven guilty" just protects the obviously guilty from the justice of the righteous. They aren't worried that innocent individuals might be punished unjustly, because they think of classes, not individuals, as having rights.
Cancel culture is not the sum of individual choices, but is a political bloc of individuals whose underlying Marxist/Nazi belief framework enables them to all coordinate at a point so far outside the liberal Overton window that liberals can't even see they're there.
The summed free choices of individuals is democratic, and can enforce only norms that the majority holds, like those against pedophilia. "Cancel culture" is when a minority cancels the majority. The main requirement for a minority to do this is tribal unity, created by expelling people who think for themselves. Look not at whether someone protests against a speaker, but at whether someone is cancelled for not protesting. Cancel culture reaches escape velocity when the cost of not participating is always greater than the cost of participating.
The idea that cancel culture started in 2014 is so stupid and revealing that it’s laughable. Very clearly, people have been getting “cancelled” or fired by public outcry forever. All that changed (and it was a gradual change that your boy only started noticing in 2014) was the kinds of speech that are considered polite or socially acceptable.
I don’t think you’re going to build a broad anti-cancel-culture coalition because I don’t think there really is a broad coalition against cancel culture. The majority of people don’t really believe it is bad to cancel. They believe that their ideas, or ideas somewhat adjacent to theirs, should not be subject to social consequences.
Very few are truly free speech absolutists. And those that claim to be are usually just liars who will happily explain why specific speech coming with social consequences doesn’t count as cancel culture.
>All that changed (and it was a gradual change that your boy only started noticing in 2014) was the kinds of speech that are considered polite or socially acceptable.
Well, that and the market penetration of smartphones. It was a lot harder to call for someone to lose their job when you had to go around on foot collecting signatures for your petition by hand, and most people would only say potentially-offensive things verbally to their friends rather than in writing on social media platforms.
This strikes me as something that is better to address incrementally, as different tactics are more or less dangerous. The norms around each should probably be different. Not affirmatively personally paying for a podcast or attending a lecture is not particularly dangerous. It can still be bad and worthy of moral opprobrium, for example if the only reason you didn't attend a lecture is because you don't want to be around someone of the speaker's race.
Secondary boycotts, on the other hand, are especially dangerous. They can easily lead people to self-censor on views that they believe are correct, even when nearly everyone shares those beliefs, and this completely shut down free inquiry. A good example would be the current debate over medical treatment for minors with gender dysphoria. But it's probably too much to say they are never appropriate, if we are talking about something sufficiently extreme and violent. It's just that they are a very dangerous tool and the bar for using them should be extremely high.
A number of others have highlighted the 0 to 100 nature of punishment, which again seems like something to push back on. Our first reaction should generally be to persuade, rather than attack, and when an interlocutor doesn't share that view, we should be suspicious. When punishment doesn't come in gradations, but is instead binary, we should be suspicious.
Finally it seems like there is an element of jumping to assumptions of bad faith. Returning to the treatment of gender dysphoria, it seems crazy that medical professionals can't have a discussion in which people agree that it is both bad to allow people to keep suffering who will eventually transition and to transition people who would eventually change their minds. And have disagreements about how to best manage those risks. I don't really know how to fit this with your pedo grad student example, but at some point the reveling in attention from a subculture seems to attach something new, and less consistent with good faith.
There is also something of a "you shouldn't get fired for holding what is currently a majority view or has been in the last ten years." True, this leads you at various points on history to have to have a dialog with people who, for example, support slavery. But it also seems wrong to believe that if you lived in the 1700s the best approach for human flourishing would be to mercilessly attack literally everyone around you because they didn't hold 2020 beliefs?
But it would seem easier to get consensus in steps rather than try to handle all edge cases at once.
> But it's probably too much to say [secondary boycotts] are never appropriate, if we are talking about something sufficiently extreme and violent. It's just that they are a very dangerous tool and the bar for using them should be extremely high.
For something extreme and violent, wouldn't other tools also become available? We banned use of poison gas in warfare because there's simply no plausible situation which would create a legitimate tactical need for it, that couldn't be done cheaper and better by something else. https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/
For me, the defining characteristics of cancel culture are threefold:
1. The transgression has a level of damage that is X
2. The punishment for the transgression has a level of damage that is 10X-1000X.
3. The punishment for falsely accusing someone of a transgression is often 0, but rarely anything more than X.
Let's point these out in an example.
Joe supports a family of his own and gives substantial aid to his brothers/sisters/aunts/uncles etc. He says something like "There are IQ differences between races" during a video. The video is posted online and goes viral. He is piled on and sent death threats. His family and friends are piled on and get death threats. He is fired, and cannot support his extended family anymore. He's debanked and is unable to pay bills. I doubt I need to go on. You've seen thousands of cases like this.
The transgression will hurt a couple people's feelings. The punishment is no-where even close to proportionate to the crime.
Furthermore, let us assume that if someone had just watched more of the video, they would have realised that he was literally quoting someone else, and that was obvious from watching more context.
What is the punishment now for everyone who sent death threats? What is the punishment for the person who originally posted the viral clip edited to remove the context? What is the punishment for the bankers who debanked him? No-one pays for any of it.
I think if everyone could agree that punishments should be proportionate to the crime, and false accusations should be punished more harshly than actual transgressions, that a lot of the edge would be taken off the cancel culture we currently find ourselves in.
EDIT: I think actually punishments for transgressions are often even more than 10x-1,000x. They feel to me more like they go from 1,000x-1,000,000x, but that seems so weird I can't make myself say it without putting more thought into it. No matter what, if a microaggression can be met with anything more than a micropunishment, then things have gone off the rails.
Sometimes people increase punishments so that they have greater deterrent value, and I think that's exactly what's going on here. Make an example of one or two, and the rest will fall in line.
There is no viable "anti-cancel-culture" coalition, but not because defining cancel culture is particularly difficult. I have seen broadly speaking two types of "anti-cancel-culture" persons.
The first type are the Political Bourgeois. They are mostly OK with the current (social, economic, political...) status quo and feel that they have some access to policy-making via the "proper channels". As a result, they genuinely oppose brigading, boycotts, etc. because they find it in poor taste when the "proper channels" are there.
A typical example is the established academic whose papers have been found to show evidence of academic misconduct by some anonymous pubpeer commenters - this is an outrageous witch hunt! Misconduct accusations should be made via university channels, scientific disagreements should be published via the journals! Never mind that the university has every incentive to not find their top shot f'd up, and is slow to investigate; never mind that publicly accusing a top-shot of being wrong (let alone sloppy or guilty of fraud) is a career-killer for junior faculty no matter how right they are.
The second type, more numerous, are the Cynical Reactionaries. They disapprove the enforcement of social norms they do not like via social pressure, boycott campaigns etc. but does not bat an eye about using similar (or worse) tactics to enforce their preferred social norms.
The cynical reactionary might not follow intentionally a Machiavellian strategy, they often just have an incoherent worldview. They think movie studios making casting decisions based on an actor's public comments (or public reaction to them) is cancel culture, but also think churches being allowed to refuse hiring staff unaffiliated with the church is freedom of association.
Cynical Reactionaries were never against cancel culture, they just think harping about it is a useful weapon of culture war. Political Bourgeois are against any culture war because their objective is (more or less) the status quo. Neither are honest in their commitment to disarmament, and their target endpoints are too far apart.
(Maybe the esteemed commentariat of this blog is different but it is not a politically-relevant bloc.)
I think the fact that the comments show a "clear line" at anywhere between A5 and A11 shows that there is no clear line - people draw different boundaries depending what extra details they add and how they interpret things.
I find the legal and economic distinction between a boycott and a secondary boycott helpful here. If a union and its supporters boycott the employer in support of their strike, that is perfectly legal. But if the union and its supporters boycott another company (e.g., a supplier or customer) because they choose not to join your boycott against the employer, that is an illegal secondary boycott.
Likewise, you and your friends are free to not support things you disagree with, publicize your views, and try to convince others to join you, and there is nothing wrong with that. But it is "cancel culture" and destructive (although not illegal) for you and your friends to cut off and demonize everyone who chooses not to join your boycott/shaming. It is an attempt to isolate the victim and cut them off from support. Also, it is an attempt to "win" the debate by ending conversation rather than by getting to the truth.
Yes. I think this is a good and important distinction you're making.
I think it also ties into a point that other commenters here have made - which is that it seems wrong for people to face serious penalties for voicing an opinion that a very large minority (or even a majority) of people agree with.
Well, the thing with a primary boycott (without a secondary boycott) is that it's failure or success will likely come down to how people in general feel about what is being boycotted or whatever instigated the boycott.
Let's say you have a boycott against a particular brand because they had a commercial that many viewed as pro-pedophile or very racist against minorities. Well, anti-pedophile and anti-racist sentiment is strong enough that these boycotts stand a good chance of succeeding even without a secondary boycott.
Now, let's say you have a boycott against a particular brand because they used the word "bossy" in a commercial. Well here, I suspect the vast majority of people don't care. This boycott will likely only work through doing a secondary boycott. And if it does work, we have a boycott that feels wildly incongruent with the wider culture, with where most people are.
If we as a society were to choose to reject secondary boycotts, to consider them excessive, that alone would alleviate much of the harm caused by cancel culture.
Full disclosure, I am a consistent donor to and enthusiastic fanboy of FIRE and all that they do.
That said, Lukianoff's definition doesn't strike me as fully baked. If anything it muddies the waters by mixing together what are for me two different things: the legal standing of free speech, and a society's broader culture regarding free speech.
It is of course accurate, and in some contexts directly on point, to note that the 1st Amendment was and is aimed at suppression of speech by government specifically. In other contexts though it is simply a pedantic response which evades the actual issue. The very term "cancel _culture_" implies -- correctly I think -- that the new level of concern we're talking about is more about where our general societal expectations/actions sit regarding free expression, than it is about the legal specifics.
I don't think most of the examples in this article are cancel culture. Cancel culture is the hijacking of social relations and institutions to coerce third parties into the suppression of political enemies. That would be example A10 and similar, not unsubscribing from the Atlantic because of their foolish ideas and unpleasant grammar.
> things that are bad and that we should oppose, but which are hard to define or circumscribe in all edge cases (the most famous example is pornography
This seems surprising as written. Did you maybe mean to write "_child_ pornography"?
I suspected as much, but that was about "hard-core pornography" (or what is commonly called "obscenity") , not about all pornography? And even so, not about saying it's "bad and we should oppose" it, just that it's not protected by the first amendment?
I read it as Scott suggesting we inhabit Potter's point of view, not because he agrees with it, but because it's a common cultural reference point for the circumstance of "wanting to prohibit something that's hard to define precisely".
Pornography is actually a remarkably difficult concept to define. "Representations featuring human nudity" doesn't work: there are thousands of works of art (paintings, sculptures, films) featuring nude or semi-nude people which are considered to have artistic merit and not considered pornographic. "Representations featuring penetrative sex" doesn't work: there are many art films featuring unsimulated coitus which are considered to have artistic merit. On the flipside, there are many kinds of content which are considered unambiguously pornographic but which feature neither penetrative sex nor nudity e.g. a JOI video featuring a fully clothed woman. The best stab at a definition can only really appeal to authorial intent: it's a representation which is intended to arouse or titillate. But of course, it's impossible to read a director's mind: he might SAY that he intended his film as a thoughtful exploration of sexual intimacy between step-siblings, and how can you prove him wrong? The fact that people are masturbating to said film isn't dispositive (lots of people masturbate to content which everyone agrees wasn't intended to arouse or titillate, and lots of pornography attempts to arouse or titillate but fails).
As to whether porn is bad: I mean, probably, but maybe you disagree.
I don't think the US had such a difficult time defining it in the first half of the 20th century. It was later on that a greater amount of work was deemed to have artistic merit despite appealing to the prurient interest.
As it is written, the statement indicates that porn is a generally recognized bad thing on the level of police brutality, which would be consensus building. From what I know, neither presidential candidate proposes to ban pornography for adult viewers.
There are likely some evangelicals and woke groups who would like to ban porn, but I would expect voter support for that to be somewhere between support for a total alcohol prohibition and a total ban on cars, i.e. very low.
Until Scott confirms that this is indeed him coming out firmly against porn, I will assume that what he meant to imply was
> things that were generally judged bad and worthy of opposition, but which are hard to define or circumscribe in all edge cases (the most famous example is pornography
"I’m still so mad I’m not sure I’ll ever link an Atlantic article on ACX again, and I have trouble staying civil when I encounter people who work for the Atlantic. This isn’t out of some well-thought-out political strategy, just that it would personally warm my heart if the Atlantic failed as a business and everyone associated with it died of starvation."
This kind of comment makes me want to pull Scott aside and ask him, "Scott, buddy, are you ok?"
"Probably this is dysfunctional and I should get over it eventually."
Yes!
Scott, I totally get the visceral anger at someone who seems out to make your life unlivable, but still holding onto that feeling *years later* seems very uncharacteristic of you. You are the Rightful Caliph of Mistake Theory, the high king of "in praise of niceness and civilization," the prophet of "Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite Rules of True, Necessary, and Kind." FWIW, I've read the piece in question and thought it was both patronizing and stupid. But surely you see how unjust it is to condemn a whole publication for publishing one stupid piece? I subscribe to The Atlantic and I find much there that is worthwhile. Does this make me a bad person in your eyes now, an accomplice to evil? I hope you can make some peace with this instead of wishing DEATH BY STARVATION on people are guilty of nothing but association with a writer you hate. Gazing into the abyss, etc. etc.
The "Death by Starvation" bit did seem excessive to me as well, but overall, I get and respect Scott's anger here. Personally, I'm more disgusted/nauseated by "liking/wanting peace and quiet makes you a racist!" than angry but the type of thinking that goes into this sort of article is truly one of the most loathsome and harmful aspects of the modern western world.
Making EVERYTHING about race - even someone as commonplace and unrelated to race as liking peace and quiet! - causes severe cultural rot. There's a certain subset of modern culture commentators and journalists that won't let people have simple basic preferences, totally apart from any racial or even political considerations. And in some extreme cases, like this one, it could even negatively impact people with legit medical conditions and sensitivities, like Scott here.
I didn't like the Atlantic article either; what I'm mostly struck by here is a) holding on to that anger for so long and b) the guilt by association - wishing death upon the whole Atlantic staff, not just the one author. Both seem very uncharacteristic of Scott, the rational effective altruist who gave away his kidney to a stranger!
Well, that's fair. I do think Scott maybe took this article too personally. I'm pretty sure the article-writer simply didn't think of people with Scott's hearing sensitivities. That's not good, and in a way it's ironic, but it's not as bad as intentionally targeting someone imo.
Scott's been through some stuff, which he got into a bit back in the 2013-2014 era. I'll ... just say that my PTSD finds his attitude very familiar. Sometimes I think that everyone goes through life with stuff like this, and only when it rises to the level where it interferes with day-to-day life, do we call it a "disorder" and start medicalizing it.
[Three paragraphs redacted at @Moon Moth's request; anyone reading this please know I was trying to explain in a semi-humorous but polite way why I was about to say the below]
I understand the sufferer's perspective of, "I have PTSD, I don't want to talk about it," but without details, the listener is often going to wonder (even if they're too polite not to say out loud), "Okay, but if you didn't want to talk about it, why did you bring your trauma up? Is this a ritual where I'm supposed to express my sincere care by proactively gently inviting you to share details? Do you need an accommodation? What kind of accommodation? What am I supposed to *do* with this information?"
I suppose most people will either be blissfully disinterested or simply invent an explanation that satisfies their curiosity, but I can't manage to do either.
FWIW, I'm pretty reasonable in real life, too. :-) [And thanks for the edit! It's probably irrational of me, but that doesn't seem to change these feelings.]
I'm slightly confused about why you think me being a generally reasonable person means that it's unlikely for me to be traumatized. The short answer is that someone did it. It's a bit like the analogy of how, if we find a watch on the beach, it implies the existence of a watchmaker? If we find an arrangement of shit in a perfect pentagram with burning shit candles at all the intersections and containing a lot of ungrammatical Latin written in shit, ...
> I understand the sufferer's perspective of, "I have PTSD, I don't want to talk about it," but without details, the listener is often going to wonder (even if they're too polite not to say out loud), "Okay, but if you didn't want to talk about it, why did you bring your trauma up? Is this a ritual where I'm supposed to express my sincere care by proactively gently inviting you to share details? Do you need an accommodation? What kind of accommodation? What am I supposed to do with this information?"
Mostly it's just what pops into my head? Like, literally, if my initial reaction is blinding rage and a desire to implement Vlad the Impaler's solution to social problems, and I have to spend 10 minutes talking myself down from that before writing a coherent response, then I'm more likely to say something like "My PTSD thinks X but perhaps Y would be better". (In this particular case, people were saying "that sort of rage doesn't sound like Scott, he's so reasonable", but I have personal experience with those two things being very compatible, so I figured it was worth a comment.)
I'm not looking for ritual care, or accommodations, or expecting any particular kind of response. ACX is the first and pretty much only place where I discuss it openly, and I'm still feeling my way around the whole mess. I censor myself for anonymity, and sometimes for standard conversational stuff like "I'm not interested" or "I don't have a good argument here" or "it needs saying but it would be better from someone else", etc. But I try not to censor my feelings or my perspective on the world. I'm trying to get used to being myself again, if that makes any sense? Part of why and what I write here is a purely selfish, inward-focused process of getting used to interacting with people again, and figuring out how to do it while dealing with this "new" mess in my head. And in that respect, I'm just tossing stuff out there and seeing how people react. So here's a new reaction, great! Your feedback has given me new data to think about. :-)
> "I'm slightly confused about why you think me being a generally reasonable person means that it's unlikely for me to be traumatized."
To be really blunt, I have a strong intuition that there are some experiences it is indeed unreasonable to be traumatized by!
While it is true that "the worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you," we all live with media that is constantly showing almost all of us someone's comparatively much greater trauma (and many of these are traumas that *could* happen to ourselves). A "reasonable," rationally-compassionate person would ideally look at certain kinds of negative experiences in their own life and say, "I don't like X thing, but it's so much better than Y or Z, I'll self-soothe by rationalizing why this is actually no big deal and/or being grateful that this isn't much worse."
A hypothetical:
Would most of the planet consider it reasonable for the deeply loved child of a billionaire to claim they're "traumatized" when they're gifted a new Honda Civic on their sweet sixteen rather than a high-end Audi, or a Lamborghini, because their parent doesn't want them to be harmed in a sports car they aren't skilled enough to handle yet? That kid might indeed *feel* traumatized; they might believe their parents don't love them enough to maintain their social status via lifestyle displays amongst their peers, but is that a *reasonable* "trauma" for them to fixate on? Is that something they should still feel wounded by, years later? *Should* they call their heart rate increase every time they see a Honda Civic on the road when they're 36 "PTSD?"
Probably no.
Does our sympathy for their "trauma" and our sign off on "PTSD" change when we learn they were riding in an identical Honda Civic during the crash that killed their best friend the year before?
In this case though it's not even clear that the phenomenon in question *isn't* fairly inherently about race. The main empirical (as opposed to normative) claim of the offending article was that upper-middle class whites have different noise standards from lower-class people of color, especially New York Puerto Ricans, and that when neighborhoods gentrify, the result of this is a significant increase in noise complaints, mostly from whites who are new to the neighborhoods. Insofar as that claim is true, the subject matter really is naturally "about race", *regardless of whether the author is right to regard this phenomenon as a bad thing*.
I think this is Scott being remarkably honest about his feelings.
Rationally, Scott would probably be willing to donate spare organs to the writer of that article instead.
I can understand that he recognizes the view that 'liking quiet is racist' as a more plausible threat to his social existence than neo-Nazi ideology.
After some introspection, I don't think that I would rejoice over an especially painful death of anyone. I mean, there are certainly people who could benefit the world by dropping dead, and over whose death I would feel joy (mostly the generic international supervillains, no personal acquaintances come to mind), but I don't think I would be saddened if their deaths were especially quick and painless. But perhaps I am simply less in touch with my subconscious emotions.
I remember reading the original article when it first came out, and I had a very similar reaction to Scott's—it was infuriating. The article is not just wrong, but devious, cowardly, and manipulative because it uses identity politics to justify obnoxious behavior. The author, Xochitl Gonzalez, doesn't openly say, "I don't care if my neighbors are annoyed by my inappropriately loud conversations and music"; instead, she cloaks her ideas in the rhetoric of social justice. (I guess it never occurs to Gonzalez that non-white people might actually enjoy peace and quiet as well.) Gonzalez knows that a lot of upper-middle class white people are terrified of being labeled as racist and she exploits this weakness to the fullest extant.
Plus, the blatant double-standard of the whole thing really sent me over the edge. If a white journalist wrote an article titled "Why Do [Members of Ethnic Group X] Feel the Need to Shout at the Top of Their Lungs and Play Loud Abrasive Rap Music in Public Spaces?" they would be denounced on Twitter and hounded out of the industry. And yet Gonzalez is free to criticize and stereotype an entire group of people, implying that liking peace and quiet is a "white" characteristic.
I would absolutely love to find out Gonzalez's address so my friends and I can camp out in front of her place all day and have loud conversations, play music that she hates (maybe opera or heavy metal), and possibly set off a car alarm for her benefit. We'll see how long her "only white people like peace and quiet shtick" lasts.
I didn't like the article either, I think it is quite annoying, even if I also think Scott's reaction is way, way over the top, but I think it is steel-manned a bit more easily than that. How about: "there is a genuine trade-off between the preferences of people who want peace and quiet, and people who like loud parties, music etc. Neither of these preferences is inherently bad/unreasonable: it is sad when people are hurt by noise, but it's also sad when people who want to can't party. When gentrification happens, there is a shift in favor of the preference for quiet, that happens because the newcomers have much greater social and economic power than the old residents. This is unfair, because a) having greater power shouldn't allow you to move the norms like this and/or b) it is unfair, and a result of racism, that the newcomers have greater social and economic power. I think if it was a right-coded disempowered group having their norms changed by upper-middle class women or people of color entering their community and flexing their muscles, Scott and other commentators here would see the article's take as a bit less unreasonable, even if still fairly weak.
Haha, the commenters above have already given you the most important response, that this is Scott being honest (and probably exaggerating a little for comic effect), which is a good thing. Everyone's a little messed up, and it's OK to admit that sometimes.
But I also wanted to pull out this quote...
"...holding onto that feeling *years later* seems very uncharacteristic of you"
Like, if there's one thing we know about Scott, it's that he's just a teensy bit obsessive, right? This is the man who on an irregular basis produces current event analyses at the length and depth of at least a university course, and feeds them to us despite it being more than we want to know. In addition to the commitment of becoming a doctor, he wrote a full novel. I agree that his obsessiveness is 99.9% directed in healthy directions, but I don't think it should surprise anyone that just occasionally it spills out a bit randomly.
It’s clearly hyperbole. Also what I am about to say might seem a bit patronising, but given other people are taking this seriously it seems necessary.
I just smiled at that and thought “That article really pissed him off, huh”. For hyperbole to work you have to go overboard - no point exaggerating slightly as that can be taken literally.
You have to say “I worked a million hours yesterday” not “I worked 20 hours yesterday” to when you worked 12, and wanted to exaggerate a bit for effect. Otherwise people might assume you worked the 20.
Only one part of the sentence needs to be an obvious exaggeration for the entire sentence to be figurative and untrustworthy:
saying “I worked a million hours yesterday, and must have had 20 coffees” puts both the hours worked and the coffees imbibed under suspicion, even though 20 coffees is doable.
The obvious hint of Scott not actually wanting the Atlantic to fail as a business, or that he probably does stay civil when he meets journalists from the Atlantic is the last part of the sentence - Scott doesn’t want everybody associated with the Atlantic to starve.
fwiw, I think A1 - A6 are clearly fine (private, personal consumption decisions are not "cancel culture"); A7 is unclear, and A8+ qualify as attempts at "cancellation" (though maybe justified if the target is sufficiently transparently bad), with the social threats in A9 being especially egregious.
It does seem really tricky to pin down a general account of when cancellation attempts are or aren't justified. I kind of suspect the only plausible answer will be unhelpfully opaque, e.g. appealing to which views are sufficiently *substantively prima facie reasonable* that a *genuinely decent person* could reasonably affirm them. Of course, people will dispute what views do or don't meet this criteria. But I think the problem of "cancel culture" precisely stems from people being unreasonably dogmatic in failing to appreciate how decent and reasonable people could have views that differ from theirs.
It’s going to depend on your philosophical and social bedfellows, always. True free speech absolutists are unicorns. Nothing is actually “transparently bad” from every perspective.
Yeah, that's why I called it "unhelpfully opaque" -- my answer appeals to objective normative facts about what is actually reasonable, self-evident, etc., and people can always disagree about what those facts are.
(Of course, on pain of self-defeat, you can't take the mere existence of such disagreement to show that there is no such fact of the matter. Otherwise your denial of objective truth would not itself be factually correct.)
I don't think this is as hard as it's made out to be in the post.
Let's first recognize that we're talking about "culture". It's a concept without many bright lines to begin with, but whatever else they are, cultures aren't just any random individual's opinions or actions. An action or opinion can be an example or manifestation of a culture, but no single example can really capture the whole culture. (This is why some people can still deny that cancel culture is even a thing.) Cultures emerge, and social context is everything. I feel like this is obvious, but I mention it because the whole framing of the post, then, feels a bit like asking "how much cream in your food makes it French cuisine?" That's not quite how it works.
Having said that, however, cancel culture is pretty narrow as cultures go, and so it's one of the easier ones to recognize. It's not "disagreement culture." "Cancel" implies some degree of enforcement and action (or at least threat of action), rather than just voicing one's discontent.
It is appropriate that Lukianoff's definition contains the word "campaign" – which hints at both the collective aspect and the goal of affecting change. And, also in his definition, the campaigns are typically targeted and intended to have direct consequences for people – individuals.
But almost none of the scenarios above mention anything like a campaign. Somewhere between A9 and A11, something like a campaign emerges, but it skirts the important parts. (1) It's only implied that shuttering the podcast means that the podcaster is out of a job, and (2) as long as it's just a single person complaining, and no pick-up is mentioned, it's not a great example of a culture (see point above). So, not a very clear example.
(However, I respect people's rights to opine and complain, and Spotify's right to have T&C that ban this podcaster, and the first amendment's limitations. Without all that, we'd be having a different and much larger conversation. But opinions, corporate boundaries and national laws aren't cancel culture.)
The same problem goes for scenarios B1 through B5. There's not much campaigning going on, and not much cancel culture. The obvious exception is: "But you know if you write it, thousands of people will get really angry and pressure the university to fire this grad student." But that doesn't get to any participation in cancel culture on the part of "you". The cancel culture is whatever dynamic goes on internally in the mob when they more or less formally organize to pressure the university – and even then, only inasmuch as it is an example of something that happens more frequently in their society. But as long as "you" act and write responsibly, you are not responsible for the mob.
If we want an example of an individual contributing to / embodying cancel culture, we can imagine you, the blogger in question, writing an opinion piece echoing the mob's sentiment, calling for someone to be fired – but even then, it's only an example of cancel culture in the context of a lot of other people voicing that opinion, and writing similar pieces. Reporting on the mob is not an example of cancel culture; joining it is.
C1 is the most interesting example, IMO, though I don't think Agnes Callard was right. I think she could have signed on, as long as the letter/petition didn't threaten any consequences for non-compliance, and no calls for anyone to lose their job. I could be persuaded otherwise, however, if I knew more about the other signatories or the wording of the petition. Something might be implied, that I didn't get from the description. But in general: Voicing one's opinion, even alongside others, is not cancel culture. Again, it's the action, and the threatened consequences, not having or stating the opinion, that makes the cancellation.
"Thousands of stay-at-home fathers get angry and write in saying they’re cancelling their subscriptions." As long as they're not explicitly calling for the writer or editor to be fired, maybe even making their continued subscription contingent on it, it's really the wrong kind of cancellation. But we can still use it for disambiguation: Yes, I guess even just cancelling your subscription is a sort of "cancellation". Yes, it reflects something in the culture (a subculture of stay-at-home dads). The thing that makes it cancel culture, however, is that they are connected – it has to be understood by the angry fathers and the institution both, that people are acting in a concerted effort (not necessarily formally coordinated) to assert pressure. And that they are not just unsubscribing from a magazine they no longer enjoy reading; not just people voting with their feet and wallets. And, again, that understanding comes from seeing it in the context of the culture at large.
So, I am quite squarely in P3 territory ("everyone acted in a morally acceptable way"), but need to expand on that. First the follow-up questions:
"Would you still feel this way if it were an article criticizing transgender people? What about an indisputably correct article, criticizing some bad pro-transgender science?" Yes and yes.
"Isn’t this option basically saying that cancel culture is fine, and that it’s okay to get a journalist fired if they express an opinion you don’t like?" No. What? It's just supply and demand. If people don't want to buy your writing, no one is obligated to publish it. That's not the part that is cancel culture or morally questionable.
The parts that are not mentioned, but that would be more in line with cancel culture, and more morally dubious or indefensible, include:
- If angry fathers demand that someone is fired (targeting individuals). Especially is it is for a single story or mistake, and they don't forgive, don't accept apologies, and in effect demand highly disproportionate punishment for the sin.
- If angry fathers threaten other people and manipulate them to also cancel their subscriptions. (Campaign.) If they publically call out and confront subscribers, employees and advertisers, and paint anyone who doesn't cancel their subscription (or call out their employer/colleagues, or pull their ads) as anti-father; and tie them up in time- and energy-draining, lose-lose sophistry if they don't bend to the fathers' will.
- If the CEO fires the editor and journalist not because of any significant threat to the bottom line, or real business concern, but to avoid awkward questions at dinner parties.
- If the CEO undermines audience trust and shareholder value in the medium to long term to get out of short-term discomfort.
- Possibly, if the editor published something they knew the publisher wouldn't defend and the writer wouldn't apologize for.
(Sorry. That comment was too long. I guess I had to work through it myself, too.)
There's an axis here that feels sideways to most of the “professional vs personal” talk: consider the case of audience members objecting to content tangentially referencing the Hogwarts setting on the grounds of J. K. Rowling's views on gender being offensive to them. Assume here the surrounding content doesn't actively promote those views on gender and doesn't talk about the issue at all, nor does it even directly advocate for the Harry Potter books being good as such; in all ways explicit it stays neutral but draws Hogwarts from the pool of common culture. That gets interpreted as indirect support, with something akin to strict-liability social rules regardless of the author's intentions. Especially consider something like objectors pushing “that you consider it acceptable not to bother with the elephant in the room is a sign that transgender people will be unsafe here” in a way where other parts of the audience will see. This doesn't fall into the “personal communication” exemption if the author is a professional entertainer, but it definitely feels like part of the “cancel culture” trend to me, in a way that objecting to an entertainer who actively made fun of transgender people would not.
It seems like broadening the scope of *transitivity* in a way that aggressively extends tribal lines in all sorts of indirect ways has a lot of relation to how “cancel culture” works in practice, and I think there's something along the lines of the game-theoretic objections to “Offense versus harm minimization” (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9thqSN8HDLM3LTxK5/offense-versus-harm-minimization) going on, plus some kind of frenzy around “cut out The Enemy as completely as possible” that enlivens purity spirals around making sure you won't be seen anywhere near the next Enemy and also enforcement of extreme low-decoupling. That last part unpredictably makes high-decoupling communication either collateral damage or intentional damage depending on how you interpret it, which seems to be a primary way “cancel culture” is destructive toward some spheres-around-here and maybe toward Enlightenment-ish open discussion of ideas in general. A9 above shows off a narrower example of transitivity and drawing tribal lines, but this still feels skew to how the A-axis is presented in the post. Where does this fit? *Does* it fit?
There's a moral if not legal case to be made against "cancelling" in certain cases, even for private actors. Lukianoff and Haidt get more specific about this in The Coddling of the American Mind. They contend modern cancellers are motivated by 3 bad ideas: "What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. " Even Mill supported "cancellation" in the right situations. Lukianoff and Haidt's thesis holds if there is something factually or morally wrong with an act of cancellation even operating independently of government.
In On Liberty, a work praised and often cited by Haidt and Lukianoff, John Stuart Mill argues that it's worse when non-government entities restrict speech. I may be putting words in his mouth, it's been a while, but he argued that when the people restrict speech, they tend to do so by feeling or whim without much thoughtful debate. While a legislature transgresses in restricting speech (usually), there is typically some level of informed deliberation. Neither transgresses against Freedom of Speech if that speech doesn't pass the test of Mill's Harm Principle. To be fair, I don't think he gave a solid definition himself. Further, Haidt and Lukianoff lament the concept creep associated with the word 'harm'.
In their The Coddling of the American Mind, the authors refer to the Three Bad Ideas as being the opposite of the principles one learns from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. They are the opposite of principles in Buddhism and Stoicism. More generally, they conflict with what passes for wisdom the world over, ideas Haidt encountered in his research for The Happiness Hypothesis. People are Anti-Fragile, citing the concept popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. So the Three Bad Ideas are actually harmful, but must be discussed.
So I think a possible retort from Luikianoff and Haidt might specifically address a narrow definition of harm to address the concerns mentioned in this article. Further, cancellation is often a consequence of as objective a definition of foolishness as we can muster. Harms are exaggerated or even non-existent.
I didn't see it in this article, but people who won't tolerate anything they disagree with tend to engage in bad faith arguments and logical fallacies, in particular strawman tactics and guilt by association. Just because protestors prevented a lecture, the lecturer wasn't cancelled because after all, he still has his podcast and his book was a bestseller, or he's still a millionaire, or he can still get a job somewhere else. Consequently, the label "cancellation" doesn't make sense and their is nothing to be concerned about here. There's also "tu quoque". People on the right engage in some ridiculous acts of cancellation themselves, so it can't ever be wrong when the left does it either.
Cancellations and opposition to cancellation are often a consequence of an uncharitable treatment of the cases at hand. Perhaps a definition of cancellation should include a reference to The Principle of Charity or Critical Thinking more generally.
IMHO cancel culture is when consequences for 'personal' actions then bridge the gap to professional/business. In your first example - the university (and all involved) would be justified in taking action to stop the grad student from publishing things that they don't believe in, assuming he was doing it using university resources. If he chooses to publish those same papers, under his own name, without using university resources, time, or reputation, then he shouldn't face any sort of pressure at work.
In the 'stay at home dads example' a bunch of dads getting the onboard with putting some hurt on the company that published an article they disagree with is a-ok - that is called public opinion and is A-ok, the company then has to decide how strongly they believe in what their employees said, and if it was even reasonable to say in the first place.
it is sort of the difference between cracking a sexist joke with your buddies at the bar vs the same joke in a meeting with your coworkers. In one case the people involved know your beliefs and that you're speaking for yourself, in the other you are acting and representing the company you work for, and you have an obligation to express their belief and culture or face the consequences for failure to do so.
This process, diferentiating between 'private life' and 'public life', and also between 'my speech' and 'speech endorsed or on behalf of my employer' is how life has always worked, it is how cultural norms are defined and how a society decides what is acceptable and what isn't.
From reading Lukianoff I think he really wants a content-neutral definition of "cancel culture" but it doesn't work for what seems to me to be an obvious reason. "Campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech" are themselves protected by the first amendment, so any concerted attempt to act against this will have to involve some form of social punishment for first amendment activities.
Relatedly a lot of comments are saying that going from criticism to boycotts are what crosses the line to cancel culture. But if you aren't willing to enact financial consequences on companies how are you going to persuade them to listen to you on "cancel culture" instead of the people who are willing to do that?
I've never seen an attempt at a content neutral definition that doesn't fall to a similar problem--I think opponents of cancel culture will just need to accept that content neutrality is unworkable and focus on protecting a fairly narrow range of viewpoints that are controversial but have value.
"if you aren't willing to enact financial consequences on companies how are you going to persuade them to listen to you on "cancel culture" instead of the people who are willing to do that?"
I agree strongly with this and in fact I believe it exposes one of Scott's biggest flaws: his eagerness to have the "moral high ground" and behave in a more principled manner than his opponents. This is nothing more than Scott virtue signalling and he should be strongly criticized for this narcissistic behavior. I believe that while we should demonstrate elevated morality towards those who have done nothing to harm us, our enemies should suffer in exactly the same ways that they force others to. Cancelling people who participate in cancellation campaigns is both moral and justified even if you disagree with cancel culture, just like it is possible to oppose murder but also be in favor of capital punishment for murderers.
15% of the population has no morals or ethics and only bases their behavior on what other people will think of them. These people have no more morality than animals and attempting to impact their behavior by setting a positive example for them is not only useless; it is counterproductive. When they hurt people or commit crimes, they are not sorry for their ACTIONS, they are only sorry that they got CAUGHT. The only way to adjust the behavior of such people is to make it clear that every time they inflict suffering on other people, it will be meted out to THEM in turn. Scott's unwillingness to acknowledge this and plan strategy around this facet of human nature means that he will never be an effective leader, since he expects his followers to sacrifice their own well-being to benefit their enemies. This is slave morality and nobody with dignity should follow it.
One thing that can be done is to form companies (like Substack) that don't bow to cancellation campaigns, and then consumers can decide which ones to support. Let the pro-cancellation consumers patronize the old companies.
For Substack specifically it's more complicated because its core purpose is to host speech. But suppose that Lowe's responded to Home Depot firing a worker for supporting Trump's assassination by declaring its commitment to not police the speech of its workers. Then to shop at Lowe's in support of this move would be to punish Home Depot for its first amendment freedom of association activity and thus, I think, fall under Lukianoff's definition of cancel culture.
That distinction seems very arbitrary to me. It's ok to use your own reasoning in private to decide you're not going to support Home Depot anymore because you think their actions are wrong, but it's not ok to persuade others that this is the correct decision? Why?
Recall the idea that arguments get arguments instead of bullets. Make an argument against what the company has done (not the company itself), and people may or may not be persuaded.
The idea that there's a sharp distinction between condemning what the company has done and the company itself seems implausible to me. Both are forms of social punishment for speech/association acts. This whole line of argument puts a lot of weight on what seem to be pretty minor distinctions.
Personally I'd endorse A1..A6, and likely A7. I think there's a clear dividing line between personally unsubscribing, and instructing others to unsubscribe -- and that line separates your personal opinion from cancel culture. For that reason, I'd also endorse either P2 or P3, depending on the CEO's motivations and the historical performance of the writers and editors. I don't think that people should be fired for first offenses (everyone deserves a second chance); on the other hand, the newspaper is a business and it is the CEO's duty to ensure it prospers (or at least to maximize value to shareholders). For a similar reason, I would be more strongly opposed to firing scientists (as opposed to newspaper writers), since they are tasked with discovering the truth (however unpleasant), not with generating content that makes money.
I get the desire for a content-neutral definition of cancel culture, and I see the practical advantages, but I don't think cancel culture is in fact content-neutral (though it may be non-partisan)
The moral failing in cancel culture happens when people get incredibly upset about things which aren't actually that bad. It's caused by a general societal push encouraging us to exaggerate how upset we are, so even if an individual is just experiencing a "natural" emotional response we should still encourage them to calm down to counteract the other voices saying that debilitating anger is pro-social. One major social ill is that we can't equilibriate our behavior to match what society will punish us for, because the bar for what constitutes a punishable offense keeps moving. Another social ill is that a society full of easily-offended people is much more constrained (for example, some useful science becomes impossible to publish)
Inconveniently, this means "no but that thing I'm upset about really is bad" is a valid defense. Maybe it's better to say "the offender had every opportunity to know how bad this was"?
I think the "Scott hates the Atlantic" issue is illustrative. The real issue is over whether, as a society, we should remind Scott that forgiveness is a virtue, or should we instead tell him that his pain is valid and must be heard. The latter is what causes cancel culture. The former is directionally right and morally ideal in theory. The instinct to say "your pain is indefensible, shut up" is an attempt to more rapidly course-correct, but risks pushing the pendulum the other way
Here's a trend that's come up more recently that feels interestingly ambiguous. Is “we oppose AI art, and displaying it is offensive” an expression of cancel culture? What about “linking to posts that include any is offensive”? What about “failing to promise *never* to use AI art means I won't support you even if your current works don't use it”? I feel like there's something interestingly different about that domain related to the concrete premises involved, and I also feel like there's related social patterns in there, but I'm not sure at all about how to parse it out. Just saying “tribalism” or “memetic conflict” feels too glib.
> A newspaper publishes a not-particularly-spicy take about a mostly-not-politicized issue, like "it's fine to eat a small meal before swimming". Someone on Twitter writes a hot take about how this is awful because maybe some young children might eat a *big* meal before swimming, and then they'd drown, so this article is endangering children. Fifty other people on Twitter are part of the anti-endangering-children activist community, and they amplify this message, because of some mix of (A) overreacting to very mild offenses helps to shape culture by making people terrified to commit any offense at all, and (B) getting outraged and complaining about things is fun. The CEO, who is also on Twitter, gets fifty furious hateful messages in his twitter-inbox, and he says "oh no everyone hates me I must react immediately" and he fires the person who wrote the article.
In this case, I would argue both:
(P1): The people on twitter who are trying to effect cultural change by wildly overreacting to tiny offenses are doing bad things and are making the world worse.
(P2): The CEO who assumed that fifty people on twitter were a representative sample of real-world opinion has made an error.
I would add that unfortunately I think it's hard to coordinate very well around my objection to (P1), because you'd have to find the people claiming to be outraged and ask them questions: "are you *really* outraged by this? or are you doing some combination of engagement-farming and personal-expression and Overton-window-pushing? and if you *are* genuinely outraged, are you the sort of person who gets outraged by things all the time, or is this an outrage outlier for you?" and they'd just say no.
I think it should be easier to coordinate around my objection to (P2), but also my objection might not be true? Budweiser is one example of a company that got cancelled and lost a lot of sales as a result. I do feel sort of confused about this because it's hard for me to imagine that a social-media kerfluffle got that much real-world traction, but I guess it must have done so.
Hi Scott! I'm a longtime enemy of Cancel Culture and have been actively fighting it for many years, using innovative tactics like encouraging my followers to create Deepfakes of people who support Cancel Culture (in order to get the Cancel Culture supporters themselves cancelled and fired) as well as encouraging stochastic violence against Cancel Culture participants while teaching my followers how to build weaponized quadcopter drones that can potentially be used to assassinate the billionaires who typically support Cancel Culture, thus giving them "Skin in the Game" as Taleb would say. You can read about my endeavors in the links below, if you're interested. Needless to say, I'm very passionate about the Free Speech cause, and that's why I feel I'm best qualified to answer your questions.
Personally, I believe that anything people say or post outside of the workplace should be considered a Protected Class, similar to gender, sexuality, religion, or other protected characteristics. In other words, if you make your pro-pedophile comments (to continue your worst-case example) outside of normal business hours and your company fires you from it, they can be sued for discrimination against you on the basis of your beliefs. I feel that this would be half of the battle to enshrine free speech as a protected right. To be clear, I don't support pedophilia and in fact I have been very active at encouraging the government to expose the Jeffrey Epstein client list, but free speech is not just about protecting speech that I like, but also speech that I hate.
"But wait!" I hear you say. "What about people like podcasters? They don't directly work for Spotify or Facebook, but they have the potential to lose a lot of revenue if people start a Cancel Culture campaign to get them fired! Are you saying that Facebook HAS to air pro-pedophilia content?!? You MONSTER!"
My opinion about this is that social media companies who wish to be protected by Section 230 do not have the luxury of deciding what speech they will or will not platform. This is the other half of what will ultimately destroy Cancel Culture. The moment Facebook decides to censor or deplatform even a single person on the basis of their offensive opinions, they have changed from being a platform to a publisher and Facebook is now liable for ALL opinions on their platform, because they are no longer protected by Section 230. If Mark Zuckerberg wants to remove a podcaster from Facebook because he finds one of their opinions offensive or objectionable, that's totally fine. But now he's legally liable for EVERY single user's Facebook post that advocates terrorism, criminal behavior, or anything else. In other words, if a social media platform thinks that it is their "duty" to police what their users say, then we should also hold them firmly to that position and make them legally liable for all user content. They don't get to selectively enforce censorship on their userbase: it is either an All or Nothing proposition. They don't get to say "Well, we're a publisher in THIS instance, but a platform in THAT instance." The second you censor one of your users, you've made the decision to be a publisher by exercising editorial powers over them.
I think that this covers every one of the examples you mentioned, but if you need more clarification on what AntiCancellation advocates like myself demand, feel free to ask.
You citing Section 230 is then an egregious error when it explicitly says the opposite. In general, I hold that referring to laws when making moral arguments is a mistake (unless your moral system consists entirely of "following the letter of the law, whatever it says", in which case, sure).
I find that when explaining the way laws OUGHT to work it is helpful to relate my explanation to how they CURRENTLY work so that people realize it is not a huge jump between those two different states
>My opinion about this is that social media companies who wish to be protected by Section 230 do not have the luxury of deciding what speech they will or will not platform. This is the other half of what will ultimately destroy Cancel Culture. The moment Facebook decides to censor or deplatform even a single person on the basis of their offensive opinions, they have changed from being a platform to a publisher and Facebook is now liable for ALL opinions on their platform, because they are no longer protected by Section 230.
Lots of people spread this "publishers, not platforms" idea, but would be incredibly bad policy, because it's impossible to run a website without selectively censoring content - in particular, spam. If a website chooses to delete a spam comment, they've made an editorial decision based on the content of a post, and that makes them a publisher and now they're legally liable for every bit of porn, warez, and death threat that gets posted on their website. If they choose not to delete spam, their website becomes unusable because 99% of all comments are spam. So this policy would be a de facto ban on websites with user-generated content. (And before you get all excited about legislating social media into nonexistence, this same problem applies to smaller websites too - even a tiny blog with a comments section is a site with user-generated content that has to make moderation decisions.)
"But I would still allow *neutral* content moderation, like removing spam and warez!" you say.
And what happens when the spam comes from a political campaign? What happens when it's not spam, but you want users to keep the politics comments in the politics subforum instead of posting it everywhere in the cat pictures subforum? And who gets to decide what "neutral" means, anyway?
In order for a piece of spam to be downvoted into nonexistence, it has to be seen by the people who will cast the downvotes. In which case, mission accomplished, deploy more spam for further effect.
Cancel culture was created when millennials who spent their formative years in the environment of extreme, enforced patriotism of the first half of the 00s began to apply that understanding of how disfavored speech should be treated to their own values
"was created"? LOL....cancel culture is far older than that and used to be far more pervasive in this country than it is today. My own mother, before she passed away at 91, used to say that when she was growing up in the Midwest what we now call "cancel culture" was simply how life worked. To pick just one example my parents had childhood friends who during the 1950s abruptly and permanently lost their careers when it was revealed that they had attended a 1940s college party at which somebody with the Communist Party USA had been present.
None of this crap is _new_ either conceptually or in practice. What makes it appalling today is seeing things that we now call "cancellation" coming _back_ into normal for a lot of Americans, and also new tools (social media in particular) helping to enable that mentality.
Sure, it just depends on the scope of the definition. I do think there is a sort of dialectic here with Bush-era patriotism in "cancel culture" as it existed during the era it has that name
I could be guilty here of romanticizing the time of my childhood (many such cases) but I wonder if you could argue that the real anomaly at hand is that we had a decade or three of abnormally low cancellation, at least between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 (perhaps a sort of ideological peace dividend?)? Or maybe also including the 70s and 80s?
It does feel that way sometimes, yea. On the plus side the pushback to it now is both broader and deeper than seen in previous eras. The strikingly-rapid growth and success of FIRE is just one tangible example of that.
In the two specific instances that I heard the sad stories of, one was a young architect; the other was a young husband and wife each new to academia. (He a rookie junior professor in one of the sciences, while she'd taken a staff job in that university's administrative offices.)
Also when I was a kid we had a longtime neighbor who, I learned only after his passing, had lost his white-collar career during the late 50s/early 60s when it came out that in college he actually joined the American Communist Party for a short time. He'd then managed to become a unionized railroad worker which is what I knew him as, which during the 1960s/70s paid well enough to keep a middle-class household afloat if not thriving.
Let us not forget that FIRE's work consists in documenting and engaging the manifold actual manifestations of inappropriate use of power to crush viewpoint diversity. For them this is a real life issue, and a life and death issue for the culture. They offer (I think) the best database of such manifestations with a commitment to not being partisan. As much as some definition of anything that considered all theoretical edge cases would be amazing, it is also important to acknowledge that behavior tends to cluster in certain patterns that makes a less perfect definition perfectly useful.
I'm confused. This isn't hard. A cancellation attempt is where person A, who doesn't like what person B is doing, directly pressures person C into cutting ties or otherwise altering their relationship with B.
Person A simply being vocal about their dislike for B is a form of public pressure as well, but it's not cancellation. Mob behavior being involved or not doesn't matter for this definition; it can make the action worse, but it can't make it more cancelly. A single person can get you cancelled, though it's rare.
I appreciate the simplicity of your definition, but under it, the Montgomery Bus boycott, the 1963 Birmingham Campaign and many of the civil rights’ era boycotts would be considered cancel culture. I don’t see how any organized boycott wouldn’t meet your A-B-C criteria.
I don’t think the original civil rights movement boycotts are what most people mean by cancel culture.
The whole conversation seems to be structured as "how can we define cancel culture, which we know to be bad, in such a way as to only have it refer to bad things?" Maybe...it's not always bad?
>The whole conversation seems to be structured as "how can we define cancel culture, which we know to be bad, in such a way as to only have it refer to bad things?"
I think that’s because cancel culture was originally intended as a derogatory. If you want to turn it into a neutral or positive descriptor, that’s up to you, but you’re working against a primary component of its original definition at that point and you’re swimming against the current of shared understanding.
1) It involves punishment disproportionate to the offense relative to the norms of our broader society. In the general case, this involves speech, but in the academic case, the "broader norms" are the commitment to the free and open search for truth.
2) The judgment and punishment is carried out or heavily influenced by a mob rather than by any legal process.
3) It often (but not always) involves judgment for conduct or speech that is outside the specific domain of the person's employment or official duties.
It's the "disproportionate" step that makes it very difficult to define, which is why our legal code has so much guidance on levels felony and misdemeanor.
"I think of myself as, at the very least, in a strong coalition with everyone who believes that people shouldn’t be fired from their job for speech that they made outside of their job. But this is too limited!"
I find this both too limited AND too restrictive. It doesn't cover some of the things I want it to cover, but it's also not especially hard to think of cases where it probably shouldn't apply. They're not the most common cases, they're not usually the sort of cases anti cancel culture people are most apt to bring up. But neither are they totally outlandish or impossible.
An simple example is to suppose that the podcast host from A1 has a day job. It's not a public-facing day job, so his podcast activities don't directly impact his job performance. But if he becomes well-known enough that most of his coworkers are aware of his podcast, it could DEFINITELY have indirect effects. A rational (i.e. amoral) company is almost certainly going to find it more expedient to fire one employee than to deal with a spate of others quitting because they don't want to work with pedophilia podcast guy. If you stand on "nobody should ever be fired for speech activities outside their job" you have to either concede that a. the company should be willing to fold rather than fire this one person or b. everybody else is morally barred from quitting, even if they find working with the guy extremely distressing[1]. Both of those are very tough bullets to bite, and I'm not willing to bite them.
Incidentally, I think this sort of problem already has a well-explored solution (at least a partial one). The key is that I don't think framing this type of thing as a "free speech issue" is really helpful at all. "Under what circumstances an employer should be able to fire you" is clearly a labour-rights question, of which this is a sub-question. I'd posit that any society in which people are routinely getting fired for expressing outside-of-work opinions is a likely society in which people are also routinely getting fired for a lot of other bad reasons, like wanting to make room to promote the manager's best friend, or asking too many awkward questions about workplace safety or any number of other things.
The solution is unions. Unions exist precisely to stand up for the interests of employees where they differ from the interests of employers. "Not getting fired" is pretty high on the list of employee interests. The crucial insight here is that unions represent the interests of ALL the employees, collectively, so protections are much stronger for behaviours that don't adversely impact your coworkers than for behaviours that do. If a large but widely-distributed campaign tries to get one of the employees fired, a rational manager will fire them as soon as they seem like a net liability, which doesn't take very much in industries where workers are easily replaceable. But the union won't have nearly as low a barrier: firing one of their members is bad for their reputation, so they'll be incentivized to stand up for the employee unless and until the manager can make the case that the PR situation is bad enough to put the whole company at risk[2]. Meanwhile, if the employee does something that significantly upsets their coworkers--as in the case of pedophilia podcast guy--suddenly the union has every bit as much incentive to get the guy fired as the management does. I expect this last part won't sit well with many people here, and certainly personal popularity and office politics are real factors in how unions operate. But "keep from badly pissing off your coworkers" is ultimately a much easier and much more fundamentally necessary part of navigating a job than "keep from pissing off random strangers you'll never meet."
[1] In fact, we have to go even further: we have to concede that nobody should be allowed to let the prospect of working with pedophilia podcast guy dissuade them from applying to the company. A lack of qualified applicants for new jobs won't sink a company quite as fast as everyone quitting, but it will certainly do it eventually.
[2] Which I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, is very much not typical of cancelling campaigns. My impression is that while they can get fairly intense, they tend to blow over pretty quickly and cause just enough worry or disruption that replacing the employee seems safer and easier than riding the storm out.
Unions are only an answer to cancel culture problems in that firing employees is harder. There are lots of ways in which unionized labor is actually worse. The extraction of fees and overhead for the union administration must be at least equal to the added benefits for the employees, and regardless the extra costs are going to be passed on to the consumer. Making it harder for employers to manage personnel is hardly always a good thing either; just ask the 22,000 union employees of Yellow Corp. who lost their jobs when the company went bankrupt because they couldn't negotiate employment contracts to the degree needed to keep the business running. Unions should be viewed in a zero sum manner; they privilege the employee at the expense of both the employer and customer. There are a lot of tradeoffs involved beyond just protecting employees from termination.
The sentence I wrote before that, "There are lots of ways in which unionized labor is actually worse." The second part must be true to avoid unionized labor being worse for the employees as well. It isn't a statement about the efficiency of actual unions.
I don't think unions in media have worked like that in practice. Don McNeil was an active union guy at the NYT, and still got canned because some rich kids vacationing on some NYT-sponsored trip complained that he asked them to clarify which offensive words were used by a student that got expelled.
I don't think cancel culture can be so rigorously defined because culture can't be rigorously defined. There are two dimensions to cultural boundaries of acceptability: 1) Is something wrong? 2) If so, what social sanction should be applied?
Cancel culture interacts with both dimensions, and neither can be rigorously defined so of course cancel culture can't either. By interacting with both dimensions I mean cancel culture involves a minority trying to tailor society's boundary of acceptability to their own preferences and/or increase the social sanctions for crossing them.
The cultural norms and their associated sanctions that are easy to define are codified into laws.
The problem that you’re running into here is that you can’t escape the object-level debate of what actions are good/bad/morally neutral. It’s incoherent to say “this set of actions is morally bad but I oppose this person receiving social consequences for it” unless you would also extend that to the pedophilia examples.
The reason most people oppose pedophilia is because we have a social consensus against it. But the social consensus doesn’t just pop into existence, it’s established by social consequences. And in order to expand social consensus in your desired direction, you have to try to enforce social consequences on (“Cancel”) people on the edges of what’s acceptable. If you win the fight to do that, you move the Overton Window.
Most people are okay with all of this when it comes to things they think are bad, but on the meta level there’s no difference between this and whatever forms of Cancel Culture you disagree with. You can’t avoid the object level.
It seems clear to me that cancel culture happens at the point of coordination with others who aren't directly impacted by the actual thing. If podcast listeners get together to push for no more pedophiles on the podcast they used to enjoy, that is perfectly reasonable. Trying to push others who don't care about the pedophiles, or who don't listen to the podcast at at all, into your coalition... that's cancel culture. So I'd say that's somewhere around A8/A9 is the line, although I think A10 is actually fine. There's a reason cancel culture came after social media. Spotify is welcome to ignore my angry e-mail if they don't agree, but it's harder to ignore thousands of them, with accompanying social media outrage and news stories drawing in a bunch of people who have no reason to care except for viral outrage.
I wouldn't say any of the people doing the actual firings are participating in cancel culture any more than I would say someone paying a ransom is part of a kidnapping gang. Maybe they're ultimately part of the problem, but that's not the thing itself.
The First Amendment addresses the power relationship between the Government and Citizens. Private businesses are not constrained by it except as subsequently legislated or specified through judicial interpretation. This leaves businesses where those of us who trade labor for income spend most of our time as petty tyrannies to the extent they choose to be, mostly.
As the privatization of once Public Goods, things like education, transportation, housing has advanced, along with the financialization of Public Goods that were never treated as such like health care and nutrition, the space beyond the remit of the First Amendment has expanded.
As "The Market" has, post Buckley vs Valeo, post Citizens United, metabolized Politics, Abba Lerner's assertion, "economics has made herself the queen of the social sciences by selecting as her domain the set of "solved political problems" has become increasingly false. He said that while Marriner Eccles was running the Fed at the height of The New Deal. Economics is now visibly bifurcated into what classical economists called Political Economy (Marx was one of the last classicals, he didn't invent the term) and what we think of as Cancel Culture is a perfect example of one such unsolved political problem: economics wielded as naked power.
Has privatization actually advanced? Public school expenditures keep going up and privately owned roads seem to be less common than in the colonial era. I guess section 8 vouchers have displaced public housing projects though, as their concentration of poor people in one big place is now regarded as a bad thing.
I would define cancel culture in terms of the Overton Window. Assume there is a range of human beliefs that form a bell curve on any given issue. I think most people are comfortable imposing progressively stronger sanctions the further out on the curve you go. The legal definition of free speech means the government shouldn't be able to punish you for unpopular speech but in a free society, I think most of us feel you can be justly ostracized and fired for speech that is at the far tail end of the curve. A normal Overton window should line up with this bell curve so that the middle standard deviations are clearly in and then it gets more dicey towards the ends. I would define can culture as when a social group with minority views imposes their own narrower Overton window on society as a whole and imposes the sanctions reserved for those at the extreme ends of the distribution on those actually residing well within the normal distribution for society as a whole but outside the new narrower Overton window.
I don't think it's possible to work towards a definition of "cancel culture" or what is acceptable to "cancel" in the first place. At the same time, I agree with the fundamental premise that some things get "canceled" that are obviously ridiculous to cancel. I would describe myself as "a leftist" but I still have strong negative feelings towards a lot of other leftists (and vice versa - no one hates leftists more than leftists).
Yet when you ask...
> "If I support a Republican’s right to criticize transgender people, will he support my right to say I wish the Trump assassin hadn’t missed?"
...to me the obvious answer is "no". And it would be "no" if the parties and positions here were flipped as well. A Republican isn't interested in defending the generalized concept of free speech against cancellation, they're interested in their political aims. From the perspective of a Republican pundit (I'm going to specify "pundit" here because to avoid arguing about the minutiae of the median GOP voter) trans people are a social negative and Trump is a social positive. The idea that they wouldn't want you to say Trump should've been shot isn't incoherent, it's to be expected. Under what circumstance would a Republican *want* people to go around encouraging people to shoot the de facto leader of their party? And if not "want" specifically, still why should they expected to grit their teeth and bear with it?
Put it a different way, rhetoric influences behavior. If it didn't, then the whole purpose of speech and argument is moot (including both this blog and this comment). We don't want people to go around saying "Let's round up everyone with a skin tone darker than my own and lynch them". We don't want this so badly that it's actually illegal to do this. Most people agree this is fairly reasonable. But what if it wasn't illegal? In that situation, would we just throw up our arms and go "Well, it's not a definition based on law, so we can't really cancel the guy"? No, of course not lol.
Let's move to something slightly more ambiguous. To my knowledge, Zelenskyy has banned pro-Russian parties from operating in Ukraine. This is, very obviously, a huge step over what we would recognize as free speech. This would more or less be the equivalent to signing a bill saying that you can't have positive words about China and work in politics. At the same time though... it's kind of hard for me to care. I recognize - abstractly - that this could set bad precedent and lead to authoritarian crackdowns if or when the war ends. At the same time, though, obviously they're going to take this measure? If you're in a war against an invading nation, it serves no good to have people go around arguing that maybe you should just give up. It's also plausible (likely, even) that these actors aren't good faith to begin with.
When Germany decided after World War 2 to ban Nazi language and symbology, were they wrong for this? Would the world be better if Germany still allowed Nazis to roam about? Would *other nations* accept that, much less us as people?
And, to be clear, I don't think "post-2014" works as well. If anything this definition makes me think "cancel culture" as a term is like... faddish and kind of ridiculous. Socrates was poisoned for the crime of being kind of obnoxious. Witch trials would burn people at the stake for being a bit weird. The Bill of Rights didn't guarantee the freedom to practice religion out of reflexive practice, it did this because the prior standard was to persecute people over these matters. If anything, the effects of "cancellation" have significantly decreased over time. The only difference now is that whereas before you only had one village to worry about, the internet allows contact with any village in the world.
Of course, when we look back at those examples (Socrates, witch trials, religious persecution) we basically all agree "that was bad". These are examples of "cancellation" that most people would say shouldn't happen, so you're probably thinking it seems kind of weird to present these in the context of an argument that "cancellation kind of isn't solvable, and you might not want to solve it anyways". I think the most obvious difference between those examples and what we see with the Nazis, or Zelenskyy, or your examples involving pedophilia, is that witches weren't real and obviously weren't actually doing anything wrong.
In a world where witches did actually exist and were consorting with the devil to spread evil, it would be entirely rational to "have witch hunts". Much less "get them fired by Tweeting a lot". The pedophilia podcaster is probably less evil than the actual devil, but their words still contain meaning and are being purposed towards ends you and I would both define as "pretty bad, actually". Should we then go burn down their house and slaughter their family? Well, no. But petitioning Spotify to take down "the pedophile podcast" seems fair?
Let's move this to an actual example. How many people do you think refused the COVID-19 vaccine due to vaccine misinformation? Of these people, how many do you think contracted COVID-19 and died? Of that proportion, how many do you think had their views on this strongly influenced by Joe Rogan, or Ron DeSantis?
I'm sure if you had a supercomputer with all the information in the universe crunching those numbers the answer would be "at least one". I'm also sure that you would probably agree that this is removed *enough* that it's kind of hard to draw a line from "Joe Rogan spreads vaccine misinformation" to "Joe Rogan is responsible for deaths, and this becomes a simple trolley problem". If you butterfly effect things out far enough you could probably argue any given action no matter how innocuous is going to be responsible for gazillions of deaths (or lives saved!) down the line.
But at the same time, pretending like "vaccine misinformation" and "deaths due to COVID" are totally unrelated is obviously foolish. Same with "anti-trans hatred" and "crimes against the trans community". The Christchurch shooting was factually influenced by specific people (they left a manifesto!). Some of these people are a bit confusing and some of these people aren't. If someone shot up a church and named *me* in their manifesto I'd be a bit confused. But I'd be confused because I haven't been using my millions large political platform to fearmonger about immigrants or the LGBT community or government oppression for several years.
If someone bombs an abortion clinic and says "I did this because Mike Johnson convinced me abortion is murder and compared it to the Holocaust, and so it was entirely rational to destroy the mass-baby-murder-building", Mike Johnson kind of doesn't get to go "Huh? What? Woah, that's crazy. There's like, no cultural impetus at all to take violent action against the Holocaust. Actually in my truest hearts of hearts I solely support peaceful protest against the Holocaust". He might just be stupid, or might genuinely simultaneously hold the beliefs that "abortion = genocide" and "abortion should only be spoken against, not acted against". But it should be fairly obvious to anyone that a movement that regularly compares abortion to *the worst crime imaginable* is going to spark random terrorism against abortion.
**For that matter, if you're speaking often about how you wished the Trump shooter hadn't missed, then you kinda gotta own up to it if it happens again and they don't!**
Is the solution here "No one should ever encourage or imply violence against anyone or anything"? Well, no. Again, we imprison people for encouraging violence too enthusiastically. That in itself is a form of violence.
I'm sure to you the difference between the abortion terrorist and your comments about Trump is something like "Well, abortion isn't murder, I consider that position ridiculous, and I think Trump is evil and that his life is a large negative, such that my axiomatic priors against murder don't weigh so heavily against his life". This is also something people would say about, like, Hitler or Osama Bin Laden or Margaret Thatcher (I'm sure people posting "Ding dong the witch is dead" would not have cared if she'd been killed by an assassin instead). I think the difficulty is that you seem to frame this as an issue to be resolved, but I don't think it is.
You are correct that abortion isn't murder. You are also correct that Trump is, broadly, "evil". It's bad to call for stochastic terrorism against abortion clinics because abortion clinics are good. It's not so bad against Trump because Trump is not good. It's bad for a company to hire someone who regularly Tweets drawings of trans wojaks being hanged because this is disgusting and negative behavior.*
Essentially, I think what you want is less a definition of "cancellation" and more a definition of "what is appropriate to punish". The answer to this (unhelpfully) is "bad things" and the answer to "what level of punishment" is "a proportional one". A guy who casually says a female manager is bossy (which she may well be) doesn't really deserve to be fired and blacklisted, no. At the same time, I also don't really have a lot of sympathy for Candace Owens or Milo Yiannopoulos. At a certain level of badditude you start to fall into the "I love the Dark Lord" camp.
* Even from a purely merit based point of view, I would doubt the credentials of someone who counts themselves as a big Matt Walsh fan for basically the same reason I'd doubt the credentials of a biologist who's a YEC. Many conservative positions (as you've lined out in your alt-right FAQ) aren't just incidentally bad, they're often abysmally stupid and indicative of the person holding them either being equally stupid or proportionally bad faith. Being "left" or "a liberal" doesn't inoculate you against the same levels of stupid (see: the Atlantic article you discuss), but it also doesn't require it as a prerequisite.
Uhhh, I'm not sure if we're disagreeing. I feel like most or at least many people agree the US' crackdowns against Vietnam protestors were bad (I don't see anyone defending the Kent State shooting, at least). I'm not sure if we'd feel the same if the Kent State shooting was instead against KKK members burning crosses on the courtyard. We see the government opposition to the Vietnam protests as shameful because the protestors were right - it is bad to invade other countries.
I'm only pointing out it was NOT against the law to speak out for or against the Vietnam war in the US. But Jane Fonda was ostracized for it. Some people come down on Fonda's side, and others against. But you're saying that if your country is at war, "it serves no good" if people oppose the war and say you should stop it.
We kind of have something similar going on now, with people protesting the war in Gaza. Whether you think the war is justified or not isn't the question here. The question is whether anyone has the right to SAY whether the war is justified.
For both Gaza and Vietnam, one can say whatever one wants, except for cancel culture consequences.
Not being familiar with the Kent State shootings, I read up on it a bit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings). I conclude this wasn't actually a free speech issue. Those opposed to the war were not demonstrating peacefully, but were looting and rioting, and so the National Guard was brought in in addition to the full police force. I'm not saying the killings were morally correct, but I do understand the decision to use deadly force, under the circumstances, and the demonstrators should have recognized what response their actions may provoke.
"But you're saying that if your country is at war, "it serves no good" if people oppose the war and say you should stop it."
No, I'm not.
The key difference between Ukraine and Vietnam is one you've already pointed out - we were invading Vietnam, Ukraine is not invading Russia (well, they kinda are now I guess? I'm not keeping up).
If Ukraine "gives up", they don't just abstractly lose a war and some national prestige. Their country gets annexed, lol. Their government will cease to exist and their people will become Russian. They're fighting a defensive war against an aggressor. The US was fighting an offensive war against people who were no threat to us.
If someone in Nazi Germany was protesting against Hitler, I would consider this good. It would be in Hitler's best interests to oppose this protestor, but I would consider him doing so bad. Conversely, if Churchill cracked down on pro-Nazi protestors who were saying the blitzkriegs are fake and it's totally safe to go outside when the weird airplanes are overhead I would consider this both in his best interests and also a moral good (it may be grey long term but obviously saves lives in the moment).
I don't care that the Kent State protestors were rioting and I think that's tangential. My point there is that most people agree "It was bad for them to be shot" and they think this because "They were correct in opposing the Vietnam war". If they were instead protesting in favor of segregation I don't think people would care as much because segregation is wrong and "war is bad" is good.
Yes, Ukraine is in an existential war. What if some Ukrainian thinks being taken over by Russia is just what the doctor ordered? He isn't allowed to voice that opinion.
Free speech means being allowed to voice your OPINION, whether that it is good for your country to be taken over by another country, that the Nazis are doing evil, or that supporting the war in Vietnam is bad. It does NOT mean that telling lies like it's totally safe to go outside and get bombed, or that the Sandy Hook murders never happened (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting_conspiracy_theories#Alex_Jones_claims).
Ukraine doesn't have free speech like they do in the US. But if they did, it is wrong to forbid pro-Russian parties.
"It does NOT mean that telling lies like it's totally safe to go outside and get bombed, or that the Sandy Hook murders never happened"
Why not? What if they happened to sincerely believe it was safe to go outside during a bombing run? Or what if they knew they'd die, but thought this was preferable?
Suppose you could prove, objectively, that pro-Russian parties existing in Ukraine would lead to a 100% chance of them losing the war. Is the right for these parties to exist really so valuable that Ukraine should cede its existence for it? (The answer is "no")
Even from a position of maximizing free speech, there is a limit. It's not like Russia is *more free* than Ukraine is. If they win the war, there will be *less* free speech in the world. Germany very much not wanting a Fourth Reich isn't just because they happen to not like Nazis now, it's also because a Fourth Reich will be drastically less free than "a society that tolerates everything except the Reich".
Again, the only common thread between all these examples (real or hypothetical) is just that we support free speech when it's in service of good outcomes and don't when it isn't. The "appropriate punishment" for expressing an unsupported opinion varies depending on context.
I wasn't aware anything bad happened to Jane Fonda. I looked up that period on wikipedia, in a section on the 70s titled "Widespread success and acclaim", and found this quote from her:
"The suggestion is that because of my actions against the war my career had been destroyed ... But the truth is that my career, far from being destroyed after the war, flourished with a vigor it had not previously enjoyed."
I've seen people defend the Kent State shootings based on the fact that student had been rioting for days beforehand. But you have a point that more people supported those shootings back then while the war was going on, and nowadays few remember the rioting at all, just that the war was bad.
This is kind of more tangential (and I couldn't fit it in the main comment anyways), but I also feel like there's a level of tacticality that has to be accounted for here as well.
In the 2000s and 2010s, I feel like "born this way" was a common argument in favor of gay rights. The analogy being something like "If you wouldn't judge a black guy for the circumstances of his birth, then you shouldn't judge me either". It also counters the idea of conversion therapy at the same time. Win/win on both fronts.
I also don't think this is true. I think most humans have the potential to be attracted to most anything, and are socialized early on to only be attracted to the opposite gender. Per-generation, the proportion of gay people has increased dramatically over the last 100 years. I can't see genetics explaining this more convincingly than just... "Gen Z was raised in a particularly queer environment, and Millenials similarly but less so by half, Boomers the same, extending into the past".
Of course, a natural extension of this is that conversion therapy probably works. It's called "heteronormativity". Don't want your kid to be gay? Raise them in an environment where only the opposite gender is attractive. Works 95% of the time.
At the same time, being queer myself, I could empathize with someone who'd get mad at someone else publishing studies about this in the 90s or 2000s. Does that mean they shouldn't be allowed to do so? Uhhh, ehhhh... I value truth too much to say "yes, these studies should be retracted". But I would also understand if the person producing the studies decided to not share the results until a more appropriate time for basically the same reason nuclear schematics were classified but on a smaller scale. The Prime Directive but, like, for gay people.
Extending this, if someone was putting out these studies with the express purpose of promoting bigotry against the queer community I would think they should be "cancelled" for *that* if not their work (though I'd also like to think I'm principled enough that I would feel annoyed if this cancellation extended to assuming their work must be incorrect - I feel this a lot when I see articles discussing old scientists who addend all their statements with "by the way, they supported eugenics").
I'm a male. At no point in my life has the thought of having sex with another human male been appealing to me. I have seen MtF transgendered people that look feminine and attractive to me... but would that sense of attractiveness disappear the moment I saw their penis, assuming they still have one? It's definitely possible.
Basically, I feel that I'm inherently sexually attracted to at least feminine appearance and probably to female-bodied people in general. So I could imagine a gay man being the same as me here, just in the opposite direction - being sexually attracted to at least masculine appearance and male-bodied people in general.
Also, if socialization is key, I wonder why someone like Oscar Wilde was gay. If sexuality is perfectly fluid, I don't get why someone like Wilde would 100% choose to be gay in a time and place when that would make things much worse for him.
Now, don't get me wrong. I do think human sexuality is somewhat fluid, but more in degree than direction. In other words, I think that the intensity of a person's sexual desires and the intricacies of a person's fetishes are influenced by the surrounding culture. In a society with no porn, people probably do think much less about sex than they do in a society with loads of easily available porn. And what's popular in porn can influence people's fetishes.
But the basic direction of human sexuality - the type of person you're sexually attracted to - that seems more inherent to me.
I mean, the very idea of having a preferred type, in the "he's my type/she's my type" sense, strongly suggests that, going above and beyond even sexual orientation itself.
I don't think sexual attraction can be forced. I know I couldn't force it. The most I can easily imagine is the following - It might be possible to deeply love someone that you're NOT sexually attracted to, but out of a desire to make that person happy (and/or have children with them) you can manage to have non-traumatic sex with them. My suspicion is that gay men who manage to have successful marriages with straight women are likely like this.
I think "types" are even more obviously social than "sexuality" itself. People express racial types, for example, but it's hard to imagine a gene coding for "I have an unusual fetish for stereotypical Japanese housewives". JohnofE has a very strong (exclusive?) preference for the characters from the Angry Beavers TV show. It's basically impossible for this to be a genetic result, unless he's a mutant in a very specific way.
I, personally, remember being definitely straight. There was quite a long period where I would've registered as "biologically straight" if I took one of those penile arousal tests that Scott brings up in the article on accusing people of not "really" being bisexual. I also distinctly remember deciding to become bisexual and just doing so. Maybe you can explain this by saying I'm just particularly unique, or that genetically I was always bisexual and heteronormative behaviors strongly repressed this, or that Pavlov conditioning can be strong enough in some people to overcome "genetic straightness". The particular reasoning doesn't really matter, there's at least sample size 1 here lol.
Personally I feel like I'm probably just more introspective and directed than other people. I also try to adjust my "type" to be more inclusive, to varying success. I assume others can do the same if they were particularly driven. I distinctly remember gaining new desires after my first few sexual encounters, at least. To give evidence for the Pavlov hypothesis, this probably at least indicates that "whereas before I thought X was gross I now think X is really hot" can be explained by "X was paired with sex despite initial apprehension". What would make gender different?
Anyways, I don't think genes mean nothing with regards to sexuality, to answer your question about Oscar (though, at the same time... did this appear in any other family member?). I just think that most humans are "genetically"
1) Instinctually driven towards sex (I remember finding sex unexplainably interesting even as a young child and I know my peers felt the same, to a degree that personally went beyond "looking at stuff my parents told me not to")
2) Driven towards the opposite gender, but this system is very easily hijacked (you can probably easily imagine a culture where "masturbation" is described as a "self-sexuality" and is stigmatized. Some people will be aroused just by the miming of masturbation, so clearly this goes beyond rote mechanical stimulation, "masturbation" is in-itself an action that can be "made attractive")
"I also try to adjust my "type" to be more inclusive, to varying success."
I suppose I just don't understand this type of thinking. I mean, it's YOUR life, it's YOUR preferences. Why do they have to be "inclusive"? I guess I don't get the moral imperative here.
I guess at a practical level there is such a thing as being overly picky for one's own good... but limiting yourself to 50% of all adults doesn't strike me as such a case of being overly picky for one's own good.
Perhaps I have a personal bias here since having no sexual preferences at all feels boring to me. Having personal preferences, of any sort, makes life more interesting in my view. Personally, I also think it can be a good way to achieve greater self-discovery.
There's no moral imperative, I suppose. I guess there's kind of a vague moral imperative in that like... if a guy said "I will only date blonde haired, blue eyed women" I'd raise a few eyebrows at him (to be consistent I would and have done the same towards Black Hebrew Israelites making the same claim about black women). But like, that's kind of far from my current (or ever) situation.
I do it for my own benefit and as a kind of challenge, I guess. I will say - I think you're being optimistic in your estimation of your potential dating pool. I don't think you'd date 50% of people just because you're straight. I doubt I'd date 50% of people and on-paper my dating pool is "everyone".
Assuming you're like, ~25ish and would only date people downwards 5 years of yourself and upwards 10 years then that alone restricts you to ~11% of the population. From there, how many personal preferences do you have? Say you prefer women who aren't obese (not a rare preference). That knocks off another ~20%, so now you're at about 9% of people. Say you're also "a gamer" and that, while it's not a dealbreaker, you're a lot more likely to date a woman who is also "a gamer" (which we'll arbitrarily define as "owns a console"). Okay, well, that's only ~42% of women, so now that 9% is slightly less than 4%. Let's also say you want a woman who shares your political party. That divides that number in half again. So on so forth.
Of course there's issues with all these numbers. Primarily I'm just Googling them and assuming even distributions (in reality I imagine more than 42% of women aged 20-35 "own consoles", probably?). But you get my point, lol.
That said, no, I'm not doing this out of practicality either. I can date just fine without being more inclusive. I just like the ability to control my feelings.
C. S. Lewis made that point about witch hunts. Willmoore Kendall argued that modern fans of Socrates fail to understand his actual philosophy and why he willingly drank the hemlock rather than going into exile after he was sentenced to death:
> We don't want people to go around saying "Let's round up everyone with a skin tone darker than my own and lynch them". We don't want this so badly that it's actually illegal to do this.
Wrong, this is exactly the sort of speech protected by the 1st Amendment. There are exceptions if it incites or proposes imminent violence. But the general concept of advocating violence against certain groups IS free speech.
Re: Zelenskyy, his administration also banned Russian language use/teaching in various spaces and Russian Orthodox religious groups. This isn't so much a speech issue as a crackdown on a minority outgroup. Which began as a result of the Crimea invasion, years before he was even elected. This is a great example of why free speech should be protected, because of course whoever controls the levers of power will use it to crush those they see as the outgroup.
Your argument on protesting war is quite bad. Just change the "public good" of the state at wartime to something right-coded that a leftist like you would disagree with. "It serves no good for these gays to go around saying they should be able to have marriage. Marriage is a social technology for men and women to coordinate resources towards stable child rearing, which homosexuals obviously aren't doing. People arguing otherwise are just acting in bad faith anyway." Who gets to decide what the public good is? There's a conflict between individual rights (like having access to official state sanction for marriage) and nebulous concepts like public good (customs for successfully raising children). Ukrainian individuals have as much right to protest their government conscripting them into a meat grinder as gays did to say they should have access to marriage. Again, free speech is the better ideal because it preserves the rights of individuals over the power of the state.
> ...is that witches weren't real and obviously weren't actually doing anything wrong.
This is just a post-facto excuse; the people at the time might have actually believed the people they burned were witches. Or Nazis might have believed the Jews were actually conspiring to sabotage the Fatherland for their own greedy ends. I hope the segue about why persecuting people is ok if they are believed to be evil enough is not a good idea is sufficiently obvious that I don't have to spell it out.
Re: Covid misinformation, yet again who decides what is misinformation? The same people who said masks were useless then flipped and started advocating for their mandated use? The NIH, which receives royalties on patents they approve and doesn't reveal this information publicly, creating a huge conflict of interest? If a doctor looks at certain studies of Ivermectin and determines it's useful for treating covid, is that misinformation? Any deliberate censoring requires people to agree on what is not true, which a) is inevitably abused by whoever ends up being the censor, and b) no one agrees on. The best way out of this is a free exchange of information by everyone. Tyrannizing people for what *you* perceive as their own good is not doing anyone a favor. People are autonomous and have the absolute right to determine what is or isn't in their own interest.
Re: Abortion, this... is actually completely consistent? If you genuinely believe a fetus has the same rights as a person, or a soul or what have you, abortion is undeniably murder. The abortion body count in the US is far worse than the Holocaust and bombing abortion clinics would be on the same moral level as fighting Nazis or killing Hitler. We might not share that belief, but that doesn't mean people who do should be estopped from trying to convince us otherwise. I also think it's stupid to conflate rhetoric calling something evil with people directing violence against that thing. People are individuals responsible for their own actions. The guy who firebombs the abortion clinic is responsible, not the podcaster who says abortion is murder. Just like the guy who tried to shoot Trump is responsible, not the journalists who compared him to Hitler. I don't think it's unreasonable to simultaneously have strong public disagreements about right and wrong while also condemning violence against those we think are wrong.
> It's bad to call for stochastic terrorism against abortion clinics because abortion clinics are good. It's not so bad against Trump because Trump is not good.
This is really the crux of your argument; things you think are bad are fine to cancel and things you think are good should not be cancelled. If everyone agreed with you, this would be a great system and you would win an honorary Philosopher's Barrel from Diogenes. Back in reality, people disagree about important facets of good and evil all the time. Sadly there aren't evil people doing evil deeds somewhere that we can all agree to go cancel. Rather, the line dividing good and evil pierces through the heart of every man, to paraphrase Solzhenitsyn.
That is why free speech and protecting individual rights are so important and intertwined. Any attempt to centrally determine what is or is not acceptable speech is going to infringe on the rights of whoever is the outgroup. That is why protecting the speech of hateful, disgusting people is most important of all; the more outgroup they are, the more protection from the masses they need. If you think "evil" people shouldn't have the same rights, you are a useful idiot who is propping up tyranny. You're doing the same thing as the mob burning witches or the Nazis shooting Jews, but you think it's fine because you defined evil as your outgroup.
> Many conservative positions (as you've lined out in your alt-right FAQ) aren't just incidentally bad, they're often abysmally stupid and indicative of the person holding them either being equally stupid or proportionally bad faith. Being "left" or "a liberal" doesn't inoculate you against the same levels of stupid (see: the Atlantic article you discuss), but it also doesn't require it as a prerequisite.
And the proof is in the pudding. Surely conservatives don't disagree with leftists because they have a different perspective. No, it's because they are stupid and evil! You can stand everything except the outgroup, indeed.
> Wrong, this is exactly the sort of speech protected by the 1st Amendment. There are exceptions if it incites or proposes imminent violence.
...You basically say "violent speech is protected" and then say "unless it incites violence", which seems kind of contradictory. Obviously the point of violent speech is to incite violence. Maybe this is enforced as much as it should be, but that is what it is.
Fact is, speech is legally bounded. You can't go around saying "I want to kill the President" without getting a visit from the Secret Service. If you assault a black person, and then scream the n-word several times, this will be charged as a hate crime and you'll receive harsher punishment. The content of your speech *made the crime worse* even if materially it changed not at all.
> Re: Zelenskyy, his administration also banned Russian language use/teaching in various spaces
Like I said in the post and other comments - I don't keep up with Ukraine. The nuances of Ukraine's policies aren't really relevant to me. It wasn't even relevant to me whether or not it was factually true that Zelenskyy banned pro-Russian parties. It's just an example leading to some Thoughtful Questions™ that happens to be (as far as I know) "real". You can replace it with any other equivalent. In fact, I'll do so right now.
Trump has said that he would be "a dictator" if elected, and that you'd "never need to vote again". Assume some super duper powerful AI crunched the math on this, and determined that Trump meant this is the worst possible way (he will dismantle democracy) and that he'll actually succeed in this goal if elected. Should Trump be allowed to run, legally?
If you value democracy, which you should, then the answer is "no". Trump's right to free speech does not override the democratic process nation wide. His freedom would impose on the freedom of others, and thus has to be curtailed.
> It serves no good for these gays to go around saying they should be able to have marriage. Marriage is a social technology for men and women to coordinate resources towards stable child rearing
I think this is kind of a ridiculous counter-example and I don't think it makes any sense or has any grounding beyond "in both situations a guy doesn't like what another guy is doing".
From a "freedom maximizing" perspective it makes complete sense to prevent people from running on the promise that they'll ban gay marriage and doesn't make sense to do the opposite. There's no contradiction here. And before you say "what about their freedom to be homophobic" - they're totally free to *think* that. They're also free to get over themselves.
> This is just a post-facto excuse; the people at the time might have actually believed the people they burned were witches. [...] I hope the segue about why persecuting people is ok if they are believed to be evil enough is not a good idea is sufficiently obvious that I don't have to spell it out.
Yes, and witch hunters and Nazis were stupid, irrational, and bad faith. If you took my or your current mental state (I.E., how smart we are and how we process evidence) and transported us back to the Salem Witch Trials, we'd just say "Yeah, I don't think the devil is real. There's no evidence for it". And we'd be correct!*
I don't think this "progressive for the time but not by today" kind of mythology is like... real? Someone who has a consistent moral framework would have the same framework in any context. Sure, we don't see people from 500 BC gunning for trans rights, but they also didn't have the concept of "being transgender". I'm completely confident that someone like the Buddha would be "pro-trans rights" if they were alive today and would've been "anti-Salem" if they were alive then, and I similarly believe that in 500 years my terminology might seem out of date or quaint but that my opinions will "age well".
> Re: Covid misinformation, yet again who decides what is misinformation?
Okay, nevermind, you are also bad faith lol. Everything from here down is just like, exercise and sunk cost fallacy.
> Re: Abortion, this... is actually completely consistent?
Yes, I didn't say the abortion terrorist had inconsistent views. I said they're dumb, irrational, and I'm now also clarifying that they oppose freedom in the form of bodily liberty. Ergo, they shouldn't be allowed to do those things. I would, conversely, support someone who's very pro-abortion because they are pro-liberty and pro-freedom and yadda yadda.
> This is really the crux of your argument; things you think are bad are fine to cancel and things you think are good should not be cancelled.
Yes, I also think this is what you believe as well. Again, this is just one of those meaningless arguments people make to look like they're saying something. You obviously have ideas that you think should be "cancelled". You're definitely fine if murderers are arrested, or if people causing property damage are fined, or if pedophiles are fired from their jobs at the preschool. Literally no person alive believes literally all opinions and actions are fair game. Everyone has boundaries, some people are just more or less honest and clear about them.
* Just to stick with this, if Salem actually happened to have very convincing evidence of witchcraft and devilry that would pass the eye of even an ardent skeptic, then the extent to which we can morally judge the Salem trials is significantly diminished. The only reason we see it as obviously ridiculous *now* is because we understand the idea of the supernatural as a whole to be obviously ridiculous. This isn't just because we have more "world knowledge" though (I don't understand why 9/11 conspiracy arguments are wrong, I just know they are), it's because we just have different values and are better at collating experiences.
it's not "cancel culture." the issue is more the idea you cannot compromise with an ideological opponent and must destroy them in general. this leads to things like cancelling but also the trend to demonize others as subhuman or to always holding extreme positions.
essentially its culture war, emphasis on war, but no geneva conventions.
the answer is to get people to live and let live in general, and that you cannot win at the cost of another; you have to both give up things to live in peace. there needs to be de-escalation of things and more walls honestly.
What on Earth was the part about ‘shocking rats’? Are these rats alive or dead when the shocks are administered? If they’re alive, why the hell would that be considered uneventful and to be ignored until the paedophilia part is mentioned!?
If that’s true then it’s a lot less bad than electric shocks, to be sure. But casting fear into creatures that we’ve captured (and are naturally helpless/at our mercy and never consented to such experiments of course) is still a very dark and twisted thing to do.
If the difference capturing humans and casting fear into them for experiments is considered a horror of autocratic regimes in WWII and then doing the same to a different (admittedly less complex, but still emotional) mammal is considered so uncontroversial that it can be listed in a hypothetical like the above article as something that no one would find morally repugnant, then our culture is a disturbingly dark and twisted one indeed!
I'll take a moment to plug James Tiptree, Jr.'s 1976 novelette, "The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats", based somewhat on personal experience.
Thank you for linking me that. That was not an easy read, but I read it all. I will also take a further look at the author who seems to be a highly notable individual based on the bits I’ve learned so far.
Tiptree is almost never an easy read, but IMO worth it. Here another one, a favorite of mine, that's among the most difficult for me to sell people on:
I’m only addressing one very limited type of American canceling: contacting the employer of someone who isn’t a public figure in an effort to get them fired for saying something outside of work that isn’t work-related. That’s it.
1. Is this ever defensible?
2. Should this be legislated against?
If, for example, Bob recognizes his Amazon delivery guy from a profile pic on a post about how said delivery guy thinks pedophilia is god’s will, is it wrong for Bob to email Amazon to let them know? Is it wrong for Bob to let his neighbors know what he discovered and suggest they take action, too?
And if you think the post in question falls under speech that directly incites unlawful actions or poses a real threat to public safety, then shouldn’t Bob be contacting law enforcement instead of the guy’s employer?
Man, maybe I'm naive, but every one of these seemed extremely obvious. Cancelling a subscription because your don't like the content, or firing someone who is causing you problems is always fine. _Calling_ for someone to be fired purely for something they have said, when you are not required to interact with them in any way, _that_ is the bad kind of cancelling.
I think your A series of hypotheticals is wrong. You present it as a linear scale, but it seems to be that you are making changes on two axes: offensiveness and response. So if you picture this as a four quadrant diagram, your hypotheticals make a rough line from the corner of "very offensive, mild response" to "pretty offensive, extreme response". The perpendicular diagonal is one where the response is proportional to the offensiveness. Trying to divide your diagonal means drawing a bright line through the middle of proportional responses, which isn't going to work. If a podcast is platforming pedophiles and one person cancels their subscription and another cancels AND emails the podcast host, the distinction is quibbling.
Instead, the bad areas are the disproportionate responses: extreme responses to mild behavior (the most common cancel culture situation) and mild responses to extreme behavior (which is people trying to raise awareness of an issue the public is apathetic about.) I think you understate people's response to A1, and many would be okay with a much stronger response. Regardless, this clarifies why it's hard to find a line through the middle, because that's exactly the place where most people will agree.
I don't think this helps on the overall question, but it may help you find a better way to ask it.
Cancelling your own personal subscription never counts. You aren't obligated to be a subscriber (or even non-paying reader) of any media outlet. But the "does not get bullet" principle applies to seeking to punish an outlet for publishing content you object to in other ways (with arguing against it not constituting a punishment).
I think I would go a little different direction from Lukianoff. To my mind, when people talk about "cancel culture", they are usually talking about:
1.) A coordinated campaign of social pressure
2.) ...that is designed to coerce or influence institutions which are popularly perceived as non-ideological
3.) ...to sanction, ostracize or punish someone for speech or perceived viewpoint
4.) ...on a topic for which there is not overwhelming social agreement in support of the position of the cancellers
More than anything else, I think it's the "minority with disproportionate institutional power declares a controversial debate ended in their favor by fiat" that raises people's hackles. That's why questions around pedophilia don't set off people's intuitive alarms about "cancel culture", but questions about trans women in sports do. People broadly (and correctly) perceive questions around pedophilia to be settled and done, while the latter is still a live controversy in the Overton window.
There's a general "chill out about speech" and "let's not be afraid to crack down on speech" knob but deep down almost no one cares about that knob. The natural coalitions are "let's chill about [X kinds of speech I'm cool with] and crack down on [Y kinds of speech I oppose]." Those coalitions hold 95% of people.
I am strongly pro cancel culture until such a definition is arrived at, because:
I observe the people that are strongly anti cancel culture were the tradition canceling as hard as they could up until mass social media allowed anyone outside their clique to wield the axe.
I observe that they selectively reserve their anger for certain violations of the norm. Blue haired SJW fired for Blue haired opinions? Silence. Race Realist fired for Race Realist opinions? Society is collapsing.
I observe that the prescribed solution to the problem is to reestablish the pre-social media norm, where the people that get to choose who is cancelled and who is not get to vote with their money instead of voting with their shitposts.
Thus: I think anyone who says they are against cancel culture but can't provide a definition ala The above post is actually just against getting cancelled themselves.
Once a definition arrives that actually sets lines that aren't "Give me back the stick I was beating you with!" I will switch to being the biggest freeze peach advocate you have ever seen.
"I observe the people that are strongly anti cancel culture were the tradition canceling as hard as they could up until mass social media allowed anyone outside their clique to wield the axe."
Wrong.
I used to be a liberal back when Christian Fundamentalists were the ones doing the cancelling, and I switched to become a conservative when progressives became the one who took up the Cancel Culture mantle.
I will always oppose authoritarian control over speech and work to get those people eliminated no matter which political "side" is doing the cancelling
Two things: the idea of switching your entire package of beliefs, including on personal liberty because one side's mass movement (not even the institutions, just the proles!) became more cencorious to be kinda silly, such that I don't believe you.
And two: both sides have picked up the axe and are swinging like crazy. The right canceles everyone they can for any reason, it's only the most libertarian fringe on both sides that even pretends to think it's a bad idea.
Different people have different priorities. My priority is free speech, to the point that I am willing to radicalize people and engage in stochastic violence in support of this ideal. I've even written a Substack post about it.
You may find my priorities silly, but that's OK: it just means that we're political enemies. I don't subscribe to your "BOTH SIDES" ideology either and I find it equally silly. One side is always worse when it comes to censorship and they need to be punished until they repent and change their behavior.
To inject more hypos...I'm always curious how outright lies should be treated in the cancel culture framework.
You *probably* have a constitutionally protected right to tell lies, under the first amendment, provided you don't use those lies to rip anyone off, obstruct justice, and a few other things. This case is an example:
So what about an employee that (at home, after work) posts online under their own name about how they're a distinguished medal of honor winner. When someone calls them out, the employee claims that they were awarded the medal *in secret*, so there's no record of it, and declines to speak further.
To me, this claim seems completely inseparable from a lot of "weird unpopular" beliefs, such as a belief that the 2020 election was stolen, a belief that lizards secretly control the world, and a belief that christ is coming back next weekend to punish divorcees and sexual degenerates. Indeed, many people accuse weird-unpopular-beliefs-holders of holding those beliefs for pretexual reasons. Should the pretextual nature of the belief factor in?
it seems true as a general proposition that an employer wouldn't want to hire or retain a dishonest employee...I can think of few qualities more material to the job...also an outright lie, plainly admitted, contributes little to the marketplace of ideas or the freedom of conscience...but it's hard to separate unpopular beliefs from outright lies!
"Stolen valour" is a thing, going back decades, happened in Britain as well as the USA, and can be proven or disproven by "did this person serve in the armed forces during a conflict, and were they awarded medals for service?"
The pope may declare cardinals 'in pectore', but I've yet to hear about "I got a medal but it was all hush-hush". Indeed, we can look it up to see that such a claim would be false:
"Are there classified or "secret" Medal of Honor awards?
No. There are no classified or “secret” Medal of Honor awards.
Presentations of the Medal of Honor follow President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1905 Executive Order stating that “the presentation of a Medal of Honor … will always be made with formal and impressive ceremonial.” They are always presented publicly.
In addition, all citations for the Medal, describing to whom and why it is being awarded, are officially published in the General Orders of the associated service branch. These General Orders are freely available to the public and all service members."
That's something that can be, more or less, decided on a "it's right or it's wrong", clear basis.
Stolen elections are murkier, but should be amenable to the same kind of investigation to find out the truth.
Lizard people and the Second Coming are not the same kind of claims.
You can lie your little heart out, but if you lie about factual matters that are amenable to investigation, you can be called on that, and I don't think there's a First Amendment right about lying per se.
It *might* not do any harm to falsely claim you were a Marine and were awarded the Medal of Honor. But suppose he falsely claimed to be a doctor and performed medical procedures? Would we say that was okay, even if none of the patients suffered harm (the procedures were minor and they recovered)? I don't think so. And claiming to be what you are not was intended, in some way, to gain an advantage for this man, be it to claim a good reputation he was not entitled to, or to advance his career on the Board of Directors by making him sound more impressive and capable than he was.
My take is that canceling is not good or bad as a rule, but as a function of quantity. In small quantities, it can pro-socially bound the most offensive content away from polite discourse. In high quantities, it creates a chilling effect that prevents the exploration of unpopular but potentially valuable ideas.
The central challenge is that it is very difficult to draw the boundary between what is allowable and what is too offensive. IMO, it would be better to draw a relative rather than absolute boundary.
I've always appreciated this about the Athenian process of ostracism. In this process, there was an annual vote held about whether or not to hold an ostracism. If the vote passed, there would be an ostracism two months later, where citizens could vote to ostracize anyone, and then whoever received the most votes would be exiled (or nobody, if a quorum isn't reached). This has a few nice properties. First, as a formalized process, it channels the desire for cancellation into a more deliberative route than mob action, which allows a chance to think more carefully and less reactively about a potential cancellation. Second, it sets a relative rather than absolute boundary on acceptability. In order to be ostracized, it's not sufficient to just be offensive, one has to be the most offensive person that year. This naturally keeps the process constrained to just the most egregious cases, without having to define exactly what is too offensive and what isn't.
Imagine, for example, the reduction in toxicity in going from "I demand that X is fired from their job immediately, and while we're at it let's get A,B,C, and D too!" to "I'm going to vote for X to get fired at the next ostracism!". Of course, the exact process of Athenian ostracism doesn't scale well to our society. But I think that the underlying principles of deliberation and relative rather than absolute boundaries are worth revisiting.
> all the side papers they write are trying to establish that pedophilia is good for children, and that victims who say they’re unhappy about it are just lying.
Pedophilia doesn't have victims; child sexual assault has victims. When a gay man rapes another gay man, do you blame this on homosexuality?
And here we go! Leonard may be trying his best to get a conversation started, but this is precisely the kind of response here that prejudiced, stick-in-the-mud types like me react badly to, and that the pro-Minor Attracted Persons lobby has to overcome.
Not gonna happen with me, I'm stating from the start.
"When a gay man rapes a gay man..." and what about if a gay man rapes a boy? That gay man only likes boys, the younger the better? I may not blame the homosexuality, I damn well am going to blame the paedophilia, because if you can have sex with adults (and many paedophiles do just that to get access to the children of their sexual partners) but you choose to have sex with children, or you prefer sex with children, that has damn-all to do with "I'm gay or I'm straight" and all to do with "I'm a paedophile".
Paedophilia *does* have victims, and the hair-splitting about child sexual assault is only because they haven't had the opportunity to do it yet, or lack the courage to do so.
But why worry about all these arbitrary principles and edge cases? Coming to a consensus for what "cancel culture" is isn't going to magically stop things like the whole NYT incident from happening again. You admitted it yourself: what you truly want is revenge. Revenge against the people who willingly try to degrade, rot, corrupt our society for their own selfish ends. Revenge against the people who tried to ruin your life. And when justice is finally served, you will have earned the ultimate prize: peace of mind.
Only one side, one candidate, can offer this justice. Remember that.
This reminds me of my old (non-serious) argument that rape is OK, because we wouldn't kill a 25-year-old, or a 24.75-year-old, all the way back to a -0.75-year-old, and to preventing sperm from coming into contact with eggs. We draw lines, they may be arbitrary, but part of what makes a culture is people agreeing on what the lines should be, or at least agreeing on meta-lines for figuring out lines. If we can't agree, are we really a culture, a community, anything that can co-exist without violence?
On a tangent, the common law process was pretty good at resolving to something reasonable after a few hundred years. Maybe AI can help us speed it up to a point where someone with ADHD, or our news cycle, doesn't mind waiting.
> I got angrier than I’ve ever gotten at anything in the media. I’m still so mad I’m not sure I’ll ever link an Atlantic article on ACX again, and I have trouble staying civil when I encounter people who work for the Atlantic.
Oof. That sounds familiar. :-(
> I think of myself as, at the very least, in a strong coalition with everyone who believes that people shouldn’t be fired from their job for speech that they made outside of their job.
Really, *everyone*? ;-) Surely there's some moral monster, perhaps with pro-pedophilic views, or even an *Atlantic* subscriber, whom you'd kick out of the coalition because they're so utterly repugnant that the mere non-act of "not killing them on sight" is enough to cause all right-minded people to shun both you and your nascent coalition? Some sort of woke fascist mega-Hitler who wants to genocide all other humans and clone himself a billion times to create a perfect society without inequity?
I have a mild intuition that the root of a lot of this is a failure to decouple, plus the increasing salience of ideological strife. Everything is political, everything is harm, nothing can be put aside, nothing can be allowed to pass without judgement.
Similar problems arise around what counts as reasonable firings. If a truck driver gets criticized for thinking the earth is flat and is fired for this, is that cancel culture and/or unethical? Seems like it. What if it were an astronomer? Then this is directly impacting their job performance. If we can't fire them for that, we'd going to get a lot of incompetent astronomers. What if they're someone who needs to exhibit good general-purpose judgement about what's true, like a judge, politician, or journalist? Is it ok to interpret someone having one egregiously false belief as evidence that they can't be trusted on other topics too? What if they work in HR for the astronomy department, and their belief that the Earth is flat means no one else there likes or trusts them, so they're unable to do their job?
Does it matter whether the person making the firing decision discovered this fact about their employee on their own with no public involvement, vs. them only making the decision because a mob pressured them into it? What if they only found out because of a mob, but they legitimately believe this is bad enough that they would have fired that person no matter how they found out, meaning that the mob was causally involved but didn't pressure the company into it?
A personal decision to unsubscribe (i.e., not pay for) a thing is never, in itself, cancellation, so A1-A6 definitely don't count. A7 merely adds the simple expression of an opinion, so not cancellation. A8-A9 add public shaming, which may or may not be bad behavior, but isn't cancellation when the action urged is merely personal unsubscription. A11-A12 are, literally, attempts to get the podcast deplatformed. That's precisely the meaning of cancellation.
I don't see the B examples as worth wading through, as they badly conflate the question "Is this bad behavior?" with the question "Is this cancellation?" These are not the same question! I can imagine examples of all four combinations of answers!
The very extremely dumb thing about the back and forth of right/left cancel culture and justifying it by "they did it to us" is THERE IS NO "THEY". The people you are cancelling are almost assuredly not the same people who did the cancelling in the past.
Take the home depot example. People justifying that with how the "left" cancelled people in the past are stupid, because unless you can find a direct example of that same person supporting or doing the same thing to someone else, the overwhelming odds are that they DONT support "cancelling" people.
When you start talking about "the other side" or "left" or "right" or "they" you've already lost the plot. These are just vague labels applied to millions of people with the same brush. Matt Yglesias has a great article about how the parties (DNC/RND) are "empty" and that there is no "Democrats" to call up on the phone and get a unified answer. There is a general sense of direction, but that is driven by a collection of unique opinions that blend together in a way that vaguely groups together in a cluster that is somewhat distinct from the same cluster on the "republican" side. The "left" or "right" is that issue multiplied by 1000x.
"Oh you voted democrat once and share some of their opinions? Okay then you're guilty of the worst infractions of the most radical people that ALSO voted for the same democrat" is how people act and it's ridiculous. People need to step back and recognize that these vague labels for groups are made up of individual people, and often don't have strong ties or might not even associate themselves with that group.
The Home Depot thing was definitely wrong. Complaining on the social media site that 'hey, wishing for an assassination attempt to succeed is violating the terms of use here" is one thing. Looking the person up, going to their place of employment, hassling them over their online views which have nothing to do with their job, and trying to get them fired is not acceptable.
If she was at work wearing an "I wish the shooter hadn't missed" T-shirt and was engaging customers and colleagues in "isn't it a shame Trump survived?", sure, complain about that. But when she's doing her job and expressing her private opinions outside of work, don't be that kind of dickhead to go and hunt her down and harass her.
Cancel Culture is female shunning writ-large. The proof is that men don't do it to other men.
Shunning can work for a time, before the shunned person realizes that living well is the best revenge. And that living well attracts the people you'd want to be around anyway.
When enough people go through that process, the screamers will be relegated to their back-bench position as a vocal and ignored minority.
A3, A4: I guess unsubscribing or even advocating for other people to unsubscribe is OK? They are actively promoting a view you consider strongly unethical and this is a majority of their activity. Your action is just a direct stopping of supporting them in this effort. It's not like you are refusing to sell them a bread or something.
A5, A6: You are bigot. Seriously, "platforming an abhorrent viewpoint I disagree with" is a good thing and we need a more of it.
A7, A8: As long as these are followups to A3, A4, I consider them ok. In the case of A5, A6, you are still a bigot.
A9: You are just evil person. Crime of association or wrong-think is simply abhorrent. No matter how abhorrent the wrong ideas are.
A10: Depends. If Spotify aims to be an un-opinionated neutral platform, then this is clearly wrong. If Spotify is a small niche platform carefully selecting views they promote and this is contrary to them, then this is completely ok.
> My thesis was this: (1) any productive discussion of cancel culture needs a workable definition of it, (2) any principled discussion of cancel culture must consider the free speech interests of everyone involved, not just the “first speaker,” and (3) any useful discussion of cancel culture needs specific action items — articulable things to do or not to do in order to advance “free speech culture.”
> “cancel culture” is when speech is met with a response that, in my opinion, is very disproportionate. Perhaps that sounds cynical, and I could certainly give you a Justice-Breyer-seven-factor balancing test, but that’s what this discussion boils down to: just as we constantly debate norms of what speech is socially acceptable, we debate norms about what responses to speech are socially acceptable.
and
> I believe that “cancel culture” exists — that is, I believe that some responses to speech are disproportionate and outside norms of decency, and I think the culture sometimes encourages such responses.
It's a subjective definition, sure, but he explores facets of cancel culture that I'd not heard anyone mention before. In particular, he brings up the "first speaker problem," which is
> a focus on the freedom and feelings of whoever started talking to the exclusion of the freedom and feelings of whoever is responding. … The First Speaker Problem is a categorical error. It treats its focus — the First Speaker — as being in a different category than people responding, and ignores the fact that the First Speaker is almost certainly responding to someone else’s speech. It assumes, without evidence, that the First Speaker’s speech somehow promotes open discourse and isn’t itself “disproportionate” — in other words it utterly fails to aim the norms-based analysis at the First Speaker’s speech.
Not saying any of this settles the question, but offers an orthogonal approach.
A9: We're finally approaching something that might be an edge case, but no
Warthog: No
A11: Yes
A12: Yes
B1: If you do, it's not cancel culture
B2: If you do, it's not cancel culture
B3: If you do, it's not cancel culture
B4: If you do, it's not cancel culture
B5: If you do, it's not cancel culture
C1: If you do, it's not cancel culture
C2: (There's an entire Screwtape monologue about how Hell is glorious noise) None of that is cancel culture.
C2A: Still not cancel culture
Cancel culture is actually really simple, and has two forms:
1) Boyo works at [FACTORY]. Boyo posts [CONTROVERSIAL THING] on X. Screecher sees boyo's post, and wants to punish him, so Screecher reposts Boyo's comment with the comment "Please let [FACTORY] know that you think boyo is terrible and should be fired." [FACTORY] is then inundated with a co-ordinated harassment campaign and fires boyo not because he deserves it, but to satisfy the mob.
2) [BRAND] advertises everywhere, to reach every audience, including on [WEBCAST]. Smaller, competing [PROGRAM] wants to harm [WEBCAST] for ideological reasons, so [PROGRAM] keeps mentioning that [BRAND] advertises on [WEBCAST] and calling [BRAND] will hurt [WEBCAST]. [BRAND] is then inundated with a co-ordinated harassment campaign and cancels advertising on [WEBCAST] not because they deserve it, but to satisfy the mob.
Note that, with slight variation, #2 can be applied to public speakers, commentators, politicians, etc.
The whole idea of cancel culture is to leverage the target's associations and force them to cut ties with the target through co-ordinated harassment campaigns in indirect retaliation for their speech. Because it's a mob, there's no individual making repeated communications to fall afoul of harassment laws, but the net effect is that the targets feel that the cost of keeping the tie is greater than cutting it. The government uses Operation Chokepoint programs in the same way.
Progressives can't hurt Ben Shapiro directly - he's already built his life around the premise that they will try to hurt him and foreclosed all avenues. But Ben Shapiro buys groceries, eats at restaurants, and has advertisers. The latter are the easiest target, but making the association known is the entire point, but I remember instances where people got banned from things like restaurants expressly because of mob action. So, you attack the people who associate with Ben Shapiro until they shun him. Now you've inflicted harm indirectly, and canceled Shapiro.
Your problem, Scott, is that you failed to include malicious actors into your assessment. You assume everyone is reacting honestly, and the whole point of cancel culture is that they aren't. They're acting maliciously.
The fallacy you are engaging in here is that in order to be either reasonable, or effective, in opposing a disagreeable social or cultural phenomenon, you need to be able to define it in a formal and legalistic way such that any objective observer would and can recognize whether each and every instance is or is not an example of the phenomenon. That is simply not true, nor is it possible in any real world. "Law", at its best, tries to do this, but, inevitably, fails. Again, not because "law" is "bad", or even flawed, but because it is just not possible. Think of a law - any law. If one is honest with oneself, one can come up with a scenario in which applying the law is either ambiguous, or leads to a result the vast majority would think was "wrong", or both. So, amend the law to accommodate for that scenario. Then repeat. And repeat. And repeat. It never ends. Because it CAN never end. A "pretty good" definition of the disagreeable phenomenon, amounts to, in practice, a REALLY good definition of the phenomenon. It can be improved upon, and it likely will be, and will be again. But it will never be perfect, and failing to act because any iteration remains flawed amounts to classic "paralysis by analysis", and is not helpful. That's what your "I agree that this is a good first step, but I’m worried about more detailed edge cases" does, in practical effect. Lukianoff's definition is good enough to serve as a jumping off point for an opposition to Cancel Culture, and I would suspect anyone who wanted to stand on doing nothing, until the definition was somehow "perfected", of not really agreeing in the first place with the premise of Cancel Culture being worth opposing. That would be a defensible position (though not one I share), but it should be stated forthrightly, rather than hiding behind the quibble that the definition is not "good enough" - if it is acknowledged that the definition is at least "pretty good."
I could go on at some length on a second line of response, but this is already too long. So, for brevity sake, just this: Since we would not be doing "law" in simply stating opposition to "cancel culture" and discouraging it - since we would not be finding anyone guilty/not guilty in a binary - ambiguity or insufficiency of definition is not even, really, a flaw. It allows nuance in discussion, and I think you've actually illustrated THAT quite well here, even if it was not precisely what you meant to demonstrate.
Good post. I agree that Lukianoff's definition is good enough for now.
That being said, I also think Scott's mental exercises can be somewhat helpful in people knowing what their own personal lines are when it comes to cancel culture.
It doesn't make sense to have a definition of cancel culture that leaves out that it was and still is a radically left-wing phenomenon. People were not getting cancelled because they said "I like pedophilia." They were getting fired because they expressed sentiments that, until two minutes ago, were widely shared beliefs! They were getting fired because they said things like "I believe there are only two genders" and "we shouldn't chemically castrate children." That meaningfully separates the phenomenon of cancel culture from other things which resemble punishing people for what they say.
Not for "stop the genocide" or even "free Palestine" chants. Just for those pro Palestinian chants that suggest ethnic cleansing or terrorism against civilians. I personally think that the line should be somewhere around "inciting to violence on the land that does the arresting, or against its civilians" or at least at more explicit incitement, but let's also not pretend "globalizing the intifada" is an innocent pro Palestinian chant
"I’m still so mad I’m not sure I’ll ever link an Atlantic article on ACX again, and I have trouble staying civil when I encounter people who work for the Atlantic. This isn’t out of some well-thought-out political strategy, just that it would personally warm my heart if the Atlantic failed as a business and everyone associated with it died of starvation. Probably this is dysfunctional and I should get over it eventually."
I'm more interested in this emotional response than I am in the cancel culture question.
Are there other people out there who have this reaction to newspapers publishing stupid articles, people leaving dodgy comments on internet forums, etc? Like, you read one thing that seems so offensively stupid to you as to be dangerous and everyone associated with it becomes permanently poisoned in your mind, to the degree that you vaguely want the people who published the journal appeared in to die, even years later? This is radically alien to my experience of the world, but a lot of things would make more sense if it were a common response.
In some ways, this is more mild than what Scott says. But in other ways, it's more far-reaching.
During the Bush and Obama administrations, I used to watch a lot of political shows on the cable networks. I watched a good bit of CNN. I also would read a decent number of newspaper articles about politics. I found it good and informative.
But after Trump fully entered the political area in 2015... much of this became very tedious and tiresome to watch for me. What I once found decently diverse in viewpoints and opinions quickly hardened into firm anti-Trump and pro-Trump camps. Political commentary became very predictable and very polarized, at least from my perspective. So I turned away from it as much as possible.
Not too long after I started reading various people on Substack. This blog, Matthew Yglesias, Jesse Singal, Freddie DeBoer, a few others. It was very refreshing to once again encounter truly diverse political commentary.
If someone I'm friends with wants my take on a NY Times article or a recent clip from a political TV show, I'll try to accommodate them, but I genuinely find it hard to take after enjoying what Substack has to offer.
To a significant degree, I tend to dislike modern non-independent journalists, I have to admit. I think Freddie DeBoer's criticisms of the modern journalism industry are very accurate, and I do resent many modern journalists just being glorified mouthpieces for one of the two major political parties. Sure, journalists always had party preferences but they seemed less overwhelming before; it seemed like they previously where more willing to diverge from their preferred party on an issue or two. And the fact that some modern journalists are simultaneously political activists is borderline abhorrent to me, undermining the very credibility of journalism itself imo. Being perfectly objective is impossible of course, but how can someone possible cover a contentious issue with even a smidgen of even-handedness if they're a political activists for one of the groups mentioned in an article? It would be like trusting a Jeff Bezos-wrote article on Amazon, or an Elon Musk-wrote article on SpaceX.
By "truly diverse political commentary" do you mean two guys with very similar views on everything (Yglesias and Singal, who for the record are also overwhelmingly the kind of politics takes-writer who I read and sympathize with*), and another writer who theoretically has quite radically different views, but mostly just pushes the same sort of upper-middle class, vaguely bohemian pro-science, secular, skeptical anti-mindless attacks on white men, anti-woke, anti-conservative viewpoint, in the writing by them that their fans actually like?
*I'm much woker than Singal on trans issues, but I don't think he deserves anything like the level of grief he has gotten from trans activists. The main issue I have with him on this isn't his *own* views, but that he combines hypersensitivity to woke bad takes on this issues, with a lack of similar repulsion towards gender critical people who, unlike him, clearly are (in my opinon!) bigoted against trans people.
Not quite to the same extent, but one left-leaning columnist that I had long respected for presenting alternate views well, lost me when he penned a column denouncing the concept of civility on the grounds that the outgroup was unworthy of civility and would never reform if they weren't regularly subject to punitive uncivil behavior. Now, whenever I see his byline, I just quietly say "Fuck off, [redacted]", and move on. I haven't unsubscribed to his publication yet, but it wouldn't take much I think.
And then there's Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I've discussed before.
The really annoying ones are two others who were just slightly less offensive and much more usefully informative when not being offensive, so that I still find it worthwhile to hold my nose and read them.
I'm no expert on cancel culture but most examples in this post deal with public speaking and (broadly defined) press, which I think is not the right "magisterium" to consider. A podcast or the Atlantic have explicitly decided to make their existence dependent on how people respond to the facts and opinions they publish. It's perfectly normal that if the Atlantic begins publishing something that most people don't like, those people will stop paying the Atlantic and it may even go out of business. Same with a podcast, even if it's not a full-time job for the hosts. Moreover, it's normal for people to exchange opinions on which products to buy, and the Atlantic is just another product; to me, there's little difference between posting "cancel your subscriptions to this podcast because they invited a pedophile" and posting "stop going to this pizza place because they just gave me a bad case of salmonella". But it's a fact of their profession, not an example of cancel culture.
I fully agree with the grad student example -- publishing research papers is not the same kind of public speaking and should not obey the same laws. But I think an even more central example would be somebody with a job totally unrelated to both the press and the subject matter (a math professor, a plumber, a startup CTO) publishing controversial opinions in his personal social media and then facing the unexpected consequences from his employer.
FWIW, I considered this when I sent my own message to nytimes in your defense. I asked myself, am I doing cancel culture?
I threatened boycott, but my proposed remedy was not that they fire the author, it was that they use your alias (or dont run the paper). In this way I was attacking content, but not the person behind it, and I think thats an important distinction when considering edge cases and part of the language in the definition above.
I do understand that attacking enough content or exclusively attacking the content created by one person might add up to the same, but was comfortable in the context I sent my message that I was not doing that.
While I think the problem is intractably messy and leads into political conflict that can't be settled by argument, I must throw in that, whatever the solution, you Americans must do your unmost to protect freedom of speech and restore it's prestige.
In my home Australia there was once a cultural unity where there were few groups the government felt the need to censor. We refused to ban our communist party back in the day. Now with the disappearance of cohesion it's a pure matter of elite consensus in the captial cities, a whole University manufactured class, and there's been virtually no resistance. Any public discourse on freedom of speech is isolated and a larp. We simply don't have legal freedom of speech. Major public officials recently advised parents to report problematic children to our FBI.
So much to say I advise from across the Pacific that you try to retain fundamental freedom of speech. The alternative exists and it's probably going to destroy Australia.
Two things missing from Lukianoff's definition, and I think from your attempt to refine it, is that "cancellation" in the current sense is done by third parties, and that it is done collectively.
If Bob is part of the target audience, fandom, or customer base of whatever Alice is peddling, and Alice offends Bob in some way, Bob deciding not to be a part of this any more is nothing special, that's just the normal sort of voluntary social or economic interaction that free societies have been doing since forever. It's when Eve, who was never going to listen to anything Alice said in the first place, is offended when she notices that Alice is finding an appreciative audience in like-minded Charlie and so decides to have Alice fired/deplatformed/swatted/whatever so Charlie can't listen to her any more, that we get into the realm of cancellation.
There's potentially still an edge case if Bob, who was once an Alice fan but has been sufficiently offended to no longer be a part of her fanbase, tries to bring others into the Campaign to Shut Up Alice. Certainly we don't mean to impose a vow of silence on anyone in that situation. Bob is going to mention it to his friends when they invite him to the next Alice concert, and that's fine. But at some point, it stops being fine.
There are many ways for that to go badly, not all of which would qualify as "cancellation" in the sense we mean. The ones that do cross over into cancellation territory, are the ones that meet the second condition - collective action. It becomes "cancellation" only when many people take part, and especially when their reason for taking part is not their personal distaste for Alice (who they'd maybe never heard of before) but because they can see that in this fifteen-minute infamy window, that's what all the cool people are doing and what they might lose status for not doing.
By this standard, nothing one person does alone can count as "cancellation", which I think is mostly appropriate. But it counts as "attempted cancellation" if they're trying to mobilize a mass movement by e.g. telling all their friends they need to retweet "#MakeAliceShutUp" or be themselves deemed unrighteous. If that works, then it's cancellation by the mob.
So, A1-A8 are not cancellation, A9 and A10 are maybe edge cases of attempted cancellation, and A11 is straight-up cancellation once that movement gets started.
B1 and B2 probably attempted cancellation by the "journalists who have started to take notice", not by the researcher who is not himself a third party nor trying to bring third parties into the mix.
B3 becomes cancellation when the article is written and has the expected effect, but whether it's attempted cancellation by the researcher depends on his motive for writing the article.
I feel like a lot of the practical impact of social media mobbing is about convincing third-parties (your employer, your school, etc.) that there is a huge group of people super mad about some terrible thing you said, and thus that it is urgent that they respond right now or they're just as bad as whatever they accuse you of doing. Inducing a panic reaction is how they get their effect.
And the reality is that this very seldom makes sense. It seems like most social media mobs are like 99% bored people who like being assholes online who will forget the whole thing in a week if nobody panics or responds much. Even when there are a lot of people actually mad at you, that means like a few thousand people spread across the globe, most of whom would not be mad enough at you to, say, write a paper letter of complaint, buy a stamp, and mail it. In almost all cases, if your employer/school/whatever just ignores this, it will blow over. If some too-online people say they're going to organize a boycott, it will probably not be visible to you in your sales numbers.
If the normal response to outraged posts on social media, emails, calls, etc from randos demanding they fire such-and-so for whatever they said on Twitter was "Thank you for your comments, we will look into this matter, though of course any personnel decisions we make will be confidential and taken only after careful deliberation," followed by basically ignoring the randos yelling at them, cancel culture would not be much of a problem.
The most obvious problem with the definition is that "campaigns to get people punished for speech" includes approximately all political attack ads ever.
People choosing to vote for the other candidate in the election that you are a candidate in, falls far short of "punished". There is no individual right to election to political office.
There's no "right" to a job or to be a popular TV star or whatever either. And yet we get mad when people amplify your statements in an attempt to influence that, just like every political attack ad either.
You might not *like* that the definition is overly broad, but that doesn't change the fact that it *is* overly broad.
There's no "right" to a job or to be a popular TV star or whatever either. And yet we get mad when people amplify your statements in an attempt to influence that, just like every political attack ad either.
You might not *like* that the definition is overly broad, but that doesn't change the fact that it *is* overly broad.
There's no "right" to a job or to be a popular TV star or whatever either. And yet we get mad when people amplify your statements in an attempt to influence that, just like every political attack ad either.
You might not *like* that the definition is overly broad, but that doesn't change the fact that it *is* overly broad.
Fair. One difference is though that by running for public office you are inherently deciding to join the fray of public issues/topics/policy choices. The degree of that differs with the office of course, or should anyway -- but it's never zero and for some offices it fully comes with the gig.
So that seems fundamentally different than other jobs, and certainly for me influences my reaction to this sort of dust-up.
I don't think inserting the rights framing is helpful. The difference is that the rules of the game are codified and institutionalized as electoral politics, whereas cancel culture is much fuzzier and outcomes vary greatly. In fact, cancel culture is appealing to cancellers in part because it allows them to skirt around rights.
The difference is that the "cancelling" is institutionalized as democratic politics. The whole point of democracy is to let the mob cancel politicians, ie make them lose their jobs. Note the 'culture' part of 'cancel culture'. Culture explicitly refers to the vague "common sense" norms that everyone just knows. Institutionalized canceling is not culture. Penalties for law breaking are similarly not cancel culture, but different from losing an election in that the sanctions are harsher.
It is now fully bipartisan, sadly. Just as for generations mainstream conservatism practiced what we now call cancellation, and then the Left more recently took it up with energy and enthusiasm, now it is unironically mainstream on both ends of our political/cultural spectrum.
The Left has in recent years been better at it, though that "advantage" is now slipping. Now MAGA folks are equally-enthusiastic, if clumsy, cancellers. That shift at the grass-roots level (I have MAGA relatives) has been striking over the past say five years.
I think discussions on cancel culture focus too much on the cancel part and too little on the culture part - to be expected, since the resulting social sanction is more the spectacle. The culture during the post-WW2 cancelling was heavily influenced by the Cold War (against a left wing ideology), which gave conservatives the ability to overcome the left's dominance in culture (though academia was much less left-skewed than now). As the Cold War ended and communism ceased being the Great Satan, the left gained an advantage in cancelling through its predominance in culture. This coincided with the rise of the internet and social media, which made cancelling much easier. The right clued into this eventually. I don't think there's a "our side is more righteous" dimension of self-restraint; it's more about which side is capable of wielding the weapon at any given time.
On a related note, cancelling those breaching cultural norms has always been around but there are more objections to it now because the bar for being able to invoke it has been lowered greatly owing to far greater ease of mass communication. I'd suspect that the greater difficulty of cancelling in the past made it less outrageous. A contravention of norms would generally have to be more egregious to rally enough people against you. With social media, those amenable to cancelling only need a xitter account to incite the mob.
Elected politicians are exactly the subset of people whose expressed political beliefs and political actions are 100% relevant for their job, and a good basis for judging how they will perform in office. If the mechanic who works on my car is a socialist, who cares? If one of my state's senators is a socialist, that matters for their job.
You're missing the point. I'm not saying that cancelling politicians is bad, I'm saying it's a bad definition because it includes behavior that is generally accepted.
It feels like all the edge cases are about what type of mob rule culture we want to promote. The problem, in my opinion, is companies letting mobs decide whether or not they fire their employees. We have a simple solution for this when it comes to the law: the court system. The public can do all the letter writing campaigns they want about somebody accused of murder, but if their guilt isn’t proven beyond a reasonable doubt, that doesn’t matter.
I argued as early as 2021, on storied journalistic platforms like Facebook, that a norm of due process in company HR departments before firing or suspending people would stop cancel culture in its tracks, and it wouldn’t even have to be particularly good. You could still fire somebody for besmirching the company’s reputation. You’d just deliberate and consider whether the offense was Really bad for the company’s reputation. In the case of the direct pediphile stuff, maybe. For the guy at the college, with the pediphile papers, maybe. But probably not the guy with the “bossy” research.
In the real world what killed cancel culture were a few companies calling “twitter” mobs’ bluff.
I wouldn’t push too hard on creating norms against concerned citizens banding together, as that seems like protected speech. (I’d work on those algorithms feeding the outrage machine first.)
Everything up to A10 is onside to me. You as an individual are entitled to exercise your own discretion as you see fit. A11 crosses the line because you are now hoping to provoke a group response that is injurious to the target beyond anything you could achieve yourself.
B1: it’s your hire, and your call to re-hire/extend. B2 makes no difference on that principle. B3 you’re doing your job. B4 and B5 are again identical on principle…you are choosing to rehire, or not, according to your own moral compass. You are entitled to that.
C1: “she” is wrong. Signing a petition is not the same as cancelling. You’re asking for something that isn’t targeting someone else.
C2: some things set people off. Slow drivers in the fast lane is one such thing for me. You’re allowed. Save your money. Atlantic ain’t what it used to be anyway.
I vote for P3. The target is the publication. It exists to please subscribers. Subscribers can and should be able to exert influence…although this is what also creates silos….and why I try to read widely.
I don’t agree with Lukianoff invoking first amendment. As you said, that is meant to protect individual freedom of speech against government prohibition thereof. It does not extend to anything beyond government. However, the “spirit” of the first amendment (dare I say as I understand it within the auspices of classical liberalism) is to allow the competition of ideas and speech even when one might disagree with it….and I believe this is the principle that “cancel culture” contravenes. A university is allowed to invite or disinvite any speaker it chooses….nothing offside of 1a….but when it does so at the behest of a mob that lacks the intellectual capacity to debate a noxious idea and so chooses instead to merely prohibit it….that to me is the ugliness that cancel culture represents.
"A2: I subscribe to a podcast about 12th-century Siberian stamp collecting. Then it switches to promoting pedophilia full-time, so I cancel my subscription."
12th century Siberia had stamps lol?
And what do you mean "promoting"? Would advocating in favor of legalizing child sex dolls be considered promoting? What about advocating in favor of legalized cartoon/animated child porn?
A lot of people in the comments seem to be talking about "proportionate" vs. "disproportionate" punishments. I think part of the challenge here is that the dynamics of the internet and social media can turn proportionate responses into disproportionate ones.
Like, imagine someone says something that you take offense to in person. You'd be somewhat justified in saying "Fuck that, your opinion is bad and you should feel bad," even in front of other people. That's easy enough to shrug off and/or learn from.
But now take that to the internet, with tens of thousands of people saying similar things. Suddenly that weighs a lot heavier on the person receiving it, especially if other, formerly uninvolved people can see the angry crowd forming.
Obviously this doesn't cover all cases—there definitely are people that will go out of their way to harass people disproportionately, call their employers, etc.—but I think it plays a part in the dynamic.
"this felt like denying my right to exist in public"
Slightly off-topic, I've been getting annoyed at the use of "denying my/our right to exist" to describe any sort of inconvenience or being told "no". Even though I agree with your position here, I'm disappointed by your use of hyperbole that I've mainly seen from the far left. Indeed that phrase is often used to trigger a cancel mob against somebody the right to exist-er doesn't agree with. Yes, it's annoying to have people insist on being noisy, and tying any objection to racism is a stupid cheap shot, but nobody is denying your right to exist unless they are literally trying to kill you.
There's two meanings here? If I say "Scott is not allowed to go outside", that's denying his right to leave his house. But if I advocate for people to camp outside Scott's house with agonizer rayguns and shoot him if he leaves, that's also "denying his right to leave his house".
Even though I didn't take action myself, even though I didn't say he couldn't (and may in fact have have said the opposite, something like "Come on, Scott, I want you to leave your house"), I'm still affecting him. And that's not even a complete parallel, which would be something like saying "Scott is an evil Nazi for wanting to leave his house, and everyone should treat him like an evil Nazi if he does", while standing right next to the guy advocating for "punching Nazis".
Well, this post was pretty wild to read, for a perhaps unusual reason: I am a pedophile. I would never abuse a child, but I am sexually attracted to them. I can't change that fact about myself, and I'm not ashamed of the attraction since I behave morally. Moreover, I literally publish articles about pedophilia (anonymously), including a blog:
In fact, I've been censored (on Quora) for my writing.
I would go so far as to say that the taboo on even talking about pedophilia does great harm to society. It prevents research on better therapeutic methods to support non-offending pedophiles. It makes it extremely difficult to seek out support (from friends, from therapists, from anyone), which pushes pedophiles into social isolation - exactly where we do not want them. The taboo makes it impossible to discuss rationally what policies around pedophilia should be. For example, should I be allowed to look at purely fictional artwork that depicts children in sexual situations? Perhaps such victimless artwork makes pedophiles more likely to offend; perhaps it makes them less likely to offend. We don't know, because no one can fund the research to find out.
More open discussion might also, if you will encourage a slight dig, encourage people to distinguish between "pedophiles" (those with the attraction) and "child sexual abusers" (those who molest children).
In any case, if anyone believes that we should offer people who wake up at the age of 13 finding themselves attracted to younger children support as opposed to hatred, then that is a strong argument for free speech. Right now, if a kid in that situation goes to Google, what will they find? Websites talking about how bad they are, and perhaps a blog entry using them as the canonical example of unsupportable views. Nothing to guide them forward, or suggest a way to productively be a part of society.
If we had free speech that let them find something better, they would not be pushed to fringe spaces that encourage the worst behaviors, and we'd have a better approach for people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves attracted to children.
What if pedophilia is culturally transmitted? Then even the existence of people writing blogs about “my struggles with pedophilia” might help to create more pedophiles, kind of like the old meme about toaster fucking on the internet.
That's a fair question, although I don't know of any evidence for cultural transmission. (To me, this is another argument for the importance of real research.)
Thank you for the kind comment at the end! I appreciate it, even though I think my courage is minimal since I post anonymously. (Although I am out to a few friends.)
Okay, you say you are a moral paedophile. You don't feel ashamed about this, because you can't help it (born this way) and you don't act on your impulses (not a child abuser).
That being the case, here's a thought experiment in the same vein as the one about "if you could be changed to the opposite gender" one on here recently.
Supposing there were a way your sexual attraction to children could be removed, or changed to a sexual attraction to adults. Nothing else about you changes, you're the same body, same brain, same mind, same views and tastes on everything else, except you no longer find children sexually arousing.
Would you take that way? Would you make that change?
If not, why not? Once you answer that, then we can get on to your sly little "and besides, I'm one of the *good* ones" attempt to slide under the radar.
Here's a few more questions I'll ask.
(1) Regarding "you wake up at 13 and find you are attracted to younger children", how much younger are you willing to go? Ten? Six? One year old?
(2) Regarding "is it okay to look at art of imaginary child characters being fucked by imaginary adults", how young do you want to go? Ten years old? Six? One year old? After all, these are only imaginary characters, not real children.
(3) If society made it legal for adults to fuck six year olds, would you take the opportunity now that you can remain one of the "good ones" and not a child abuser, by having legal sex with the partner of your choice, just like everyone else? Or would you continue to not fuck children because you feel that, whatever *your* desires and attractions, it is not to the benefit of the child to be in such a relationship?
I'm asking all these because of how you phrased your appeal to the nation - oh, how can you be so cruel and condemnatory and maintain a taboo against people who never chose to feel this way, who are just 13 and like that 11 year old younger girl or boy? Who never did nothing? Who just want to look at porn of their preferred flavour like everyone else has the right to do?
And I'm also going to finish up with one question: now that you're not 13 anymore, how do you think we should deal with those who are not 13 and who still like 11 year olds in that way?
Please enlighten us knuckle draggers who still engage in taboos that persecute and punish innocent non-choosers of their sexuality who woke up at 13 and found themselves attracted to younger children:
"A now 37-year-old Tipperary man, who was 13 when he began sexually abusing the then four-year-old victim, was jailed for five years for the offences on Friday.
The accused man, who cannot be identified to protect the identity of the injured party, pleaded guilty to oral rape and sexual assault of the young man by inserting his fingers into his anus at the victim’s home on dates between 1999 and 2002. He has no relevant previous convictions.
The boy was between four and eight when he was abused by the accused in the bathroom of the young boy’s family home. The accused was aged between 13 and 17 during his offending.
In his victim impact statement, the now 28-year-old man told the court that the accused had taken his childhood and groomed him for his own sexual gratification. He outlined the adverse effects the abuse has had and continues to have on his personal life, education, and relationships."
Well, I apologize for striking a nerve by distinguishing actions and thoughts. I see that really got to you. I'm afraid my own tone is going to be a little caustic in reply, and I apologize because I don't really know if your anger is coming from somewhere else.
That said, I'm going to answer your questions seriously. There's real value in them despite the tone, and I suspect others will be genuinely interested.
> Supposing there were a way your sexual attraction to children could be removed, or changed to a sexual attraction to adults. Nothing else about you changes, you're the same body, same brain, same mind, same views and tastes on everything else, except you no longer find children sexually arousing.
> Would you take that way? Would you make that change?
This question is asked all the time on discussion boards with pedophiles. The answer for me is unambiguously yes: I would love to be attracted to adults instead of children. It would make my life infinitely easier, allow me to experience pleasurable sex, and take away one of the major threats to my life. If I can keep who I am otherwise, I would absolutely swap this attraction.
> (1) Regarding "you wake up at 13 and find you are attracted to younger children", how much younger are you willing to go? Ten? Six? One year old?
Are you asking about what ages I am attracted to? That's been fairly consistent, and I'm going to state it straight out, although I'm sure it will be unpleasant for people to read. I am attracted to boys, largely 8-12 years old (although with flexibility on either end). Something around puberty massively decreases my sexual attraction, and I don't understand exactly why.
> (2) Regarding "is it okay to look at art of imaginary child characters being fucked by imaginary adults", how young do you want to go? Ten years old? Six? One year old? After all, these are only imaginary characters, not real children.
I don't see a moral problem with artwork. I will look at what I find sexually arousing, which is those in the range I shared above. I don't have a problem with others looking at younger ages; it feels irrelevant to me.
> (3) If society made it legal for adults to fuck six year olds, would you take the opportunity now that you can remain one of the "good ones" and not a child abuser, by having legal sex with the partner of your choice, just like everyone else? Or would you continue to not fuck children because you feel that, whatever *your* desires and attractions, it is not to the benefit of the child to be in such a relationship?
This is an extremely complex hypothetical. Why did society change the legal rule? Was there actual research and thoughtfulness, or did it just happen due to some legal loophole? If the latter, I don't think anything would change: the reason I don't offend now is morality, not worries about legal implications. If the former, I'd want to better understand the reasoning for the change and make my own decision about what is in the best interests of the child. Based on my priors right now, I would strongly expect that I would still not have sex with children because it would harm them.
> I'm asking all these because of how you phrased your appeal to the nation - oh, how can you be so cruel and condemnatory and maintain a taboo against people who never chose to feel this way, who are just 13 and like that 11 year old younger girl or boy? Who never did nothing? Who just want to look at porn of their preferred flavour like everyone else has the right to do?
Here is where I want to call you out: it feels like you're asking this because you disagree with me and don't see the value to my points, and because you insist on conflating attraction and abuse. In fact, it's a rather stunning example that feels straight out of Scott's post.
What you represented wasn't my argument at all. I was discussing the value of free speech, and I gave as a reason how there should be therapy offered to people who are attracted to children and that they should feel less isolated and hated. (Not just for their own sake as human beings, but also because creating a group of people who must isolate and "circle the wagons" is a great way to encourage child sexual abuse. In the history of the world, kicking groups of people out of society has not been a great way to develop pro-social behavior.) I also claimed that more research on this topic would be beneficial.
> And I'm also going to finish up with one question: now that you're not 13 anymore, how do you think we should deal with those who are not 13 and who still like 11 year olds in that way?
Well, you actually "finished up" by ignoring my point that abusing and sexual desire are not the same. But putting that aside.
Unfortunately, there has not been much research on how to support 13-year-olds, as I've mentioned repeatedly, so I don't claim to have the answer. What I do think is:
- We should destigmatize so that they can actually talk to their parents about what's going on.
- They should have access to therapy that is supportive of their needs.
- They should be encouraged to keep exploring and work on developing older-age attractions, because for many people that age it really does seem to be transitory, and early sexual experiences may help drive later attractions. (Again, we don't know. This was not the case for me: I had no sexual experiences or thoughts, really, before puberty; it came out of nowhere. However, I have heard this for other people.)
With that, I'm afraid that my own life won't allow logging on here for a couple of weeks at least. Between friends visiting, work commitments, and some travel, I'll have to reply to any other comments when I can get the time and space to engage again. Just in case you decide to pre-emptively claim anything about my silence, since apparently not coming on here within ten hours to reply warrants a "Leonard never answered my question as to that." Although I still feel like you are taking my points in bad faith, I'm happy to reply when I return.
Thank you for answering the questions. I am pleased that you say you would like, if it were possible, to change your attractions.
I am also pleased about your honesty in who and what age you are attracted to.
I mainly agree with you that if this is discovered early on, there should be support and attempts to help overcome it. I fear, though, that all the displeasure about "conversion therapy" will hamper any such efforts to steer young people away from such attraction, as I doubt many therapists will want to run the risk of being smeared by "you're anti-gay! you're anti-trans!" if someone 'outs' them as "they're engaging in conversion therapy!"
I may indeed have come across as hostile, but that's because "the burned hand dreads the fire". Too many "I just want to ask for understanding" posts of a nature similar to yours *do* end up being "and in reality, what I want is it to be both legal and accepted that I can fuck 6 year olds".
Thank you, I do appreciate that! It's possible that we go around in different circles: I encounter many fewer people who actually think they should be allowed to fuck kids.
When I have talked to teenagers wrestling with this, my response has been: "go look at some adult porn, think about people your own age or older whom you find attractive." I've generally tried to encourage them to explore, not convert. I did see a psychologist once who tried to get me to masturbate to adult porn (I was by then an adult) and otherwise engage in something like conversion therapy, and I found it both unpleasant and unlikely to succeed. (Moreover, he recommended visualizing myself getting arrested with my life ruined whenever I thought about my fantasies, which seemed like it might lead to genuine long-term harm.) That's different from teenage exploring, though, and I've talked to teens who definitely realized later that they had more attraction to adults than they realized.
I'd be surprised if there are real fears around conversion therapy with pedophilia, but I'm certainly not an expert.
The other stupid thing about stigmatizing discussions about pedophilia is the conflating of every kinds of attraction to those under the legal age of consent. As if being sexually attracted to a 17 year old (ephebophilia) is some sort of deviancy or moral or biological failing.
I agree with the distinction, but unhappily it's often used in the same context as "trans people claiming intersex people as examples of biological sex not being simple binary", I see it most often in "Well I'm forty and I think hot 17 year olds are sexy, but why am I lumped in with those perverts who want to diddle 12 year olds?"
Because, dear 40 For Hot Chicks, the guys who want to diddle 12 year olds and 6 year olds use "it's a simple biological fact, men are attracted to young nubile teenage women, yet we treat being attracted to 16 and 17 year olds as equivalent to those being attracted to 12 and 14 year olds" as the fig leaf to cover "and this is why you should understand my orientation".
My point is that such an exception should be made (a 17 year old is not a 12 year old) but that the unhappy real world experience is that those who want it to be legal for 40 year old men to fuck 12 year old boys or girls will not come out of the blocks stating that, they'll try and soften up opinion with "why are ephebophiles conflated with paedophiles?" first.
And the next step then is "okay, if 17 is not too young, what about 16? After all, [this list of countries] has the age of consent set at 16. What about 15? [Quotes Romeo and Juliet laws]. We all agree that a 17 year old boy should not be branded for life as a dangerous sex offender merely because his girlfriend is 15, yes?"
And then step by step they try to get acceptance of "yes, that's a reasonable point" until they get you to "okay, why shouldn't 12 year olds - who are undergoing puberty after all - be considered capable of deciding if they wish to engage in loving relationships with adults? After all, in ancient Rome, that was the age girls got married!"
(Does anyone else remember our friend with the bee in his bonnet about child slavery, i.e. 15 year olds should be considered adults and given adult rights? He liked to quote the bit about age of Roman marriage for girls, and he had an entire side-fantasy build up around teenage forced sex, pregnancy, etc. when you linked to his personal site).
So yeah, I tend to quash with hobnailed boots any initial "DAE ephebophiles?" attempts, because my experience has been that generally these are not in good faith but are stalking horses.
This is a pretty terrible slippery slope argument. Replace pedophilia here with say homosexuality and you've got a pretty good mirror of the usual moral panics around LGBT ideology. Of the "We should keep gender dysphoria taboo otherwise transgender proponents are going to advocate for preteens undergoing bottom surgery" kind.
Besides, someone advocating to lower the age of consent to 16 - where it is in most of the places around the world - is an eminently sensible position to take. It's not that hard to draw a bright line somewhere and avoid falling off the slippery slope.
Thanks for the offer, but I'm not interested in subscribing to the Paedophile Information Exchange mailing list.
Have fun with the campaign on "all we want is it to be legal to fuck six year olds, what is so outrageous about this simple request to be treated with basic humanity".
I don't know if you're the same Leonard who started this conversation, probably not, but here's the thing: he was talking about prejudice and doing away with the taboo so that access to treatment would be easier to get, without the stigma. A large part of that will rely on persuading ordinary people to change their minds and fixed views.
I'm one of those with fixed views and you, Len, couldn't do it. You couldn't even stick within the parameters of what I said about "these are the exact arguments that *don't* convince me". All you had to do was say "yes, some bad actors abuse these efforts", but no. You had to go "slippery slope fallacy! lowering age of consent good!"
Well, if you or someone uses the *exact* arguments I say are *not* convincing to me, why then should I believe you or anyone else about "I am the very model of a moral kiddie-diddler, I would never even if I got the chance".
There's plenty of people *would* if they got the chance. So keep on keeping on trying to make Tiberius' minnows legal.
It is unfortunate that the term we use for "sexually attracted to minors/children" is also the term we use for "people who sexually assault kids".
The basic attraction probably should be studied more. I mean, what hope is there of reducing pedophilia (i.e. the basic attraction) if it's not carefully studied?
That being said, I get why people are very leery of going down this road. People have seen how much our society has changed over the last 50 years when it comes to our attitudes towards many other sexual matters, and so I think many are understandably fearful that if we start talking about pedophilia in a coolly detached academic way then... who knows? "Consenting adults" IS holding out pretty well so far. But it sometimes feels like the last sexual taboo...
These worries would probably be greatly lessened if we had two different terms - one for the sexual attraction itself, and one for sexually abusing kids. I'd suggest that "pedophile" is a term simply beyond changing, so perhaps a new term should be created JUST for the sexual attraction itself.
Do paedophiles *want* the basic attraction to be reduced? Leonard never answered my question as to that, and I got whale scratching its head with puzzlement over my screed.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and go "no more than the fighters for gay rights wanted to reduce homosexual attraction".
Homosexuality was traditionally seen as something people did, the sin was in the doing not the being, the law opposed the act - “sodomy” in all its forms including amongst heterosexuals.
So it should be for pedophillia - we can only condemn the act, and perhaps depictions if the act.
Cancel culture seems to me about morality. It has two unstated premises:
1) that every opinion or belief or political position has an objective moral value
2) that everyone must agree on these moral values, and hence on which opinions are right or wrong.
Most people hold a collection of opinions, some I agree with and some I don't. For the most part, I don't feel the need to assign them a moral score as a function of their views - and so I hardly ever need to express outrage at the opinions of others. Cancel culture seems to hone in on a particular opinion (sometimes expressed through a single tweet) and infer from that a judgement on the person as a whole. Approximately, a person's moral value equals that of their least moral opinion - possibly this could be a third premise for cancel culture?
It also seems necessary to point out that this is a mostly American phenomenon. Does anyone know why US culture has such a Puritanical obsession with the behaviours and even thoughts of others? (The obvious answer her is a cop-out: the Puritans have been dead for 300 years, and if you blame them you have to explain why no other group influenced US culture so overwhelmingly.)
My impression is that these examples only describe possible symptoms of cancel culture, and people reading them will give very different answers depending on how they imagine the actual situation & their experience with what real-world cancel culture looks like.
If you do A3-A5 and you tell everyone you meet about it and they all agree with you and do the same thing and also themselves spread the message, and this is all considered good and normal, that is nasty cancel culture. On the other hand, if you do A11-A12 but people on social media tell you to chill out, and spotify tosses your mail in the 'weirdo' bin, and your campaign fails, and for some reason people don't talk with you so much anymore, that's probably not cancel culture.
So I think you're looking at the wrong dimension. One individual's action isn't a culture.
Opposing "cancel culture" as such is mostly an attempt to make a content-neutral argument for something that is inherently a disagreement about content (small caveat to this at the end). There will always be positions you find dumb and damaging enough that you don't wish to participate in conversations or groups where you have to rehash them again.
Society as a whole is not truth-neutral. It is built on a median "consensus" view of the world (and has to be, in order to function). There are then opinions that are steadily further and further from this consensus. Each ring invites a certain level of toleration. Some of these views can be tolerated because they are not particularly damaging to the consensus, e.g. veganism is not the median consensus view but the consensus view is not violated by a few vegans argue that meat is murder. Average people engage in mild avoidance (or "cancellation") of vegan arguments (not reading vegan literature, complaining if vegans are too pushy about their views, not inviting them to barbecues), but they don't condemn them. In certain subsets of society, vegans are closer to the median consensus view and in these subsets of society, more space is made for them: e.g. offering vegan menu options at a potluck or making polite positive comments about how "I should probably be cutting back on the meat myself."
Other opinions are further from the consensus view - so much that they invite even stronger stigma. E.g. pedophilia, because the consensus view is that sexual abuse of children is evil and damaging to children's psyches. Again, like with veganism, there are subsets of society where pedophiles can create slightly more space for themselves, but generally they are given little room to operate or broadcast their views to others.
The position of various views in relation to the social consensus changes over time. E.g. once upon a time, the consensus view in the U.S.A. was that heterosexuality was the only way and that homosexuality was vile. Any attempt to argue that being gay was okay was promptly "canceled." Then people's views shifted to the idea that heterosexuality was normative but that homosexuality wasn't really hurting anybody. Homosexuality was openly tolerated as long as people didn't talk about it too much in mainstream settings. People who continued to condemn homosexuality were considered a little passe. Then the consensus view shifted again to the idea that all forms of sexuality were equally important. People who condemned homosexuality were met with grimaces and avoided.
Groups and people who condemned homosexuality consistently over the course of this transition are distressed. They have experienced something like a gradually increasing social ostracization and consequences to speaking out about their opinions. But the truth is: there was no morally-neutral shift towards "cancel culture." There was "cancel culture" before - they were just closer to the middle of the cultural consensus and now they are finding themselves far from it. The real argument is about the content of the disagreement: whether homosexuality is morally equal and how much it is hurting people to condemn it. Any attempt to appeal to "cancel culture" is really an attempt to create space for oneself without talking about the (unpopular) reason why that space has been lost.
Rather than talking about "cancel culture," it's much more productive to talk about the actual content at hand and participate in the consensus view-building project in good faith. Many people here hold views which a large part of the public finds repulsive. Your best bet is not to whine about cancel culture, but to make strong arguments for your position so that people are gradually convinced that certain opinions have enough evidence that they can't be completely written off. This in turn edges the social consensus back in your direction.
The best version of the anti-cancel culure argument is an argument that hearing bad ideas does not cause significant harm. This is what Lukianoff has been fairly successful at doing. This seems like a content-neutral argument, but it isn't. A big point gaining steam in the social consensus is that people suffer when their identities are derided. I agree with the basic version of this argument (and think people have basically always agreed with this). I think it definitely hurts people to be actively insulted for a trait that they did not choose, e.g. race or sexual orientation. But the argument has been significantly extended - both in terms of the number of ways one can disparage others and the degree of harm caused by very mild offenses. Lukianoff's argument (which has real content to it) has been to say that being exposed to some opposing opinion's about oneself is not as damaging as the social conensus is starting to think. In doing so, he made a good-faith contribution to the discussion and has helped budge the social consensus back in the other direction - so much so that Barack Obama has spoken out in favor of some of his ideas. But this isn't really an argument against any kind of broader "cancel culture" - just an argument about the degree of harm being not as big as previously thought. There is still no fixed definition.
Lukianoff’s definition is absurd. The problem, say, with cancelling JK Rowling isn’t that it’s wrong to cancel someone who “literally put trans lives in danger”. It’s that JK Rowling did not, in fact, put trans lives in danger, or came even remotely close to that.
One thing that gives cancel culture it's particular flavor is that the standards of acceptability change quickly. I believe conservatism has its own system of cancellation, but people could be relatively sure of what the boundaries were.
In my view, there's a very clear line between acting in accordance with your own views (good) and trying to persuade others to agree with them (fine), on the one hand, and trying to pressure those who DON'T agree with your views to support them, actively or tacitly, by suppressing their own (bad).
I think we're allowed to be politic, and by trying too much to be a-political, we're just in danger of being the suckers. It's ok to notice that the current Overton Window is too much towards cancel culture, and use it as a mental shortcut to define our positions: mostly anti-censorship, except for the cases where our defense of free speech would be so far outside the Overton Window as to backfire (like defending a pro-pedophilia radio station.
Late to posting this, but I very literally laughed out loud at Scott's description of an Atlantic article accusing quiet spaces of being racist. I *SPRINTED* to Google and discovered The Atlantic has indeed written about the topic...more than once! LOL again!
I started reading the most recent article - likely the one which so infuriated Scott - and kept laughing. The author utterly beclowned herself throughout with her near-parody levels of entitlement. She's used to noise so she believes she gets to disrupt and inflict it on the people around her, including late at night, and in specific quiet zones, even though she can go make noise elsewhere and they can't necessarily find silence. Oh, man, I sure hope she moves to Tokyo someday and writes scolding essays on Why You Japanese Should Quit Being Too Much Like White Rich People.
The Atlantic piece was almost as funny as a June 2020 Esquire article by a trans woman sincerely complaining her plastic surgery for facial feminization was postponed in late ***March of 2020*** (!!!!!) because....hahahahahaha! It's so funny I can't even finish typing!
Scott.
Please.
If you're going to indulge in emotions, at least indulge in the ones that are strongly protective. Don't get rationally angry, get rationally *contemptuous,* and from that contempt, enjoy the pure pleasure of laughing *AT* the utterly oblivious, narcissistic folly on display in that Atlantic essay and in my favorite Esquire essay.
Then you'll be able to dismiss them with joy in your heart, and maybe even a little bit of affection for the poor, unsuspecting, unwitting clowns amongst us.
I think an important point that hasn't been mentioned relating to the "disproportionate" aspect is that modern society allows small groups to take actions that require significantly more work to counter than they do to take, either in terms of effort or time.
As an example, you have a restaurant with a 4 out of 5 star average review. A group that doesn't like the owner starts spamming 1 star reviews. Mathematically, you would need to spam significantly more 5 star reviews to get the average back to 4. And that's once you know that the review bombing is going on.
You have company with an employee that said something bad about a popular politician. How many negative complaints before the employee gets fired? The internet and social media make it easy to get enough negative complaints to get the employee fired before the other side can respond. Firing is easy. Investigating is hard. Rehiring is almost impossible.
You have a lecture. Someone stands up and begins yelling about how bad the lecturer's beliefs are. Yelling back won't get the lecture back on track. Even if the authorities can get the yeller out, the time is still lost. And all it takes is another person to disrupt the lecture again.
The "the best answer to unwanted speech is more speech" approach doesn't work when the cost for more speech to counter unwanted speech is significantly higher than it is to make the speech in the first place.
I think this mixes up two things: (a) common action against a company, and (b) action against individuals. I don't think that a definition of cancel culture should include the first, but only the second.
When it comes to review spamming, an nice solution would be to verify that the person visiting the restaurant / buying the thing / watching the movie actually did that. This can be done nowadays and is incorporated in various online marketplaces and apps. There also were some experiments on articles of newspapers, where - before commenting - you had to answer a few questions first, to prevent spamming (I liked those a lot, they increased the level of rational discourse immensely).
As for the firing of employees, the solution is increased employee rights against undue contract cancellation - most european countries have much stricter employee rights, which helps tremendously.
As for the lecture example: In general, no protest form should affect other people in their daily lifes. Hindering people to get into a butcher's shop at a vegan protest. Hindering workers who do not want to participate in a strike to reach their workplace. Gluing yourself to motorways to protest weak climate change politics.
Protest your view outside, but don't disrupt the lecture itself. That's the way to go.
There's a case of P4: The CEO would have stopped the publication of the articles because they are stupid, but didn't learn about them until he read the edition. He was on his way to fire the writer/editor for being stupid and ruining the brand but during the elevator ride down the mob rose up and demanded their firing.
In this case you have a writer/editor doing something in their job capacity which they knew (or really, really should have known) would wreck the publication. This is vastly different if instead of the Atlantic it was "Outrageous Opinion Quarterly" or some such thing.
This is also different from the writer/editor expressing this particular opinion in-private which somehow gets leaked, assuming they don't normally write about the topic. I don't care if the Sports Desk person has odious views about social policy. I also don't care if the political reporters have terrible taste in music.
This definition and the post combines different issues under the umbrella of "cancel culture", which I think is unhelpful.
I would define "Cancel Culture" as "actions to suppress an individuals free speech rights through punitive measures, by trying to shame people, organizations and companies into banning the offender".
Bringing together a group to boycott a company due to their "woke agenda", "working with Israel/Palestina/China/...", "creating surveillance tech", "<your-thing-here>" is not in this definition of cancel culture, because it does not target individuals. This form of organizing protest should be handled separately. Let me explain.
An individual has basic needs and necessities (like earning money for their livelihood or even the ability to buy goods and services). "Cancel culture" targets these by shaming a company to fire them, not allowing them to order, or restricting their right to express themselves.
In contrast, a company is a legal entity, which has certain advantages, e.g. in tax cuts, rights, but most fundamentally in reduced risk for the owners of the company. The company is always at risk of defaulting, depending on its behavior - usually the market fit. By extension, a company that does not have a target group to sell profitably to, it will default sooner or later - in other words, the risk of being defaulted is the "normal" state.
If I do not like a company or their products, it's my right as a consumer to simply not doing business with them. I can also ask for a boycott - if the company defaults over this, it's simply unfit to survive in the market.
This is completely different for individuals. Individuals should never have to fear for being thrown out of their apartment, getting fired or even not having the ability to buy stuff, because of their opinion (or political agenda or sex or race or whatever), because this indirectly prohibits freedom of speech.
This also includes Scott's experiences with the doxxing - it did not add anything to the journalistic view of the article itself, but posed enormous risk for the livelihood of Scott.
Now the edgecase coming up is naturally the question of "small businesses" and "freelancers" and if they should have the right to refuse service to someone (because they have a different opinion, are e.g. homosexual, have a different political affiliation, have a certain skin color, etc.). I'm on the side of the individual again here - if an individual is unable to buy hardware or food or participate in the daily life due to their sex/race/opinion/..., this severely limits their life, and should therefore be banned as well. I believe this is for the most part how the legal system sees this in most states and "developed" nations.
Why is banning this form of "cancel culture" so important? Because it severely hinders discourse and opinion on the expense of "shielding others from being offended". Unfortunately, Scott chose the usual go-to example of pedophilia, so let's dive into this from a different perspective - I'm trying to make a point here, bear with me on this sidenote.
<sidenote>
(Note: For the sake of argument, I rule out non-consenting sex here, but talk about sexual and consenting relations between "under-age" and "over-age" individuals.)
Most societies have some form of age-of-consent-laws. Why? Because the society sees the requirement to shield individuals in a weak position (in this case because of still developing their intelligence, view of the world, and all the things coming with developing from a child to an adult) from predatory and overpowering other individuals. So the point is: Being developed enough to make an important decision (like having sex, but also to join the military, marrying, getting into huge debt by accepting a huge loan, ingesting different levels of alcohol, smoking cigarettes, etc.) and being able to understand and consent to the consequences. It should come to no surprise, that this "level of development" is different for different individuals - some may be able to grasp everything with 13, while others are still too immature with 25. So, why is there an age-of-consent (to any of the aforementioned topics)? Because the amount of work to develop and test every single individual on their current level of development would be an insurmountable effort. So most societies decide to "proxy" this question through "age" for specific actions, and most have different ages for different actions. Noteworthy exception: Most societies _do_ invest the question of the level of development in some extreme cases, mostly when it comes to criminal acts and if the criminal should be ruled as a minor or as an adult - and provide an "age range", where a court can use one or the other. As for pedophilia, the decision to proxy the level of development through age has hard consequences. Some societies allow sex between 14-17 year olds as one "bracket", and 18+ as another "bracket". Therefore, a sexual relationship starting with a couple at 14 suddenly becomes non-consenting rape after three years, when one of the two has their 18th birthday and the other one is still 17. Is an 18 year old with an intellectual disability able to consent? And if that age-of-consent is such a clear and logically definable line (and if you overstep you have to be shamed, shunned and cancelled, because you obviously are an overpowering rapist), why do different societies have such wildly different ages-of-consent, ranging from 10 to 18...
</sidenote>
If this sidenote does not offend you at all, feel free to exchange it with any highly dividing topic you dislike (notable examples from my experience are "reasons for jewish overrepresentation in positions of power", "equality-of-outcome vs equality-of-chances", "no-womb-no-opinion", ...).
The question is: At which point is the topic or opinion so absurd, so bizarre, so illogical and twisted and mind-boggingly stupid, that you feel that someone should loose their right to live a normal life? I've had my fair share of discourses and discussions with a lot of radicals and extremists (or was viewed as the extremist by others), and at no point did I ever want the other person to not being able to live a normal life.
IMHO, the exchange of ideas and thoughts _always_ trumps the emotional hurt of being offended. And if people spew out idiotic and stupid things (in other words: things that offend me, and there's a _lot_ - a **LOT** - of that), then I have to tolerate that and am free to oppose and criticize those - and I want to live in a society, that does the same for my views, which might offend others.
Cancel culture directly (i.e. by "deplatforming") and indirectly (i.e. by getting me fired) prevents me from taking part in a society, therefore discriminates me, and therefore should be prohibited by law.
And this is why the narrow definition at the beginning of this comment makes more sense to me than Lukianoff's - or for that matter the amalgamation of different topics in Scotts' article.
As Scott spells out in full detail, there is a continuum from regular reaction to something unpalatable, to the worst excesses of cancel culture. Which means that you can't really define cancel culture without going into the substantive issues of why the stuff that's being cancelled is not in the same league as other bad stuff we'd generally very much like to deplatform.
But another thing that stands out in the recent excesses of the "woke" movement, it's people getting super invested in the plights of marginalized or disadvantaged groups that they don't actually belong to. This goes way beyond the laudable idea of solidarity, to the point where formal or informal committees of e.g white dudes are literally telling the Black community what they should fight for, groups of cis-straight dudes are leading social media fights around the meaning of "gay" or "woman" in the name of the trans, gay or queer communities, plus plenty of male randos pontificating on feminism. I'm sure you can make up your own examples.
Not that I'm a super fan of N. Taleb here, but the concept of "skin in the game" surely applies here. If you're all involved in some group's plight, and neither you nor the people around you actually belong to that group, please consider the possibility that you're not actually helping anyone - the group in question, the world at large, or even your own image.
I think the missing ingredient here is intent. If you intend to eliminate someone’s ability to express their opinion, either by removing their access to the platforms they use, or by intimidating them with personal consequences such as job loss (contacting an employer with the intent to get them fired, for instance), then you are engaging in ”cancellation”.
If you are simply no longer interested in supporting someone, but you are not actively trying to prevent their ability to say things, that is not “cancellation”.
A petition requesting the NYT not dox SA is not cancellation, and it is not an attempt to remove the ability to say things generally. It is rather an attempt at censorship, which is different. If the petition was to fire the journalist, it would be cancellation.
Asking others to cancel their subscription to a podcast because you find the pedophilia discussions objectionable is not cancellation, unless it is done with the intent of shutting down the podcast entirely.
If enough subscribers of something find the content so objectionable that they stop paying money, and the platform changes the content, that is not cancellation: that is market forces which have been at work for a long time.
If instead large groups of people threaten to cancel their subscription unless a certain journalist is fired, as they find that journalist’s content objectionable, that IS cancellation.
Suppose that podcaster A loses his popularity because he is cancelled over expressing an opinion (let's assume that it's an unambiguously fine opinion like "hats are cool" and he happens to have an irrationally anti-hat audience), and podcaster B never gets popular in the first place because he has an annoying voice.
Why is podcaster A's failure more unfair than podcaster B's failure?
Because it's reasonable to expect that being pro-hat will not be controversial and that a person won't have to take it into account when making important life decisions like choosing a career in podcasting and, say, taking out a mortgage based on his podcasting income. The capriciousness of cancel culture is a major reason many people object to it.
You could say that podcaster B faces unfairness because voice is largely out of his control, but this is a different kind of unfairness that doesn't relate to the topic.
Perhaps unrelated to being fair to the individual, but the first scenario leads to conformity in opinions and the second one to lower diversity in podcaster voices. One is more harmful to society than the other
I don't know if you'd count it as a greater *unfairness*, specifically, but it's generally more psychologically distressing to have been successful in the past but now be a nobody than it is to always have been a nobody, because in the first case you have experience of success to contrast with your current insignificance. Podcaster A, then, is probably going to be more upset than Podcaster B.
Cancel culture is a tool deployed by people who truly believe that social justice or other political goals can be achieved by enforcing language and speech codes. They’re obsessed with language and symbol, and because of this they’re ultimately unable to produce material changes in the world of the kind they are imagining they’re producing. The result is that people’s lives and reputations get ruined, perhaps sometimes fairly but more often than not unfairly, and ultimately nothing changes. The entire premise of cancel culture is an attempt to narrow the scope of our axioms down to a very narrow set of beliefs about what is right or wrong, even though this is ultimately futile. People are drawn to cancel culture because real change is hard, but destroying people’s reputations is easy.
I think the main thing that distinguishes cancel culture from normal behavior is the third partying. It's okay if you personally are offended by someone to unsubscribe/avoid/boycott that person and/or their stuff. It's also okay to point out why you're offended and let other people know that if they are likewise offended for the same reasons, they can unsubscribe/avoid/boycott that person and/or their stuff.
It's not okay the pressure people to care more by adding consequences to them. If the company was not itself offended by the speech of an employee who does not speak for them, do not threaten to boycott the company (explicitly or implicitly) or unless they fire the employee. If a person already had a platform, do not pressure the platform to remove them. If a person has friends and family, do not harass the friends and family in order to punish the person through them.
If person A wants to speak and person B wants to hear them and/or pay them, do not as third party C act deliberately to prevent this mutually consensual exchange. You can control what you do with your own time, attention, and money. You do not get to control other people.
There's still a couple of edge cases this doesn't explain, but I think it gets most of it.
I think you’ve touched on something important that the cancelling needs to be stopped by the affected institution/organization. Getting people to stop wanting to pressure other people to shut-up will never work. We need institutions whose knee-jerk reaction is to resist the pressure and examine the situation.
Perhaps we try seeding a culture that doesn’t demand immediate gratification?
I think the key element of Lukianoff's definition is *people* here:
> ...get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished...
IMO, there is a clear schelling point line between asking an institution to discontinue specific speech and asking that institution to fire the specific speaker. In the A and B series given here, it is never considered that the activist or grad student be asked to stop talking about their unpopular opinions. Obviously we cannot reasonably expect "X activists" to have some non-X subject to bring to the next podcast, so this is a more reasonable omission in the A series. But in the B series it would be completely reasonable to tell the grad student to find a different subject area.
It would be the case that the ideas themselves still get "cancelled", and so free-speech absolutists will not be satisfied, but at least people would be free to *try* promoting their unpopular ideas and they only put themselves at risk if they refuse to stop. This seems like a worthwhile middle ground.
As for the "people shouldn’t be fired from their job for speech that they made outside of their job" norm. Here's another situation, similar to your P1-P3, which challenges this. (And this is less hypothetical; real companies are being faces with this dilemma now.)
Acme Corporation is located in a state that bans abortion. They offer an employee benefit where they will pay for their employees' travel to other states to get abortions. One of the people involved in administering this employee benefit is Bob, who has, outside of work, engaged in substantial anti-abortion advocacy. The organizations' employees express concern that, due to Bob's anti-abortion beliefs, they can't trust Bob to administer the process the way he is supposed to. For instance, they suspect that Bob will deliberately break the confidentiality of users using this benefit to expose them to retaliation. Several employees threaten to quit over this.
(Of course, if Bob in fact does break confidentiality, he can be fired for that. But the damage has still already been done. And one can imagine there are ways for Bob to break confidentiality that are hard to detect or prove. For instance, if Bob "accidentally" leaves his screen open when he walks away for a moment, and Alice's boss "coincidentally" walks by, and starts treating Alice poorly from then on, it might be very hard for someone else to connect the dots.)
Similar to the above choices we have:
Q1: The employees threatening to quit are wrong, and they should just accept the risk that Bob will break confidentiality?
Q2: Acme Corporation is morally obligated to keep Bob on, even if it means losing several other valuable employees, or
Q3: It's okay for Acme Corporation to fire Bob, "for his outside-of-work speech"?
This particular example might seem like a sort of edge case, but one could consider a similar case like:
R: Bob doesn't have access to any information about individual employees, but is in charge of the company's employee benefits strategy, and has to decide what to prioritize. The employees are concerned that Bob will deprioritize abortion-related benefits (and might even be concerned that Bob's anti-abortion advocacy is evidence that he doesn't care about women's issues in general, and so will deprioritize benefits that help women in general). It is likely not possible to say "okay, if Bob in fact deprioritizes these things, we'll get rid of him then" because these are high-context decisions that Bob is the only one that has full context on, so if Bob says "we're deprioritizing X because it's too expensive" for instance, it will be hard to tell whether that is because X actually is too expensive, or because Bob is just making an excuse. Or maybe there are decisions that could harm abortion-seekers (or other women) whose effects won't be visible until years later, so if you wait and see then a lot of harm could already have happened.
I think that **most** jobs where this sort of thing comes up have some element of R in them. I'm reminded of an example Scott gave years ago of a pro-Nazi schoolteacher:
where he said that "if the schoolteacher credibly promises not to be repugnant in any way in front of the kids, you let her keep teaching until she slips up." I think this is a lot harder than it sounds. If they do something really blatant, like go on a slur-filled rant in the classroom, that will probably be found out pretty quickly. But there are lots of subtler, high-context decisions that teachers are making all the time - who to call on in class, what topics to emphasize in discussions, who to give the benefit of the doubt to in disputes - that have a lot of opportunities for teachers to sneak in bias that are hard to detect until it's been going on for a long time. when you hire a teacher (or hire someone for a lot of other jobs) that often involves giving them a position of trust over something you can't easily verify. So you really do have to make a subjective judgment of "does this person share my values?" and outside-of-work speech could be a reasonable indicator of that.
In the Acme Corporation example, I think it much more likely Bob will ask not to be tasked with implementing the "pay travel expenses for abortion trips" and he'll be penalised for not doing the work, or that even if he agrees to do it because it's part of the job and he keeps his personal life and work life separate, some/many/lots of the staff will complain that they don't feel safe with such a bigot in a position of authority.
What I'm saying is that it's much more likely Bob gets cancelled just for his views, than that Bob poses a real threat of "psst I'm gonna email the abortion bounty hunters with your travel details".
The idea is that it's possible that Bob asks TO be tasked with implementing the "pay travel expenses for abortion trips", precisely SO THAT he can "email the abortion bounty hunters." (And there are things that aren't as bad a "abortion bounty hunters" but could be a real threat.) Or at least that there will be a real perception of that threat.
Sure, that could happen. But while I am aware that some people do in reality think that the Republicans/Trump/MAGA are just itching to implement "The Handmaid's Tale" in reality, and that the Supreme Court has been taken over by far-right extremists who intend to subject women to forced pregnancy and take away their rights to contraception next, I don't believe that.
I treat it as any other tinfoil-hat wearing exercise.
I could counter that Alice might ask for the task so *she* could send on a list of those employees/bosses who object to Emily's List and get them cancelled, but if we're going to construct bogeymen for both sides of the disagreement, then we're not really engaging with reality.
And I'll counter your "look at the comments" with a "look at the comments" of my own; even when companies (paternalistically, be that mistaken or not, or even just virtue-signalling) provide "we'll pay for your abortion as health care", there are a lot of "humph! privileged out-of-touch corporate males who don't understand real people's lives!" comments.
Biting the hand that feeds, because there is no such thing as gratitude, because whatever you do it is never enough and they're never satisfied. That don't impress me much 😁
EDIT: I did as you requested, ctrl+F for "treated badly by boss", and got one comment about someone imagining that "rabid anti-choicers" might treat the abortion-haver badly:
"An interesting approach, that sounds good in theory, but it won’t take long for people – especially rabidly anti-choice people – to figure out what’s going on. And the employee really has no recourse if they suddenly start being treated badly by boss or coworkers, who can claim they didn’t even know and that they aren’t treating the person any differently."
Also, I think the discussion about "cancel culture" can usefully divided into three questions:
(1) How much, and in what circumstances, SHOULD people be fired/deplatformed/etc for their speech?
(2) How much, and in what circumstances, ARE PEOPLE IN FACT being fired/deplatformed/etc for their speech?
(3) How much, and in what circumstances, DO PEOPLE THINK PEOPLE ARE being fired/deplatformed/etc for their speech?
--
Some frequent statements made in these discussions could be interpreted in multiple ways. For instance "cancel culture doesn't exist" could mean either:
(a) people aren't being punished for their speech (i.e. (2) is low)
(b) people are being punished for their speech, and this is justified (i.e. (1) is high)
Another possible question here is where is (3) in relation to (2) or (1). For instance, one possible state of affairs is that people *aren't in fact* being punished much for their speech, but people *think* it's happening a lot, so they self-censor. In this case what's needed is to give people more accurate information about the real risks of punishment.
I wonder if anyone's done a survey on this? You could ask people something like "are there any opinions you have that you self-censor, and if so what are they" and show those to other people and ask "do you think that someone who expresses these opinions should be punished?" To see if people have accurate views over what actually gets punished.
One problem here is that the term "cancel culture" has acquired a meaning similar to terms like "wasteful spending" - nobody is in favor of being wasteful, but an expenditure that one person might consider "wasteful spending" another person might consider justified.
I also agree with some of the other commenters that these sorts of discussions might be more fruitful if you talk about real examples, or things closer to real examples, rather than a bunch of hypotheticals that involve stand-ins, for a few reasons:
First, it's hard to tell how much this actually happens. I mean, millions of people are laid off every year for all sorts of reasons (unrelated to their speech/opinions), and a lot of the discourse on "people being fired for their speech/opinions" focuses on the same few dozen individual examples, so it's hard to tell if this is because (a) there's lots of people being fired for speech that you never hear about, or (b) being fired for speech is just really rare. So it would be good to know more about how/when this actually happens.
Second, the way I would respond to real situations depends on a lot of nuanced factors. For instance, if Bob fired due to saying something nasty about group X they said on social media, I would have questions like:
- Does it seems plausible they were thinking through something related in good faith and they said it in a context where they reasonably thought it made sense? Or was this just a random potshot that doesn't seem to have any purpose beyond nastiness?
- How does Bob treat the people of group X that they work with? Do those people say "yeah, Bob's been nasty to us for a while, we've just never felt comfortable calling it out until now when the spotlight is on it?" Or do those people say "Bob's always been good to us" and it's only external pressure?
- What kind of job and position is this specifically? Is public communications a core part of the job? Is it a position where someone who dislikes group X has the opportunity to undermine or otherwise harm them? If Bob has been in the job for a while and never done anything like that, is it plausible that he's been doing it without being detected yet, or that he's biding his time until he can get away with it?
When it comes to employment, there is an obvious bright line: if it impacts your work, then it matters, and if not, you should basically be able to say whatever you want. In the examples of you not subscribing to the Atlantic, it's because you hated one of their pieces. Same with you not subscribing to a podcast that promotes pedophilia--though trying to get it "deplatformed" would count as cancel culture. I guess B1 is unclear to me because it's not obvious if he's publishing articles under your lab/letterhead that you don't want to publish (impacts the work), or is just blogging on his own time (does not).
I think the point is that arguably "impacts the work" is broad enough that it applies to just about any situation. In the example of the grad student blogging about pedophilia, even if he's just doing it on his own time and isn't publishing it in any place associated with the lab:
(1) others might not believe you when you say "we don't support what the student is doing, he's doing it on his own time", and that could impact the lab's ability to get funding, support, personnel, etc.
(2) colleagues might surmise that if he thinks that "people who claim to be victims of pedophilia are lying," then he might think the same about people who claim to be victims of other things, so they might be less comfortable talking about any problems they might be having with others in the lab.
(3) if some of the other psychology experiments in the lab involve kids, there's likely a higher chance that the student might molest them, given what he believes. Even if he hasn't shown any tendency to want to molest kids in the past (he's just written articles), that could be because he's biding his time, waiting to get into a position where he can get away with it. And even if he never in fact does so, the fact that he's perceived to have a high risk of that might make it harder for the lab to recruit subjects.
Number (3) I think is probably the most interesting one. In general, I think there's an interesting question here: if someone does thing X, which isn't bad on its own but the kind of people who do X also are more likely to do bad thing Y, when is it okay to restrict their actions to preemptively deny them the opportunity to do Y, and when do you have to wait until they actually do or attempt to do Y? What if the perceived risk of Y is already causing problems, even if they haven't done Y yet?
I think there are clear examples of cases on different parts of the spectrum:
- If people who practice religion R are more likely to hijack planes, is it okay to deny them the ability to board planes? The answer seems pretty clearly "no", and I think few if any people would argue otherwise.
- If people with shorter credit histories are more likely to default on loans, is it okay to not give them a loan? Under the US system we do in fact do that, but there's reasonable debate on both sides: there are lots of regulations about what they're allowed to use in credit scores, and and there are certainly people arguing that the current system includes factors that are unfair to certain groups.
- If people with severely impaired vision (that can't be corrected) are more likely to get in a car crash, should they be denied drivers' licenses? The answer seems pretty clearly "yes", and I think few if any people would argue otherwise.
I think you're not giving Lukianoff enough credit for the ways in which his definition is actually quite precise. His definition requires three separate things to all occur:
- "Protected Speech" under the first amendment, meaning that this is speech the _government_ could not legally attempt to suppress, were it to happen in a place the government had the ability to do so (even though it didn't).
- A "campaign" meaning you need to be trying to convince someone else to join you in getting the target...
- "fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished".
Here's a fun and probably wrong opinion on this: What people call cancel culture now exists because we got rid of all the unions. Now [huge and unjustified overgeneralisation ahead:] people still have an urge to change things they don't like about the world, but there's no institutions with history and knowledge and strategy behind them. We've lost our experience of cooperative action and wielding people power on every scale. So instead we just get weird misfires where people form loose temprary coalitions with weak targets that have low strategic value, ultimately not getting what they really want and staying frustrated and becoming more upset and hostile.
I think that can coexist with this theory if you consider that ‘cancel progressivism’ is 1) a pretty new invention and 2) now essentially demanded of any leaders within a leftist organization. I get the sense that until ~15 years ago Unions didn’t ‘cancel’ anyone (except for directly labor-rights-related reasons), like most organizations. Now that the cancellation meme has spread, especially within leftist circles (in that any leader won’t last long unless they conform to cancelling), Unions have made a hard turn towards cancelling people. It’s unfortunate because Unions best serve their constituents by being focused on a single agenda - labor rights - and distractions from that cause mostly make them ineffectual. On the other hand, we’ve also had historical moments where unions incited racial massacres (e.g. Rock Springs), so it does seem important that they be influenced by ‘intersectionality’ or consideration of non-labor issues on some level.
It seems like two important ideas that are key to making cancel culture destructive are:
a. Attempts to coordinate meanness. Not only do I unsubscribe from your substack, I go out on Twitter and post about what a terrible person you are and how you're a racist fascist homophobe and everyone should unsubscribe from your substack.
b. Contagious shunning--not only do I shun you, I shun anyone who doesn't shun you. Like deciding that because Rogan has interviewed Alex Jones, you should shun Rogan and also shun anyone who goes on Rogan's show.
[edited] Part of what makes this so nasty is that social media have made it a lot easier to make sure everyone gets the memo about what is in/out right away, and this has made it more efficient to coordinate meanness.
US society is very diverse. We have people with wildly different personal lives, morals, religions, taboos, etc. It seems like the best way to have a society like ours work smoothly is to have people be pretty tolerant of "wrong" opinions and ideas and ways of life of others with whom they interact on a casual or occasional professional basis. Like, what if the lady who does my taxes is a lesbian, my dentist is Jewish, my cardiologist is on his fourth trophy wife, the guy who works on my car is a socialist? One way for things to work is that I refuse to associate with such people, and find straight white Catholics with good family lives and sensible political views to do business with. Another is to decide that what I really want from these people is good work at a fair price, and that their personal lives, religion, political beliefs, etc., are irrelevant to that. The second one works a hell of a lot better in a multicultural society, but it does require that I accept that there will be people with whom I do business who believe the wrong things and live the wrong way.
It seems like the basis of cancel culture is to try to push against that. And you can find places where this makes sense--if my dentist hates Gentiles and won't give them novacaine or something, yeah, I'm finding another dentist. You can find places where someone's expressed beliefs or outside-of-work activities make you worry about how they will do their job. But also, it seems like a lot of the time when I hear about these cancellation campaigns (probably I hear about the outrageous ones, because media), and people make this kind of argument, it's a huge stretch, or it ignores contradictory evidence.
You make a good post here, but it undersells what cancel culture does.
"One way for things to work is that I refuse to associate with such people, and find straight white Catholics with good family lives and sensible political views to do business with."
You presented this as the more negative/extreme option. And compared to your 2nd option, it is.
But it's actually LESS negative/extreme than what cancel culture does, and our modern society would in fact be better if the most cancel-loving people out there chose your first option instead of what they do.
"I'll only do business with companies that share my values" is honestly not the problem here, at least not if it's done in a non-aggressive way similar to someone simply unsubscribing from a YouTube channel or blocking someone on social media, and leaving it at that. Trying to minimize your exposure to companies or content that goes against your values is not the core problem here, and if everyone did only this, cancel culture would not be a significant issue. The issue happens when some individuals/groups attempt to force EVERYONE to go along with their values. And given that you're right about how very diverse US society is, this causes severe problems.
If more people could simply accept that a lot of people out there have "wrong" opinions and choose to minimize their own personal contact with such people BUT LEFT IT AT THAT, things would be far better.
I don't mind people who carefully curate their social media experience, for example. Block whoever you want. That's purely defensive. By itself, that's not the same as someone trying to deplatform everybody they disagree with.
This distinction is completely crystal clear to me, so much so that I'm surprised that a lot of people don't seem to see it.
For me a big part of what makes "cancel CULTURE" a *culture* is the online social media mob aspect of it. So I think the think I particularly object to about it is that. Random individual people, even in large numbers just aren't as much a concern to me (though obviously can still present problems and moral/practical failings).
Not that idea that people shouldn't be able to mobilize letter writing campaigns about things they don't like, and not that people shouldn't be able to do what they want with their time/money.
But the particular nature of the online low effort social media brushfire where thousands, sometimes millions of people decide some person or thought is now verboten/ostracized/thoughtcrime/unemployable. In particular, since they seem to be able to use allies in HR/legal departments in the business world to make their displeasure have real teeth.
Often based on very little personal involvement/interest/stakes.
It is the great mass of many mobilizing and aggregating minor annoyance into a tidal wave of consequence for one person or small group of people.
I suspect villages frowned on and even had rules against this sort of mob incitement on those smaller scales, and it makes sense for the online global village to have such norms/rules too.
Anyway, that would be my slightly different spin on it.
I am pretty tired of the "free speech" legalism around this issue, because I think most people can agree that free speech norms outside of the government's sphere are also SUPER VALUABLE, and there should be strong bias towards them.
Should people be free to not patronize a store of someone just because they don't like their politics? Absolutely. Is it good for society when everyone is constantly conducting these ideological litmus tests on everyone else. No it is terrible.
So you gotta figure out how to discourage/minimize it without making it outright banned. Maybe it is like drugs that way.
Maybe if you actually listened to the podcast promoting pedophilia, you would learn a thing or two about pedophiles, such as the fact that pedophilia (i.e. being attracted to children before puberty) does not equal child sexual abuse, that the large majority of pedophiles never have sex with children, and that stigmatizing pedophilia actually increases the risks to children.
Got around to reading the infamous Atlantic article discussed above.
It's quite stupid in a particularly dense and entitled manner which has made my teeth grind since I was myself a dense and entitled young person. The author is apparently _not_ a young person which is a bit sad. Yes the article does imply that to prefer peace and quiet -- even at 2 am -- is an example of white-person arrogance/insensitivity/racism/etc. Yes it is yet another example of how far the Atlantic has fallen (I'm old enough to remember when that publication was a home for thoughtful journalism and essay-writing) (no, seriously).
All that said -- the article doesn't name anybody who is supposed to be shamed or shunned, doesn't suggest boycotts of anybody or anything, etc. So I'm not sure it really represents an example of cancel culture in action, though I can see how it could ring that particular bell for people nowadays.
At its heart the piece strikes me as just another addition to the ancient and endless pile of passive-aggressive pontificating which boils down to: things are no longer as they were when the writer was young which was the perfect way that things should always be. That genre is literally as old as the written word and for my money hasn't become any more interesting or meaningful than it ever was.
I think there is a false equivalence between (1) organising or calling for violence against a person or a group of people and (2) other types of speech. For me, answers to many of the questions Scott posesdepend on whether the speech in question is of the first or second kind. Coincidentally, there is a large movement I the US that is focused on blurring this boundary. One of their slogans is literally "silence is violence" but they work on blurring this boundary in many other situations. This is so pervasive that at the end of this essay Scott implies equivalence between supporting murder and political terrorism and simply "criticizing" a group of people. These things are not the same and no fair coalition can be built this way.
"I think there is a false equivalence between (1) organising or calling for violence against a person or a group of people and (2) other types of speech."
I think you will find that a very hard line to properly define.
Suppose hypothetically
A) I am very pro abortion. Am I organizing violence against Foetuses?
B) I am pro death penalty and want to bring back whipping. Is that organizing violence against prisoners?
C) I think circumcision of infants is a generally good idea and improves health. Is this organizing violence against babies? Does it matter if it's done by doctors or by religious leaders with no medical training or anesthetic?
D) I think people should have greater right to self defense and defense of property. If someone picks your pocket in the street, you should absolutely be allowed to pull out a gun and shoot them. Is this a call for violence against thieves.
E) I am organizing a BSDM party.
F) I think OSHA is far too strict. Let people do jobs that will get them maimed or killed in industrial accidents.
G) I am pro euthanasia.
H) I am a soldier in a war calling in an artillery strike.
I) I am calling for various highly unpleasant, but technically not violent things to happen to a group of people. I say they should all be sacked and have all their money seized and be forced to live in a labor camp eating gruel. But I never specify anything outright violent.
And of course this is speech, so you can call for things that are physically unrealistic. Like calling for a wizard to magically turn someone into a toad. Or saying someone should be tickled to death. Or gored by a unicorn.
I agree that drawing lines is hard and there are always tricky edging cases. Scott is laying out a lot of examples on the broad spectrum of cancellation reactions, my point is that there an important dimension in the kind of speech we are protecting or prosecuting.
Having said that, some of your edge cases are much harder than others. I agree that A is a fundamental conundrum (alongside cow and fish violence), while I see no problem with advocating for consensual or legalised violence even when I disagree with its desirsbiluty, as in B, C, D, E, F, G, H or non violence as in I or wizard summoning.
I don't think "cancelling" at least in the form people find most odious is really any of these things. I don't necessarily find boycotting (personal or public) or arguing for deplatforming necessarily evil in their own right, although they can be self-righteous and silly depending on the "infraction".
But I think there's a line between stumbling upon something that you find untenable and being upset by it (like the Atlantic article situation), and deciding you dislike someone/something so combing through all their history to try to find something unpopular enough to make some portion of the public upset. You can organically stumble on actions that you find appalling to the point of broadcasting this opinion to others, but when there is a calculated move to find a reason to hate someone you already dislike, that's the true spirit of "cancel culture".
There are actions that are permissible as things an individual is at liberty to do, yet can be part of a pattern of maliciousness.
Whether it's a rich person with a horse based grudge, or a person with a speech based grudge.
Cancellation is doing this, because you don't like what someone said. It means having a negative term for someone elses wellbeing in your utility function.
If not interacting with a person is the easy default option, and your dislike of someones speech is causing you to go out of your way to interact, in a way clearly detrimental to that person, that's cancelation.
(Disagreeing with them is ok. Polite explanations of why you think their wrong, totally fine. Yelling slurs at them, not on.)
Personally, I feel like the line is when you try to coerce (morally or otherwise) everyone else into doing what you want them to do.
In scenario A, I'd draw the line at A9. A1 to A7 are firmly your individual response and choices. A8 is a bit blurrier, but there's no real coercive attempt. A9 is where consequences of not joining the bandwagon start getting thrown around, and that's where I'd say it starts becoming "cancel culture".
In scenario B, it's a bit murkier for me. None of these seem particularly like "cancel culture" as I'd intuit the term - the closest is B3, but even there it's the actions of the audience pressuring the university to fire the student that comprises the cancellation. The article being written and people decrying the student without calling for their firing wouldn't be "cancellation".
In Scenario C, I don't think it's an example of cancel culture at all. The journalists did get fired, but the CEO didn't fire them because the baying mob demanded it, they did so because the article was bad for business. The journalists weren't inherently wrong as journalists writing opinion pieces, but they were wrong as employees hired to maintain and grow the business. If the article had *gained* the publication subscribers and critical acclaim, but the authors were fired anyway at the demand of an aggrieved group of protesters, *that* would be cancellation.
I'd tentatively offer a definition of "cancellation" as "attempting to morally or economically coerce others into enacting consequences upon undesirables that go beyond your personal choices".
Thus, "I don't like this, so I'm not going to consume it" isn't cancellation. "I don't like this, and I'm going to name and shame anyone who says they do" is (moral coercion). "I don't like this, so I'm going to start a petition calling for the creator to be fired" is as well (economic coercion).
The way I'd want cancel culture to be limited is by treating out-of-work political opinions and (legally permitted) actions as somewhat similar to 'protected classes'. So this totally wouldn't apply to half of the examples above which involve intentional acts of companies, or acts of their employees as representatives of the company, but would apply for the various out-of-work acts.
There are many people with opinions and moral values which I consider morally repugnant and evil, and probably my opinions and moral values are considered morally repugnant and evil by some other people, but the core social contract (in my opinion) is that we want everyone to be permitted to freely function in society - being able to shop, get services, rent or buy housing, and work for a living - unless a VERY high bar is met, which is equivalent to being convicted by a court of law; practical ostracism is very severe punishment and should be handed out with the same level of care as prison sentences; and employers shouldn't be able to fire someone just because they don't like someone's political opinions.
Like, the basic level of anti-cancellation is someone should be able to be a card-carrying party member, a candidate and/or a political activist of a cause totally opposed to the manager/leader/owner of the company without risking their job. It should be impossible for a Trump-loving company owner to fire someone for organizing e.g. pride marches or BLM protests (within the bounds of law), and it should be just as impossible for a liberal democrat company owner to fire someone for organizing e.g. pro-life marches or participating in J6 (if they were within the bounds of law).
And that kind of sidesteps many of the issues described above - it should be permissible for people to write angry letters to a company or cancel their subscriptions, but the company should not be permitted to act on that, *exactly* just as they would not be permitted to fire a Black employee due to pressure or protests or boycotts from racist customers, or fire a Muslim or gay employee due to pressure or protests or boycotts, etc; if some employee is e.g. communist or MAGA or pro-pedophilia (within bounds of law) or agitating for some unpopular policy, that's their right to do so, and if customers complain about that, well, it's their problem and shouldn't permit the employer to fire an employee without a proper cause.
To me, cancel culture is all about treatment of people from 'enemy tribe' - my definition of cancel culture is refusal of these basic transactions (goods, services, housing, employment) to someone who is openly and defiantly of the 'enemy tribe' (whatever that means), and it shouldn't happen. We do live in a single society, and tribalism should be forced down (both legally and in practice) so that people don't get to refuse service, housing or employment to the enemy. You get freedom of association, you don't have to be friends with them, but you should be forced to tolerate them being at the desk or chair next to you, or across the counter in a business - they have the same right to be there as do you.
I'm kind of surprised by your use of the term pedophilia. That is a psychiatric disorder, right? It is not illegal to have a disorder. It is only illegal to enact it, i.e., sexually abuse children. It is unfortunate that you are conflating the two (see, e.g., Wikipedia) by just calling it all pedophilia. Since you are a psychiatrist, I am mightily confused by this.
(1) For the purpose of the article, the only property that is required of the thing is that people don’t like it (2) the DSM uses the term “Pedophilic disorder”, while “pedophilia” is used in many parts of the English speaking world to interchangeably refer to either the act of child sexual abuse or the motivating psychology for adults who pursue it
Very good article with a lot to chew over. The A, B and C propositions seem trivially easy, but the P propositions are very hard. As for whether people with drastically different opinions and values can find common cause supporting mutual freedom of speech, regrettably experience suggests the answer is no. But the effort to thrash out a basis for this is still salutary.
I think cancel culture refers to the overreach of a natural phenomenon that is good and should exist. We need to be able to socially ostracize *profoundly* bad views. But many people felt that only mildly bad, or even mundane or mainstream views began to receive this reaction in 2014.
It's like when white blood cells in the body start attacking things that are harmless (peanuts, shellfish), creating an allergic reaction. Humans use gossip and withdrawal of support to express their preferences, and that isn't going away. But like the immune system, group dynamics can create a hysterical or "allergic" overreaction.
Thus the phrase refers to behaviors at the end of the spectrum, but since humans may not be able to agree where to draw the line, it may be impossible to reach a consensus. I think we can agree on some common elements:
- The target of anger is a low-profile civilian. Exceptions exist.
- The viewpoint being punished is held by more than 5-10% of the population (or, those who find the viewpoint enraging are a small 5-10% vocal minority)
- Context or intent is ignored in favor of evaluating only perceived harm
- Pressure is applied to risk-averse institutions rather than onto the individual
- The reaction to the viewpoint could be described as a moral panic. Emotions are high and intense.
If we’re going to try and invent a compromise people would mostly agree to, I would personally prefer if the criteria included “action related to creating consequences for the person who engaged in the undesirable communications is being taken by someone who is only loosely connected to the circumstances
of their communication”.
For me the hallmark of “cancelling” was always “someone is trying to get me to call Joe’s boss to tell them Joe is a horrible person. I don’t know very well the person who is trying to get me to do this, they don’t know Joe at all, and neither of us has spent more than an hour thinking about the actions we’re now feeling highly motivated to take”
Just coming back to this, I thought it worth pointing out that logically speaking, of course there is the option of saying the writer was morally wrong for writing the piece but everyone else acted acceptably.
I might be taking Lukianoff's definition too literally, but if Cancel Culture there refers to only the uptick in as opposed to the baselint of campaigns to get people punished for speech protected by the First Amendment, the question that would maybe most often have to decide if something on the edge is a part of cancel culture is "would this have been the reaction before 2014, as well?"
Even before 2014, people were not seeking out pedophilia-promotion podasts all the time, and I don't suppose A12 would be very common before 2014, so it covers the extremes correctly (and I don't know enough about what was usual in 2014 to accurately guess everything in the middle). The problem would of course be that it makes it hard to prove one specific instance of trying to get people punished for first amendment speech, but you can pretty easily apply it to the number of such campaigns overall and determine the total "amount" of Cancel Culture.
If our brains naturally run the algorithm: "When people say bad/wrong things, we should stop them", then there is obvious incompatibility between people with different beliefs, and what you are doing amounts to trying to find/establish a fairness override. You want a principle that says "I will view my own stances and my opponent's from an outside view and establish a boundary that we both have to be held to."
The problem is that the algorithm our brains seems to be running isn't *just* "When people say bad/wrong things, we should stop them"... it has the added proviso, "How far we go in stopping them should depend on how bad/wrong the thing is."
That proportionality is why it's tricky-to-the-point-of-impossibility to draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable reactions to disagreement. If everyone only ever said things with 3 units of evilness, then we could all agree that, when someone says something we disagree with, it's ok to respond with 3 units of activism, but not with 4 units of activism. But when you can imagine people saying things with 4 units of evilness, or 50, or a bajillion, then you can't agree to a rule that limits you to 3 units of activism.
And if you set the bar high enough to cover how evil people really think others' opinions are, then you end up with allowing all of cancel culture.
And if you try to make a rule that says, 'ok, you can respond with 3 units of activism to 3 units of evil, but you can't respond with 4 units of activism to 3 units of evil', then you run into the problem that people are already doing that, they just have wildly different notions about how many units of evil different sayings have.
FWIW, as a descriptive take on the phrase "cancel culture", I would draw the line between A7 and A8, because that's where it crosses the line from "me" to "you", that is, from "my reaction is..." to "you should...". Prescriptively, A8-A10 seem morally justifiable, at least in some cases.
From Google: Aristotle wrote, "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it". This means that an educated person can evaluate different values without necessarily adopting them.
Cancel culture is predicated on not understanding this.
You use “mob” instead of “collective” and specifically define mob in such a way as to exempt people that you think are correct. Because, if you believed they were, you wouldn’t be very eager to define their decision-making as simply tribal or malicious.
Back to the drawing board, and put in a pot of coffee.
Do people apply power for no reason in your view?
We do have such asymmetries, but it doesn't follow such different treatments are necessarily sensible. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/broken-symmetrieshtml I personally think part of the issue is that it's just easier to enforce regulations on firms (particularly large firms, which tend to be more regulated) than individuals.
My comment under that post no longer exists, but thanks to the Internet Archive I see that at the time I linked to Ilkka Kokkarinen https://web.archive.org/web/20111117183904/http://fourthcheckraise.blogspot.com/2009/11/applicants-meet-trapdoor.html
Yeah, I agree with this. I think Scott still isn't quite getting to the core of the issue because it's not really about how acceptable/unacceptable the views are; nor about how much/little people disagree with those views. The thing that would distinguish cancel culture from normal disagreements is: did the people who disagreed use untoward methods to attack the person who expressed the views? And so the effort needs to go into defining what an untoward method might be.
I think an under-discussed aspect of cancel culture - at least it didn't come up here - is the willingness of employers to stand up to Twitter pressure. I feel that it should be accepted as a given that people on Twitter are going to say stupid and nasty shit. The question is whether employers (or gig-offerors) see the existence of nasty stuff on Twitter as a good reason to fire someone. I'd want to include that as part of the definition of cancel culture: cancel culture is a situation in which people's employment is often at risk because of claims that they have engaged in bad speech in a way that is not directly relevant to their professional competence.
There is no pair of reasonable definitions of “cancellation” and “protected speech” where cancellation is not protected speech. Honestly “Coordinated actions intended to harm an individual that are difficult to legislatively prevent because the actions consist entirely of protected speech” is a pretty good definition of “cancellation.”
Have there been any test cases involving that law? Laws are not generally declared unconstitutional when they are passed, their unconstitutionality is established by cases involving them that go to court.
No, but see this re a somewhat analogous law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corry_v._Stanford_University. Though that is only a trial court judgment, it appears that Stanford did not bother to appeal it.
And it is a stretch to say that firing someone is protected speech. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._O%27Brien
Especially given that, if it were speech, government could do it. https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/government-speech-doctrine/
It does seem a decent parallel, especially the bit about "Stone also ruled that the Leonard Law was constitutional, essentially because it did not in any way restrict the speech of the university as a corporate entity. The university remained free to express its abhorrence of racial and other forms of prejudice. He ruled that the law expanded, rather than contracted, the range of legally permissible speech by protecting the free speech rights of students without abridging those of the university itself. "
That’s so interesting! When I worked at Texas A&M I specifically remember a rule saying that I would have to take a leave of absence if I ran for or won a seat in the state legislature (but that city office was fine).
Surely because the Lege tells the university systems how much $ they will get out of the pot (every 2 years?).
A norm doesn't have to be altogether reasonable to be useful. Mostly it's illegal to fire someone for joining a union or being a member of a particular religion. That doesn't give the employer perfect free-speech rights but it seems like a good thing.
Protected speech is a legal term. I don't think the article is talking about making cancel culture literally illegal?
There are things one might one to oppose, without calling for them to be outlawed.
I think the tricky thing is that the anti-cancel culture side is trying to use as a shortcut "if you treat someone as bad for engaging in protected speech, you're bad." But if cancelling people is itself protected speech then that doesn't work as well.
Well, it works fine, except that protesting cancel culture becomes a form of engaging in it.
Like being intolerant of intolerance?
In this case, it might be intolerant of intolerant of intolerant.
No, you just say that it's bad without asking that people lose their jobs. Announcing your disagreement isn't cancelling. Calling for "deplatforming" or firing it whatever is cancelling. It is extremely easy to protest something without falling into cancelling.
The problem is that some people are not satisfied with the efficacy of this kind of protest and want something stronger.
You get it. I wish more people had your clarity.
"The problem is that some people are not satisfied with the efficacy of this kind of protest and want something stronger."
This can be phrased stronger: a lot of people aren't satisfied with a protest that can be judged on its merits, instead of automatically getting their way through (usually economic) force.
and yet we know them when we see them
almost as if that's how all language works
Except that people /don't/ agree about what does and doesn't constitute them, because in general language /doesn't/ work very well for complicated questions like this!
The fact that language doesn't work very well to describe the phenomenon doesn't mean people don't know it when they see it. Which was...exactly Freddie's point
Sure, but I'm saying that that point is wrong; lots of people say "I know it when I see it", but they don't all say that about the same sets of things.
I agree about the coordinated actions-- that's what makes it a cancel culture rather than just cancelling.
I'm not sure coordinated is quite the right word. There's too little structure for that. However, I'm not finding a better word.
The other thing that makes cancel culture what it is, is secondary cancelling-- cancelling or threatening to cancel people who don't comply with a cancelation campaign.
How much coordination is "coordination"? If Scott complains about NYT, and in response most of his readers unsubscribe, it Scott guilty of coordinating them?
> The other thing that makes cancel culture what it is, is secondary cancelling-- cancelling or threatening to cancel people who don't comply with a cancelation campaign.
I need to think more about it, but it is a good approximation for my intuition. Unsubscribing NYT, no problem. Telling my friends to unsubscribe NYT, dunno, gray area, depends on how influential I am. Unfriending people if they don't unsubscribe NYT, gray area, depends on how predictable that was and how many people will also unfriend them in turn. Threatening people that unless they unsubscribe NYT, I will unfriend them, and also tell all my friends to unfriend them, clearly bad.
I think the grey area there is "asking" my friends to unsubscribe, no problem, you're leaving it up to them. "Telling" them is trying to force them into doing something, and there may or may not be a threat behind it - at the least, that you will sever ties with them and no longer consider them friends. That's the unacceptable part.
Things like "bad people doing bad things" and "people making mistakes" are bad. Threatening good or neutral people to do bad things, and preventing other people from figuring out their mistakes are meta-bad.
Somehow the meta-bad things make me more angry than the merely bad things. Without meta-badness, things would kinda sort themselves out after a while. Some people would get smarter. Most people would learn to avoid the bad people and the idiots. Meta-bad things prevent this.
It is okay if you don't read a newspaper you don't like. It is okay if someone pointed out a reason that made you stop wanting to read the newspaper, even if otherwise you probably wouldn't notice that. (Basically the "extrapolated volition" - what would you want, if you knew more.) It is not okay if you stop reading a newspaper only because you are afraid that other people would punish you for that.
Cancellations don't entirely consist of speech. At a minimum, it typically involves an company/organization firing someone, otherwise stopping doing business with someone, banning someone from a platform etc. It also often involves non-speech actions by the cancel mob, like boycotts.
My take is that speech should only get speech, material punishment should get material punishment. Say a cancel mob demands a company to fire an employee, and the company fires him. Then condemn the participants of the cancel mob but don't attempt to materially punish them; but do materially punish the company for yielding, e.g. by boycott it.
In theory there is another self-consistent definition: protect all speech except that which seeks to punish others for their protected speech, in which case what's good for the goose is good for the gander. (I.e. speech is protected if it contains an even number of "punish them for their speech that says...".) But since it's fuzzy what counts as punishing someone for speech, it may not work well.
> otherwise stopping doing business with someone ... It also often involves non-speech actions by the cancel mob, like boycotts.
According to the precedent set by Buckley v Valeo (the precedent often misattributed to Citizens United) politicized spending (and therefore lack thereof) *is* a protected "speech" action.
As far as I can tell, this struck down rules about spending *on speech* (spending on the cost of making and distributing one's speech as part of a campaign), and that was key to why limits on spending were considered limits on speech.
Anyway, however the SCOTUS defines speech, describing the spending decisions involved in a cancellation as speech is definitely a stretch from its everyday definition, and I discussed private actions against cancellation, not law. While Scott referred to speech protected by the 1st Amendment in America, Hastings asserted that there were no reasonable definitions of “cancellation” and “protected speech” where cancellation was not protected speech, not just that the prevailing American constitutional definition considered cancellation protected speech.
I think the problems with 'cancel culture' should probably be solved by cultural norms rather than law.
I think the entire debate largely boils down to people arguing what the norms should be, and in particular trying to get things they don't like defined as beyond-the-pale and things that they do like defined as "opposing them is beyond-the-pale".
I think thee problems not only should, but inevitably WILL be solved by cultural norms, once most of humanity is tired of cancelling, and defaults into anti-cancel camp. Simply put, sooner or later so many people, ideas and organizations will be cancelled, that cancelling will become meaningless. If everyone is a "sinner" By Cancellist definition, then nobody is.
I agree. Am I the only one here who is ok all the way to A12? People have a right to call for pretty much anything they want. They also have a right to unsubscribe, boycott, refuse to participate, try to get others to stop participating, etc. In general, I don't think you can force people to do something they don't want to do, or prevent them from expressing an opinion about something they don't like.
On the other hand, I also feel that private organizations like a business should be more cautious regarding when they actually deplatform or fire someone. In other words I make a distinction between people using language to express themselves and institutions taking actions that affect people. I think private institutions and organizations should hesitate before taking action that harms someone just because a bunch of people are demanding it.
That said, there does come a level of public outrage that any private organization is going to want to protect themselves from. If a business is being boycotted to the point of bankruptcy because of something an employee said, well, they may have no choice but to let that employee go.
Objective harm, and the expression of opinion seem like they belong in different categories for me, and should be held to different standards.
I also support laws against pedophilia. Adults sexually exploiting children causes harm and society has an interest in preventing it. Pedophilia is bad.
But what about speech supporting pedophilia? There are certain behaviors that only become a problem when a lot of people start doing it. Using speech to support pedophilia doesn't seem very harmful, until the rate of pedophilia starts going up. At that point it becomes a public health issue, not a speech issue. If there is solid empirical evidence that some form of expression is resulting in some form of harm to someone, then ok censor it. This also applies to hate speech, racism, fighting words, etc. But I would need to see that evidence first.
Note also that if someone who belongs to an organization and they are expressing support for pedophilia, then there will be a level of public outrage that the organization will want to protect itself from. If graduate students publishing articles in support of pedophilia actually lowers revenue, by reducing enrollment or alumni contributions, then they may have little choice other than letting them go.
Obviously the dynamics change if there is a large enough portion of the public that supports laws against firing employees that undertake unpopular actions, or belong to unpopular groups. This is where anti-discrimination laws come in.
I honestly can't tell what side of the issue I'm on. I don't think I fall neatly on one side or the other. Sometimes I self identify as a "proceduralist" (don't know if that is the correct term)--I seem willing to tolerate a wide range of outcomes if I think that the procedure that led to that outcome is basically fair and contributes to the overall functioning of society in a sustainable way.
I think this is an area and you are caught up in specifically where what are good in theory principles don’t work in the real world of our particular messy humans and their technologies.
Like at discrimination in hiring. From a principled standpoint you just want to say “anyone can hire whoever they want as a form of free association and if they don’t want to hire blacks/wiccans/mormons/whatever that is fine the market will punish them for their inefficiency. No one should be forced to employ or hang out with people they don’t want to.” That is a totally reasonable and normal ideal.
The problem is once you get into the messy reality of what happens in the real world.
I feel like cancel culture is a similar area where people are looking for some appealing consistent principle in an area where one does not exist. Because the failures are failures of particular failure states in the real world, not problems in our abstract values.
It’s an engineering problem not a design problem.
I actually agree, to a point. I mentioned in my post that I support government action when there is empirical evidence of real world harm. In the case of discriminatory hiring practices, the real world harm is an elevated unemployment rate for a targeted population, and I think the documented effects of this are strong enough to make discriminatory hiring illegal, at least for certain protected categories, and race is one of them.
If it is a social engineering problem, well I feel that passing laws is how we address those.
For what it's worth I'm good all the way to A12 too, and I completely agree with you that none of the behaviours listed, whether prompted by pro-pedophilia or anti-bossy-use (or literally ANYTHING else) are an expression of cancel *culture*. People being unreasonably (or reasonably) outraged and acting on it and making it known in public and trying to influence others is a universal human social behaviour.
I think that "cancel culture" applies to a behaviour of institutions and organisations that much, much too easily give in to pressure from (usually over the top and unreasonable but not always so) outrage over legal speech or (and I very strongly disagree with Scott in that it's solely about speech) fleeting/ unproven/ very arguable but still highly outraged accusations of (usually sexual) misconduct.
In this sense, a brand boycott is NOT cancel culture, for example.
>“Coordinated actions intended to harm an individual that are difficult to legislatively prevent because the actions consist entirely of protected speech”
Surely that would include typical playground bullying, though?
As well as millions of other thing that happened with great regularity before 2014, or before 1014 for that matter?
> Surely that would include typical playground bullying, though?
Are you out of your mind?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8-fLUanZGs
In broad terms I think there is some function that maps (degree of outrageousness) to (degree of expected social punishment) and for every level of (degree of outrageousness) the (degree of expected social punishment) should be less than the current level.
Edit: I should be clearer here- makes the point that this isn't and never was, about principles so much as a general sense that people are being a bit mean and need to chill out. This may sound vacuous but it's so much better than pretending there are fully general principles.
I don't agree with this at all. One of the most obnoxious and unconscionable things about wokeness is precisely its support of horrible punishment for trivial things COMBINED with absurd leniency for horrible things. A man disagreeing with 3% of feminism is condemned, a feminist saying "I love the smell of male tears" is *celebrated*. A white guy saying nasty things on X gets death threats from people; those same people defend a black guy with a long record of violent crimes and sex offences and say he didn't deserve to die. See the part on Britain https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-march-2023 for how very left-wing jurisdictions treat "words are violence" hate speech versus how they treat actual violence. Also SF and Seattle leaders saying zero tolerance for "hate", while their police departments have explicit policies of tolerance for actual crime.
I don't think your solution works either, because "your group gets punished for everything" and "my group can get away with anything" are two sides of the same coin for every form of injustice ever. Taking away one part of that (even if you can) will just make them double down on the other part.
The government of the UK circa March 2021 was not, in any useful sense, "very left-wing". Or at all left-wing.
The specific case of actual violence I assume you have in mind is the guy who assaulted a couple of cyclists, including stamping on the head of one of them, and got a suspended jail sentence and some community service. I agree that that's shockingly lenient. (I assume the lenience is at least partly because, so far as I can tell by sheer good luck, no one was actually seriously injured.) And it seems pretty clear that this wasn't a matter of the judge in question being a woke leftie who doesn't care about physical violence; comments the road.cc page linked from ACX include one pointing out the last time the same judge was in the news -- unduly _severe_ sentences for ... protestors against fracking. The judge allegedly has some ties to the oil industry, as do others in his close family. That doesn't read to me as "woke leftie who wants to be soft on real violence". I would place a sizeable bet that the judge's political preferences are nearer to yours than to mine.
And, of course, there's the same thing to say as there always is about shocking stories in the news: these stories are shocking and in the news _because they are unusual_. If it were normal for someone who stamps on someone else's head to get a short suspended sentence, you wouldn't be hearing about it because no one would think it worth making a fuss about.
(In general I have a lot of sympathy with anti-fracking protestors and none with motorists who assault cyclists. But there _is_ some logic here. Someone who assaults someone else in a fit of road-rage might reasonably be expected to reconsider and repent over the course of doing his community service, because no one really believes that cyclists deserve to have their heads staved in. Someone who makes a nuisance of themself in an anti-fracking protest will not, because for them it's a matter of principle. So, if the Officially Correct Sentence for both is some moderate amount of jail time -- which, yes, is ridiculous -- then replacing it with community service does actually kinda make more sense for the guy who assaulted the cyclists. Even though what they did is worse and less-justified.)
It was some people who climbed onto lorries at a fracking site. (I _think_ it was a fracking site; it was certainly a site operated by a company that does fracking.) They caused substantial disruption to the company, which so far as I can tell was their goal. I think they also blocked the road, which caused problems for other people, but (again, so far as I can tell) that was a side effect rather than part of the goal of the protest. (I am aware that some protests _do_ aim at maximum disruption to everyone, or everyone using the roads, but I don't think this was one of them.)
I wasn't trying to make it sound as if they were punished for their views. They were punished for conducting a protest in a way they weren't legally allowed to, and it didn't occur to me that what I said would be understood as saying anything other than that. I have no idea how what the thing you quote from Twitter is meant to relate to this; the thing they were jailed for was the protest action they undertook.
As for whether the punishment was reasonable, all I know on that is that the UK's Lord Chief Justice called their sentence "manifestly excessive". Being the UK's most senior judge doesn't guarantee any sort of infallibility, of course, but if he thinks the sentence was _obviously_ too much then my default position is that it probably was too much.
But SCOTUS has ruled that protesting is free speech even if it interferes with normal activity. So, you are trying to cancel them (by jailing them) for expressing an opinion that you disapprove of. /S
"The government of the UK circa March 2021 was not, in any useful sense, "very left-wing". Or at all left-wing."
I disagree, I find it pretty much impossible to regard a government that was in power for 14 years and made no attempt to repeal its absurdly broad hate speech laws "not at all left wing". (Or maybe they did try and I didn't hear about it--I haven't followed British politics in any detail--but it can't have been much of an attempt, and I don't think they did at all). Other things include the Prime Minister immediately condemning the US Dobbs decision and expressing his strong support for abortion, and "considering" introducing full gender redefining legislation (I heard about this since opposing it was what got JK Rowling cancelled; I don't know if they passed it or not, but the idea of a so called "conservative" government not simply refusing to repeal but actively considering enacting such legislation is almost beyond my comprehension).
Maybe I'm misinformed about all this, but the way it looks to me is that, on a lot of issues, the UK basically has two left-wing parties. Of different degrees.
"The judge allegedly has some ties to the oil industry, as do others in his close family. That doesn't read to me as "woke leftie who wants to be soft on real violence". I would place a sizeable bet that the judge's political preferences are nearer to yours than to mine."
I don't particularly like or support the oil industry. Please don't put me in a box.
As for the cyclist case, you make some valid points. But, (1) this isn't the only time Britain has handed down lenient sentences (Rolf Harris served about two and a half years!!! for sexually molesting numerous children), (2) the issue of repentence is only one factor, and the factor of giving justice to the victims of the attack is neglected in your analysis, (3) my (and Scott's) main point was contrasting this lack of jail for serious assault with *actual jail* for mean words on social media!
A place that didn't treat either of those things with jail would be one thing. It's the combination that's beyond comprehension. And what's more, it seems pretty clear that serious punishment for "hate speech" is strongly correlated with leniency for actual violence (contrary to Philosophy Bear's perspective). I'd be interested whether you dispute that, and if not what you think the reason for this correlation is.
I wasn't claiming that you support the oil industry. I was claiming that people with substantial pro-oil-industry biases (as it seems kinda plausible that this judge has) are usually on the right rather than on the left. (And that if you think the UK's Conservative Party is a far-left party, then from my perspective you are definitely on the right.)
Different people will put the left/right axis in different places -- both by locating its centre differently ("he's further right than me") and by pointing it in different directions (economic: high/low taxes, high/low state benefits, high/low regulation; social: anti-/pro-religion, progressive/conservative on sex, progressive/conservative on gender; international: doveish/hawkish, pro-/anti-immigration). I think that when someone says "party X is far-left" what they usually mean is "party X is far to _my_ left". I will gladly believe that the Conservative Party is far to your left. So far as I can tell, most people consider it somewhere between "centre-right" and "right-wing". Arguing about whether it's "really" far-left or centre-right or whatever seems unlikely to be enlightening.
Rolf Harris was released from prison at the age of 87 and in bad health. It is hard to believe that he was much danger to any children at that point.
Again: most people committing serious assaults in the UK go to jail; most people saying mean things on Twitter in the UK don't go to jail; the cases you hear about are the exceptions.
I would be interested in your evidence that serious punishment for hate speech is strongly correlated with leniency for actual violence. (Do you mean across different jurisdictions?) I don't myself claim to know whether there is such a correlation. I wouldn't be super-surprised if there were, and the mechanism for this that occurs to me is that the usual bundle of "progressive" views includes (1) a belief that criminal punishment is mostly about deterrence and prevention rather than vengeance, which will tend to produce lighter sentences overall, and also (2) a stronger opposition to "hate speech".
On the other hand, "hate speech" is not the only class of nonviolent thing that sometimes gets jail time. I would -- also handwavily and unconfidently -- expect a correlation via "conservative" views between stricter punishment for X and _stricter_ punishment for violent crimes, where X is "drug offences", "societally disapproved-of sexual activities", "activities considered politically subversive", etc. If I'm right about this, the big picture isn't "lefties are soft on violence and hard on nonviolent crime", it's "lefties are soft on everything but hard on _some particular types of_ nonviolent crime".
"Different people will put the left/right axis in different places -- both by locating its centre differently"
I don't agree you can just "locate" the centre wherever you want. Words means things; any definition of centre has to be in comparison to other jurisdictions in a given reference class. The only natural reference classes for the UK are either the whole world or the English-speaking world. The former is far too difficult for me to analyse (though you can try) so using the second: on free speech, the US has no hate speech laws at all, Australia has much weaker hate speech laws than the UK and conservatives have made several strong attempts to repeal even those (just barely unsuccessful), and Canada has constitutional speech protections (though weaker than the US) that have sometimes overturned hate speech judgements plus I think the conservative government repealed a large chunk of those laws in 2013. Compared to all these countries, the UK with its absurdly broad laws that are zealously enforced with no free speech defence recognised (see TGGP's link below for really disturbing stuff) that "conservatives" have done nothing about whatsoever, can only honestly be described as (on speech issues) far-left.
On abortion: even in places like Australia where it hasn't been a politicised issue, conservative politicians generally avoid talking about it rather than actively championing their support for it and condemning pro-life laws elsewhere. Again, the UK looks far-left by comparison.
The UK was also the only one of these countries where gay marriage was actively pushed (not just allowed to happen or not repealed) by a conservative government, and was one of the earlier places to do so as well (so not just responding to a widly acknowledged trend).
Now yes, I take your point about there being other issues. But if the UK *right* has a bunch of positions that are the same or even *further left* (hate speech) than left-wing parties elsewhere, then it's not enough for them to also hold a bunch of right-leaning positions that are the same as right-leaning parties elsewhere. They would have to be far, far to the right of other countries on a comparable number of issues to be reasonably described as centrist overall. "Way to the left of other right-wing parties on some issues, way to the right of such parties on others" would be enough to call the UK Conservatives centrist or centre-right; "way to the left of other right-wing parties on some issues, the same as such parties on others" would not. And would even out to being overall on the left.
Do you have examples of such latter issues that would balance out the ones I mentioned?
"Rolf Harris was released from prison at the age of 87 and in bad health. It is hard to believe that he was much danger to any children at that point."
Again, you are only considering prevention of further crime by that person, just one factor in the purpose of punishment. Other factors, including (1) making an example of that person to deter others, (2) giving a feeling of justice to the victims, and (3) punishing an evil person because that's intrinsically just, all argue for much harsher treatment of someone like that, bad health or not. Even if you go full consequentialist and reject (3), the others still hold.
"Again: most people committing serious assaults in the UK go to jail; most people saying mean things on Twitter in the UK don't go to jail; the cases you hear about are the exceptions."
Also, again see TGGP's link. If those descriptions are accurate, the situation in the UK is far, far worse than I imagined.
"expect a correlation via "conservative" views between stricter punishment for X and _stricter_ punishment for violent crimes"
Yes, but that's an entirely *consistent* attitude: be tough on everything. (And I'm pretty sure conservatives will always be more tough on violent crime than on sexual deviency or drug use or whatever, though I suppose I could be wrong). What I was specifically objecting to is the left's unbelievable hypocrisy of being tough on harmless things and soft on seriously harmful things.
The right has its own hypocrisies, to be sure, but this isn't one of them.
I didn't say, and didn't mean, that you can just locate the centre wherever you want. Well, I mean, obviously you _can_ and many people do, but some choices are more defensible than others.
The natural reference classes for the UK are the UK, the English-speaking world, Western Europe, Europe, the English-speaking world, "the West", the developed world, and the whole world. The first of those is (at least arguably) appropriate when talking about one particular party, but obviously not if the question is "is the UK as a whole notably far to the left or the right, compared with other places?". The others are I think all clearly reasonable for any purpose.
I agree that the UK does pretty poorly on free speech. I don't agree that that makes it _left_ as opposed to _right_; for me, free speech is not a left-versus-right issue as such, and while in recent years the right has tended to claim it and the left has tended to blow it off, not so long ago it was the other way around.
(The right and the left tend to limit freedom of speech in different ways. E.g., laws against "hate speech" are generally left, laws against "unpatriotic" speech are generally right, laws against blasphemy are generally right, etc.)
UK politicians also mostly avoid talking about abortion. The US is generally further right than the UK (both socially and economically) and somewhere over 60% of the US population thinks that overturning Roe v Wade was a bad thing, and about 2/3 of the US population think abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy should be legal. Boris Johnson's position would be entirely normal for a moderately right-of-centre American.
So I can't agree with your claim that the UK is far left on abortion and freedom of speech and should therefore be considered far left unless it's exceptionally right-wing on other issues: UK opinions on abortion aren't all _that_ different from US ones, and I don't think freedom of speech is a right-wing value at all.
This is all sticking with your framing where we compare the UK to the US, Australia and occasionally Canada. (Canada is about as liberal on abortion as the UK, I think.) Of course this ignores New Zealand, which has plenty of laws against hate speech and is I think similar to the UK on abortion; and Ireland, which has laws against hate speech and (on account of its rather theocratic past and still rather religious populace) modestly restrictive laws on abortion.
If we compare against Europe, or perhaps more specifically Western Europe, I'm pretty sure the UK comes out consistently to the right both socially and economically.
TGGP's link, if I've correctly guessed which one you have in mind, is to a tweet containing a screenshot of something with links in it. (I wish people wouldn't do that, but never mind.) Once again, this gives (at least so far as I can tell from that tweet; maybe there's more in the replies, but Twitter is configured not to show those unless you're logged in to it, which I'm not) _one_ example of someone getting a harsh sentence for "hate speech" and _one_ example of someone getting a lenient sentence for possession of child pornography. So, I repeat once again, you have heard about these cases _because they're unusual_.
Seems like you are defining the USA and its particular left/right coded issues as the norm and any assessing any cultural or political differences in other countries by that standard.
Eg, Cannabis remains criminalised in my country (NZ) marijuana. Some, mostly left wing politicians want to change that. Does it make sense for me to look at the relatively liberal regime in much of the USA and conclude that your country is very left wing?
On your wider point. I don't find picking real or hypothetical examples of where a criminal or commenter of one persuasion is treated more leniently than another very convincing.
1) This is very dependent on context; there's plenty of spaces where saying "I love the smell of male tears" will be condemned. Plus there is lots of random variation in punishments.
2) Your impression of whether "left" or "right" get treated unfairly is always going to be hopelessly biased by your own opinions. This is the value of Scott's approach of picking topics for his examples that are nonpartisan to try to come up with conclusions (all sides condemn pedophiles).
3) People are complex, they might hold 'left' or 'woke' positions on one thing and 'right' positions on others.
The upshot is, it's pointless to compare hate speech to Rolf Harris. Approximately no one (even on some weird woke corner of the internet) would argue Rolf Harris deserved less punishment than someone who commits a 'hate speech'.
The divergence there is that they are *socially* liberal (since that is the trend in society today, and the UK government draws from middle to upper-middle class, college-educated, urban professionals who have all been raised with nice liberal views). Hence, pro-abortion, pro-gay rights, pro-trans rights (often as much out of calculation that this will play well with the voters as out of genuine conviction on these issues).
They're *fiscally* conservative, which is why they're centre-right and call themselves conservatives: cutting back on welfare and social spending, low tax on business and the rich, etc.
The government of UK circa 2021 was not left-wing at all by UK and European standards. By the US standards, it was quite a bit to the left of any recent Democratic administration. Additionally, UK judicial system is pretty independent from the government and also more left-wing in many aspects than most left-wing-by-UK-standard governments.
I agree, and I think what it comes down to is that it's basically outgroup hatred and bullying disguised as a moral crusade.
I suppose it all goes back to "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/), doesn't it?
i.e.
"PRIEST: It seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. You forgive a conventional duel just as you forgive a conventional divorce. You forgive because *there isn’t anything to be forgiven.*"
&
"The Priest further notes that this is why the townspeople can self-righteously consider themselves more compassionate and forgiving than he is. Actual forgiveness, the kind the priest needs to cultivate to forgive evildoers, is really really hard. The fake forgiveness the townspeople use to forgive the people they like is really easy, so they get to boast not only of their forgiving nature, but of how much nicer they are than those mean old priests who find forgiveness difficult and want penance along with it."
-- as in, people call themselves merciful because they've never actually been challenged to be merciful. The moment someone actually displeases them though...
(i.e. It's like the man who's brave only because he's never actually been in any risk in any way, in other words.)
I Can Tolerate Anything is going to be 10 years old(!) next month; I wonder if Scott will do an update or a reflection on it.
I for one would love to read such a reflection. 'ICTABTO' had a very large impact on my entire outlook on politics; I had spent my life making the exact mistake he describes. It's a piece whose points seem obvious to me now because I've internalized them so thoroughly, but it sure didn't feel that way at the time.
Yes, this. I wanted to make a comment along these lines but was certain it had already been said somewhere, so might as well scroll till I found that comment and maintain something like a proper thread.
I think the key here is that CANCEL CULTURE IS NOT NEW. There has always been an Overton Window of acceptable discourse, and posting outside of it would get a person "canceled." It could have been that you were fired for being openly gay. It could have been that you violated the Comics Code. Whatever. I think the issue with Cancel Culture is that there has been a shift in the Overton Window, for some people but not for others. So the notion of what's acceptable public speech is no longer a matter of general public consensus. It'd be like if the definition of 'pornography' suddenly switched to 'women showing their ankles' for a quarter of the population. We always had some general sense that 'pornography' shouldn't be on public TV. But now we have some intractable disagreement about what constitutes pornography.
So, the root problem is that society no longer has a consensus about what constitutes acceptable public discourse.
I don't think there's any "anti-cancel culture coalition" to be had here, because complaints about 'Cancel Culture' are explicitly part of a conflict, wherein Social Conservatives complain about Progressives trying to shift the Overton Window.
> So, the root problem is that society no longer has a consensus about what constitutes acceptable public discourse.
I think this is pretty much it.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
Everyone can talk, but I get to choose who I listen to.
The magnifier of course is “social media”;
Andy Warhol said “In the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes.” It cuts all kinds of ways.
The practice of shunning in small communities is old, and that’s being cancelled for sure, but it’s local.
Christ was cancelled.
Yeah, that's the problem with the right-wing appeals to "Free Speech". Free Speech is only Free Speech if you're supporting people you hate. When you're supporting your comrades, that's just garden variety behavior.
"A white guy saying nasty things on X gets death threats from people; those same people defend a black guy with a long record of violent crimes and sex offences and say he didn't deserve to die."
OK, wow is that ever not an apples-to-apples comparison. Saying "[person] didn't deserve to die" (note especially since this is AFTER the fact) is about the most absolutely minimal defence of somebody one can possibly give. Personally, I don't believe ANYONE "deserves to die" (though I'm significantly less upset by some deaths than others).
Now, if it's the same people saying that are the ones making death threats, then yes, that's certainly inconsistent and morally reprehensible. But as a general rule, people who go around making death threats (even the relatively implausible online sort) are the Extremists of their particular position, with a capital E. I'm highly skeptical that all, most, or even a sizable minority of your ideological opponents are making or support making death threats. This only passes muster if you broad-brush everyone in your outgroup as believing and doing all the same things, which of course they don't.
> Personally, I don't believe ANYONE "deserves to die"
Then we are all getting screwed.
Emphatically yes. But some people are getting more screwed than others.
Yes, some people are getting screwed more than others. The ability to broadcast grievances and character assassinations through social media is a game changer but….
“Tis a Wicked and Censorious world Master Sparkish!
- from “The Country Wyfe”
Another thread on such discrepancies:
https://x.com/aaronsibarium/status/1825977695361994875
I liked the way he used pedophilia as an example of something (hopefully, almost) everyone on both sides finds really offensive. I think at least part of the objection to cancel culture comes from disagreeing about where the original statements receiving the punishment should sit in the overton window, rather than a bright line between acceptable and unacceptable consequences to be then applied.
Yes. It's almost always a gradient, with the "ideal position" somewhere in the middle. E.g. cannibalism is bad, but ... when a group is isolated and starving, it's the response that allows, or may allow, SOME of them to survive.
I especially like it because almost everyone[1] who whines about cancel culture will, in practice, agree with every one through A11 - because most of them demonstrably don't *actually* believe in the principal of free speech for things they find truly disagreeable, they just believe their own speech should be unpunished. [2] (You see evidence of this with Scott's starting anecdote in the linked post, where conservatives suddenly are ambivalent about cancel culture). Almost everyone is pro-censorship, they just disagree on what is permissible to censor (and, as I like to point out, when everyone agrees what to censor, it's just called "moderation").
Using "pedophilia" as an example is always useful as a test for whether people can be actually ideological consistent when faced with an extreme emotional stimulus, or whether they don't really believe in their principals.
[1] The posters in this blog section are an order of magnitude more likely to be in the ideologically consistent camp, as are most that identify as actually libertarian instead of right-wing/anti-liberal
[2] I wrote this, scrolled down, and then saw commentor "La Gazzetta Europea" outright saying the quiet part out loud, to some degree of agreement from the right.
Like I said, that is probably true for many people here, but it is *much* less common on places like eg twitter, especially when you weight more towards the loudest voices.
I only think it's a good idea up to A4 or A5, and only think it doesn't deserve any condemnation up to A6 or A7. Zero tolerance for anything and anyone remotely adjacent to something always leads to overreach, whether it's a partisan issue, or a non-partisan one like pedophilia. Scott has written about this too: https://web.archive.org/web/20170325201558/http://squid314.livejournal.com/333353.html
But people who only complain ("whine") about their own speech being punished, while they don't oppose cancel culture when it comes to speech they find truly disagreeable, are still right that punishing their speech is wrong! They are only wrong when they don't consistently extend the same treatment to others. In general, if someone is hypocritical (asserts both "A" and "not B", where A and B are equivalent), that doesn't mean he's wrong about both assertions, or that you can decide he's wrong about either assertion of your choosing, it means that he's wrong about one and right about the other, and it matters which one is which.
EDIT: Also, even if everyone only really cares about his own speech, different people who are at risk of some of their views being punished may form a coalition against cancel culture, or you can use their own interests to convince them to join such a coalition. Likely many (though far from all) people who only started to care about cancel culture because it targets their own views have also come to care more strongly about free speech as a general principle as a result.
>In general, if someone is hypocritical (asserts both "A" and "not B", where A and B are equivalent), that doesn't mean he's wrong about both assertions
Correct, but in this case, A being "my speech good" and B being "other's speech good", given f(a) =A and f(b) = B, they're claiming to assert f(x) is correct while also claiming f(b) = ¬B. They actually are asserting a special, discontinuous function g(x), which will do just as much damage when enforced.
It's not that they're never right, it's that they're wrong (or lying) about their stated beliefs - so we shouldn't take their beliefs *system* seriously, because their actual terminal values are counter to what they're claiming.
In response to your edit, your hypothetical coalition sounds basically exactly like the coalitions of early socialism - in practice, the object level beliefs actually win out and your glorious stateless revolution ends up passing the keys to the next set of would-be statists.
But we *should* take seriously the arguments of people like Scott who do consistently defend everyone's speech. (In the current post he argued some potential overly broad definitions of cancel culture, but he has defended a broad freedom of speech, including from private actions, many times, e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170405013731/http://squid314.livejournal.com/333353.html) Hell, we should even take it seriously if hypocritical people provide good arguments, ones that don't depend on trusting their judgments but we can independently judge them.
Re: the last paragraph: I don't know what the coalitions of early socialism were or what they did (where? Russia? the West?), and don't really follow how it's relevant to the cancel culture discussion. Do you mean that if you don't want view A to be suppressed, so you don't support suppressing view B, then the pendulum will swing to view B winning, and it will suppress view A just as much as the current system? Firstly, I'd say siding with the underdog in the marketplace of ideas (which is closely related to whichever ideas currently get suppressed) makes it less likely that any one side wins a complete victory, and a complete victory makes it more likely that competing ideas get suppressed. Secondly, a complete swing of the pendulum is arguably implausible; politics often moves in the same direction for a long time, if we don't suppress those who disagree with the direction, it may at most slow down the movement or move it slightly backwards, but it has a slim chance of actually enabling a complete victory of whoever we stop suppressing.
I'm generally fine with Scott's takes on things, with my one gripe being that he sometime writes in a way that falsely presumes there's a clear bright line between "censorship" of "free speech", which is bad and we should never do it, and "moderation", which even he recognizes is necessary. This post is pretty explicit about there not being a bright line.
I was mostly talking about the discourse elsewhere. I'm not convinced of the value of arguments rooted in bad faith, but I understand your point
As for the socialism metaphor, I was clumsily trying to allude to the tendency of socialist revolutions, composed of true believers in equality and allies of convenience, tend to result in those allies of convenience just using the true believers to swing the power wildly into their favor, and only further inequality. I see the same patterns in both sides of the free speech/cancel culture argument - but especially the right, because freedom of speech is a fundamentally liberal idea, and they hate libs.
You seem to understand that based on your pendulum metaphor though, so I think we agree on the basic facts, just not on the likely outcomes.
I'm so curious about the flowchart linked from that post ('Whoever made it obviously had never met an actual Christian') but sadly it doesn't seem to have been archived (weirdly, the wayback machine's list of captures has a 500 error).
https://web.archive.org/web/20131212190606/http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/exploringourmatrix/files/2012/08/wpid-Photo-Aug-9-2012-1207-PM.jpg
Oh, looks like archive.org is just having some intermittent server issues. Thanks!
I would guess this is probably true for classic First Amendment free speech as well - the people who defend it consistently are a minority. And yet most of us here don't consider that a knock on the First Amendment.
I'll certainly admit that opposition to cancel culture tends to be even *more* hypocritical than defense of the First Amendment, but that seems to me a matter of degree.
A1-A6 concern only an individual's private behavior to not support something they find offensive, and are therefore not relevant to "pure" cancel culture discussions (as opposed to concerns that people are personally more bothered by certain discussions than they should be). However, cancellation campaigns require participants, and someone in any of these categories may be participating in a campaign to cancel someone, in which case their behavior is unfortunate but should not be directly targeted as morally wrong.
A7 is pure speech with no coercion, so same as above.
A8-A9 are attempts to use social pressure to make others participate in a deplatforming campaign. These are often bad, and often a part of cancel culture, but do not require or prompt any official response. However, A9's threat to refuse to interact with those who disagree is where I would draw the line between liberal attempts to convince others and exercise of one's own right of association, and illiberal attempts to force others to conform.
A10-A12 seem like pretty classic examples of attempted deplatforming, which is harmful in a way that goes beyond social condemnation, as it no longer appeals to individuals' rights of free association but instead asks some sort of authority to censor or reduce the reach of a given type of speech.
I consider myself very opposed to cancel culture, and I would personally have no qualms about doing A1-A7 in the case of something I found morally unacceptable, would reserve A8 for what I thought of as the absolute worst content, and would not do A9-A12 on principle (although offline, I would probably reconsider my friendship with someone who I thought actually supported pedophilia or something else I consider equally bad).
I think most of the problem is that people disagree about how outrageous certain things are or should be. Once you take the mask off, it's all an object-level political war and the meta-level talk is pure pretense.
We cannot give a clear definition of cancel culture for a single reason; the problem is not "intolerance" or cancel culture, but the existance of left-wing progressivism and its moral crusade for a new society, that require extreme cultural repression.
All societies in history had a form of cancel culture. Our problem is that we cancel good things, not that we cancel stuff.
Yep, society needs to have a broad agreement on which things are good and which are bad for liberalism and civility to work. Whereas we're in the middle of a "progressive" revolution so broad in scope that even a core notion like "woman" is no longer uncontroversial. Also, amusingly, these "progressives" usually refuse to acknowledge this revolution, their default frame is "all reasonable people have always agreed with whatever we say", but this probably isn't a key point.
"See also "Star Trek was always woke""
I'm confused by this comment because I've seen basically every minute of Star Trek produced before 2015 or so, and...um...yeah, it *was* always woke. Depending on your definition of "woke," I suppose (which has always seemed to be a pointlessly broad word).
To be more precise, Star Trek has always had some tendency to push the ideological boundaries of its day in a progressive direction. In the 60s that was racial integration and women's rights. I suppose one could split hairs in disputing "always" by noting that Captain Pike in The Cage is explicitly sexist--so if you go far enough back to include just the pilot, the claim fails-- but TOS as a whole certainly did some boundary-pushing.
Once you get into TNG era Trek, of course, the progressive themes ought to be familiar enough to be extremely obvious to a modern audience. Themes of racial equality and gender equality are plainly present, and there are a number of episodes touching (in a somewhat veiled way) on various aspects of queer rights. My understanding is that the main things that stopped it from being more overt with these was that Rick Berman was much more conservative on that score than most others involved. For example, Andrew Robinson has said that he wanted Garak to be explicitly gay, but was instead forced to play him as extremely-clearly-and-unsubtly-gay without it actually being made explicit in the text. For example, there's probably gay porn videos that are less in-your-face about their gayness than his performance in "Our Man Bashir."
The only sense in which "Star Trek was always woke" fails is if you define "woke" as only applying to the specific social issues that are currently hot points of contention in 2024. In which case sure, I'll grant that he people making Star Trek in the 1960s were not, in fact, capable of time travel.
I'm not entirely clear on WHO you think is doing that. I agree that lumping in racial equality, sexual equality, mass censorship and trans issues all into one big package would be a silly thing to do. Which is why the word "woke" is so confounding. YOU may regard it as particular to the politics of 2024, but that's not the way I see it used in practice. It seems to be a catch-all term for things that various factions and segments and subcultures of the American right dislike, which *absolutely includes* all four of those things listed above, and many more.
If you want "woke" as a pejorative to specifically apply to, for example, trans issues and mass censorship (which would still be a weird grouping, but you do you) then you need to start pushing back a lot harder against the people using it to talk about race and gender equality, because right now they're doing a very good job of claiming the term as disparaging both the things you dislike and the things you do like.
Progressive isn't synonymous with "woke." Sounds like we need to define those terms better, too!
Oh, very much agreed. I much prefer to avoid using the adjective "woke" at all simply because it seems to have become almost meaningless. A lot of red tribe people seem to apply the term to anything with the slightest hint of blue-tribishness, while it seems like a good fraction of the blue tribe (at least the very online segments) have picked up on this and ran with it, using it ironically or with implied scare quotes, to mock its overuse by the red tribe. I take "Star Trek has always been woke" to be mostly a claim of that sort.
To the extent that it still has a descriptive meaning at all, I'd say "progressive but specifically for social issues" is the closest that one can easily come. But that's somewhat related but still pretty distant from the original use, which was something like "aware of racial injustice and power dynamics."
"Woke" never meant much of anything, but it briefly emerged as a word associated, by their own use, with progressive ultra-militants.
> To the extent that it still has a descriptive meaning at all, I'd say "progressive but specifically for social issues" is the closest that one can easily come.
This is inaccurate, except for the part about being "for social issues", except that "social issues" is defined broadly enough to include almost everything.
> But that's somewhat related but still pretty distant from the original use, which was something like "aware of racial injustice and power dynamics."
That may be what people said, but it's like defining "psychology" as "an understanding of the root causes of human behavior", when an outside description would call it "a bizarre cult that believes alien ghosts cause all of our problems" and see a clear difference between it and real psychology. You can define Scientology in general enough terms to make it sound reasonable, but that definition has nothing to do with why people object to it, except for on a meta-level where the evasive answer demonstrates part of the problem.
> I've seen basically every minute of Star Trek produced before 2015 or so, and...um...yeah, it *was* always woke.
I disagree. ST was progressive, but it was liberal progressivism, not woke progressivism. Serious question: can you tell the difference? I ask because the rest of your comment conflates "woke" with general progressivism, whereas I'd bet that most of the comment section here see them as quite distinct, and I'd even guess that most of us explicitly identify as "progressive" but not "woke".
(E.g., "Let this be your last battlefield" is not woke.)
(TNG started adding some bits of generic leftism (as distinct from liberalism), and DS9 seemed to be deconstructing those bits.)
Here's an example: some people may be against murder because that's one of the 10 commandments, others might be against murder because of the categorical imperative, or because of some elaborate bit of game theory, or maybe they were just told that "murder is bad" by their parents and it seemed like a good idea. Some religious people argue that any form of anti-murderism, anywhere in history, is a result of human perception of God's will. And so they look around and say that there's really no difference, that everyone everywhere who thinks that murder is wrong is basically agreeing that God exists and (e.g.) Jesus is his son, full Nicene creed, etc. Do you think they have a point? Does it matter that most of those people wouldn't describe themselves as Christian? Are they allowed to take credit for all of that, everywhere, throughout all time?
"I disagree. ST was progressive, but it was liberal progressivism, not woke progressivism. Serious question: can you tell the difference? "
Not really, no. Which is to say, I can tell you roughly which social and cultural issues were at the forefront of the progressive movement during which historical periods. But I don't see a clean and natural dividing line between "liberal progressivism" and "woke progressivism." It certainly seems like some people are very strongly in favour of the outcomes of last season's liberal progressivism, but much less in favour of aims of this season's. And certainly there are broad differences in the national culture between the 1960s, the 1990s and the 2010s-2020s that inform how these debates play out. But which facets of proposed or realized progressive change count as "fine, settled, reasonable, liberal" and which count as "radical, crazy, unhinged, woke" seem to vary *quite a lot* from person to person. People making serious use of the word "woke" do mostly seem to all think that they are using it in a coherent sense to refer to the same, but AFAICT they are simply incorrect about this. Mostly it doesn't matter (for now), because it cashes out into strident opposition for the same people, but that doesn't mean the differences don't exist.
I don't think your example regarding murder is a good one. I think the abolition of slavery, the fight for women's rights and fight to end segregation were all expressions of the same underlying impulses and value systems. I think the fight for queer and trans rights and various continuations for the fight against racial and gender inequality are also expressions of that impulse. I think it's the same, underlying, motivating factor that's behind the mass movements in all of those cases. Doubtless there are fellow travellers who were on board for some of those and not others, but I think the core ethos has been the same for *quite* a long time.
> But which facets of proposed or realized progressive change count as "fine, settled, reasonable, liberal" and which count as "radical, crazy, unhinged, woke"
So that, right there, is *not* the distinction I'm making, not at all. There's a more subtle distinction here, which you are apparently completely missing. I'm about to go on a plane, but for the moment, give this a read and see if it helps? He's more eloquent than I am.
https://acoup.blog/2024/07/05/collections-the-philosophy-of-liberty-on-liberalism/
>Yep, society needs to have a broad agreement on which things are good and which are bad for liberalism and civility to work.
Its not going to get it,people vary too much.
I do think that liberalism is generally unstable and can't reliably defend itself against viral totalizing ideologies, but, like the saying goes, it seems better than everything else that has been tried, so I appreciate people like Scott fighting for it, however doomed this particular attempt may be.
Defending against totalising ideologies is exactly what Starmer is doing , or thinks he is doing.
That's not what they are saying. At least that is not what I am hearing. What I am hearing is that it is not necessary to have one definition of notions like "woman" accepted by all, a plurality of definitions can live side by side, and that even includes definitions like "I just feel like that". The fights are started by the other side, such as Rowling, who say everybody has to accept one definition. In practice, in most of everyday life we can get along without any common definition, and when it is necessary, for example sports competitions, then a definition can be made for that specific purpose.
This seems clearly false. If somebody who "just feels like it" gets called a "he" by somebody operating under a slightly outdated definition, the punitive forces of the right side of history would come down like a ton of bricks on the offender. Both Rowling and them in fact agree that there has to be one definition, they just disagree on what that should be.
Hmm. No, that's not true. I'm a gay man, and to me, being a gay man means that I like dicks, and I also like masculinity, but a preoccupation with dicks is what I say is the defining factor. So trans guys don't do it for me, and I used to be a little annoyed by trans guys in gay men's spaces, and then I realized what gay means for me isn't what it means for everyone else, and I can both have my definition and apply it by virtue of the fact that nobody is making me fuck trans men. Plus, gay men's culture is downright utopian compared to the extreme dysfunction straight people have going on right now, so I don't blame anyone for wanting to be a part of it. Hope y'all figure that out.
Less of this please.
Talking about what people actually say and believe is reasonable. The insistence that your ideological opponents are intending terrible and nefarious things should either be left unvoiced or backed by strong evidence that they actually intend those things. There are plenty of better places to indulge in fact-free speculation about all the evil things that the out group intends to do.
p.s. I've read plenty of discussions about trans people in queer spaces, and I strongly suspect you don't understand the arguments actually being made. But the dearth of actual content in your comment makes it hard to tell.
"Yet."
Fuck off.
Sure. But you don't need to have your sexuality on your driver's license. There aren't Olympic competitions for gay men only, say, or any deep reason to have such things. Your private decision is functional here explicitly because it isn't the basis for any collective action. Culturally, it's not load bearing.
I agree that for some topics it's possible for people to have lots of different private definitions, so long as individual choice rather than collective consensus is what matters. And the more we can reach that kind of conclusion, the better. But you just need the right scissor situation where people are *forced* to choose one side or another, and where that choosing a side is seen as threatening to some group, to bring that quiet divergence to a head. Until that moment, everything is calm.
And yes, maybe that moment will never come for any given question.
>nobody is making me fuck trans men
Yet the expectation that cis lesbian women SHOULD be willing to fuck trans women, and it represents a moral failing on their part if they don't want to, is so widespread in trans activist circles that there's a specific term for it:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_ceiling
Cotton ceiling specifically dealt with a pornographer trans woman that routinely had private sex with cis women that confined in them that they wouldn't have sex with her on camera, due to various reasons including losing their queer/lesbian cred.
Cotton ceiling doesn't mean forcing all lesbians to enjoy girl dick.
Specifically the expectation in SJWy trans activist circles, who do not represent all or necessarily even the majority of trans people. I agree that there are communities where this expectation exists and it is toxic and terrible, but it's not the certified transgender opinion that all transgender people have.
I have mistakenly misgendered people before. When corrected, I apologized and used the term they prefer. Because I am a polite person who doesn’t feel the need to die in the hill of my right to make someone else feel like shit. The “single act of misgendering brings society down on you like a ton of bricks” thing is a horseshit strawman. It’s about insisting on everyone agreeing with your definition so hard you’re a huge asshole about it.
A lot of the stuff that people decry as cancel culture is just a group deciding some behavior is shitty and some people refusing to accept that they might have to accept some shit they think is silly or wrong in the name of being polite. A lot of the rest is people being straight up hateful and cloaking it in justifications about strongly held beliefs.
Social consequences for being a dick are normal. We just have more disagreement now about what constitutes being a dick and many, many more people with the opportunity to see us being a dick.
As soon as you grant that the notion of "misgendering" someone makes sense, you have accepted that the "progressive" definition is correct, and of course from then on there's no reason not to behave accordingly other than sheer assholery. I'd also agree that even if you don't grant that, it's assholery to make a confused person needlessly feel like shit to their face, when all of their social circle vigorously enables and "validates" this confusion.
If I insisted upon calling you a gender you don’t identify with, in public and repeatedly, I imagine you would be very unhappy about it. If not you, many cisgender people are. And I would bet you have no problem with them feeling that way. So… there is actually already a broad agreement that it is asshole behavior to misgender someone. Your argument is that it should be ok to misgender lender some people because you disagree that they are the gender they believe themselves to be.
You, then, are just an asshole who wishes to not have your asshole behavior socially punished in this specific scenario. Good luck with that.
"What I am hearing is that it is not necessary to have one definition of notions like "woman" accepted by all, a plurality of definitions can live side by side,"
This is completely and absurdly false for most progressives. If it were true, "misgendering" wouldn't be called a bad thing, let alone a form of genocide. Probably at least half of everything the trans movement has ever done would make literally no sense if this were true.
I'm reading this about the same way I would read "Christians have never really had a problem with one another having different beliefs". Like, are we living in parallel universes?
There's a difference between demanding you believe a definition of gender and demanding you treat somebody's personal understanding of their gender with respect. I don't care if you think I *must* be a man/woman, even though I don't feel I am either. But if you want to insult me by insisting your concept **must** apply to me instead of my internal concept, not cool.
re: the Christians analogy, precisely zero trans people have set up the inquisition, burned down anti-trans establishments, passed laws requiring people to use preferred gender language, etc. And literally every trans and non-binary person I know is chill if you accidentally misgender them. They're adults (I don't know that many kids!), they get that not everybody's brain automatically sees them and registers their preferred gender.
Also, when people use terms like "genocide" to describe language, ignore them. That's ridiculous and non-serious as flat-eartherism. It's not worth anyone's time to debate what the lunatic fringe is doing, even if they have very busy Twitter accounts. (And, yes, I will dead name Elon Musk businesses until the end of time. Call me Mx. Double Standard.)
You mean the guy who got sued over his religious belief that he had to refuse service to people the Bible says are bad but doesn’t require you to discriminate against?
>But if you want to insult me by insisting your concept **must** apply to me instead of my internal concept, not cool.
Isn't this exactly what gender-critical feminists complain about with regards to gender ideology? They resent the claim that trans women are exactly as much women as they are, by virtue of how they identify?
Nobody is telling them they aren’t women, or insulting their personal sense of identity as a woman. That’s the difference. They simply dislike a definition that is more inclusive than the one they prefer and openly insult those whose identity is based upon that definition.
>passed laws requiring people to use preferred gender language
At least one person has been convicted for misgendering someone, although his conviction was later overturned (https://thecritic.co.uk/misgendering-is-not-a-crime/). See also Canada (https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/canadas-gender-identity-rights-bill-c-16-explained).
Has anyone been convicted in Canada of misgendering someone?
"I don't care if you think I *must* be a man/woman, even though I don't feel I am either. But if you want to insult me by insisting your concept **must** apply to me instead of my internal concept, not cool."
I'm sorry, I don't understand the distinction you just made; the two parts are phrased almost exactly the same. Either you're saying that I can disagree with your definition but you can also disagree with mine--which is something virtually no progressive I've ever seen supports--or you're saying that I can believe what I want but I have to call you the thing I don't believe. Which is like saying "you don't have to believe Islam is true, but you *will* be killed if you publically repudiate it". And then saying that's religious freedom.
>Which is like saying "you don't have to believe Islam is true, but you will be killed if you publically repudiate it". And then saying that's religious freedom.
Again, no one is getting killed for repudiating gender ideology, and in fact many people are getting rich off of it (and the converse can't be said - *lots* of trans people get murdered merely for being trans, and in many states it was even explicitly accepted as not criminal to do so).
And it's funny for you to use religious freedom as an example - you're entitled to your own beliefs on the nature of God(s), but if you go on the internet and say "Muslims" are all mentally ill, *you're* the asshole. Likewise, intentionally giving a Muslim pork in a society of religious freedom makes *you* the asshole - and it's the same with intentionally misgendering someone.
It’s “nobody cares about your beliefs except where you start being an asshole about them”. What your internal belief is irrelevant. You have been made aware that misgendering is considered extremely hurtful, so to insist upon misgendering is shitty behavior. Even if you believe the idea of transgender is a bunch of hooey, it’s still shitty to do it.
And, frankly, the degree to which the tales of the harm of the transes turn out to be some waking up in a bathtub of ice fabrications makes a lot of the justifications provided for why it’s ok to be a dick about this ring hollow. Especially with how hard it rhymes with anti-gay propaganda we have mostly all agreed sucks at this point.
Some points:
https://nypost.com/2023/01/06/117-year-old-church-burns-down-in-latest-portland-mayhem/
https://www2.cbn.com/news/news/lets-burn-church-when-lgbt-activists-threaten-attack-uk-police-try-silence-pastor-instead
I am very much live-and-let-live with the trans crowd. But they're over-represented in a lot of the violence since 2020. And you can't blame the "far right" for I don't know, whatever, and not also note trans spree killers like Randy Stair, Alec McKinney, Ezra McCandless, or that kid in Nashville. Murder isn't a sane response to misgendering. I think trans rhetoric contributes to the problem. I agree, almost every trans person I know has been a decent human being. But so has almost every religious person been decent.
Liberals in general? Well, Jane's Revenge went on a little spree vandalizing LDS churches here in Utah and Catholic churches everywhere else. And let's not forget the many dozens of churches in Canada torched after that made-up boarding schools "mass grave".
My point isn't to dunk on your comment about "zero trans people do bad things." It's just to make it clear that sadly there isn't any group that's completely wholesome, and I think trans rhetoric (on the fringes! not everyone) lately has been quite a lot more violent.
This response is purely a matter of factual clarification and not trying to argue for or against any underlying morality.
If someone can't apply their taxonomy to you and must respect your taxonomy, I'm sincerely not sure how that's different from demanding agreement with your taxonomy. Such a demand for agreement might be seen as reasonable, but it's still a functional demand to use your taxonomy and for people to abandon their own.
" passed laws requiring people to use preferred gender language"
California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) considers persistent misgendering as harassment.
Canada's Bill C-16 included "gender expression or identity" as prohibited grounds for discrimination.
The UK's Equality Act 2010 makes discrimination based on gender identity illegal if it creates a 'hostile or intimidating environment.'
Again, I'm not saying that these things are good or bad. I'm simply noting that there is a definite movement to enshrine certain standards in law,, which has had some success.
> re: the Christians analogy, precisely zero trans people have set up the inquisition,
Trans protestors have raided and defaced churches
> burned down anti-trans establishments
Masterpiece Cakeshop only still exists because it's become a celebrity institution on the Right, but other businesses have absolutely been destroyed through trans-focused lawfare and harassment
> passed laws requiring people to use preferred gender language
It's the law in Canadian workplaces
https://www.them.us/story/canadian-court-rules-misgendering-human-rights-violation
And if the misgendering "demonstrates hostility" to the person in the UK? Crime.
https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/homophobic-biphobic-and-transphobic-hate-crime-prosecution-guidance
>precisely zero trans people have set up the inquisition, burned down anti-trans establishments
What about calling in bomb threats to gender-critical events? https://www.sussexexpress.co.uk/news/police-investigating-bomb-threat-against-hastings-meeting-1020623
Just give them another two thousand years, that'll even the playing field of "worst transgression ever".
"re: the Christians analogy, precisely zero trans people have set up the inquisition, burned down anti-trans establishments, passed laws requiring people to use preferred gender language, etc. "
Agreed, it's not necessarily trans people doing this, it's their cis allies, e.g.
https://www.newstalk.com/news/it-should-be-a-choice-setu-drops-legal-threat-in-gender-pronoun-policy-1716964
"An Irish university has removed controversial references in its gender identity policy.
The South East Technological University had previously stated that refusal by staff or students to use the preferred gender pronouns of another university member would constitute "unlawful discrimination or harassment".
In an updated policy released last week, SETU has removed the “unlawful” and is instead asking staff and students to avoid “unacceptable behaviour” and to avoid using a person’s pronouns “with which they do not identify”."
EDIT: As others have mentioned Masterpiece Cakeshop, I had forgotten about Autumn Scardina and their various lawsuits.
And here's an opinion piece that laments that the defendant is "a genuinely sympathetic claimant" because his "probable victory will make the law even more dangerously incoherent."
Curse those conservative Christians who would have baked the damn cake if Mx. Scardina hadn't deliberately tried to make a case out of it by provoking a reaction! Don't they know you only get to plead your conscience if you're LGBT+ and want to claim the right to do things that offend the normies? And double curse those judges who think conservatives have, you know, *rights* under the law!
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/4414848-the-colorado-cake-wars-continue-with-a-literally-colorful-twist/
"Since Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, not a single conservative Christian plaintiff has lost on the merits at the Supreme Court. The judicial justifications for these decisions have become increasingly implausible, and taken together they have made the law increasingly unintelligible.
...Autumn Scardina is a transgender woman. On the day that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the earlier case, she called Phillips’s bakery to order a pink cake with blue frosting. She did not describe any words or decorations. The bakery confirmed that it could make the cake. Then Scardina declared that the cake was to celebrate her transition from male to female. Phillips thereupon refused the order, later explaining that he “won’t design a cake that promotes something that conflicts with [his] Bible’s teachings” and that “he believes that God designed people male and female, that a person’s gender is biologically determined.”
Scardina is an attorney, and she carefully sequenced her questions so that there could be no doubt that Phillips would sell this type of cake to the general public. Scardina complained to the state Civil Rights Commission, which found that Phillips had discriminated on the basis of transgender status. That finding was clearly correct as a matter of state law — Phillips refused to sell her something that he was willing to provide to anyone else."
I like this interpretation of the earlier case:
"Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Denver, won an earlier case in the Supreme Court in 2018. He objects to same-sex marriage on religious grounds and so refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. The couple sued, citing Colorado’s ban on sexual orientation discrimination. The case promised to address major questions about the balance between gay rights and religious liberty, but the court ended up disposing of it in a way that evaded those questions by inventively declaring that the state adjudicators were biased against Phillips."
There's no 'inventiveness' about it. The state adjudicators were open about their bias, and the irony was that at the same time they were punishing Phillips for not baking a gay marriage cake, gay marriage was illegal in Colorado. Nobody ever explained how it could be discriminatory to not bake a cake for something Colorado said didn't exist, but hey. Why sue the State of Colorado when you can just go after a small businessman instead?
And even this rah-rah piece doesn't much like Scardina:
"Scardina’s relentless campaign against Phillips is reprehensible. But law consists of rules, and sometimes malicious and vindictive people have valid legal claims. Scardina cleverly came up with a cake design with no explicit message for Phillips to reject, but which had a significance that would repel him and induce him to refuse. So, even though he has stopped making wedding cakes and was bothering no one, she gets to entrap him with this trick. Nyah, nyah.
One might defend Scardina by observing that it has not been unusual for civil rights groups to use testers to determine whether real estate brokers discriminate against blacks. But such testing uncovers actual ongoing discrimination. Phillips was unlikely ever to discriminate against even a transgender person unless confronted with the scenario that Scardina crafted.
Scardina claims that she is upholding principles of nondiscrimination: “I don’t think the law can accommodate individuals sidestepping secular law based on your own internal religious belief. It descends into chaos very, very quickly.” But this litigation was her idea. And, if the dispute gets to the Supreme Court, it is likely to produce exactly the kind of bad law that she claims to fear. It is as unsympathetic a test case as anyone could devise.
The Supreme Court would be eager to rule against her, and the result is likely to be some vague expansion of what counts as free speech, or some vague limit on discrimination law. Devising the right balance between gay rights and religious liberty is difficult, but here’s a good starting point: don’t provoke pointless fights."
"This is completely and absurdly false for most progressives. If it were true, "misgendering" wouldn't be called a bad thing, let alone a form of genocide."
I suspect we are living in parallel universes. Could you cite at least one example of somebody referring to misgendering as "a form of genocide?" And if you do, perhaps include some degree of evidence that "most progressives" agree with it?
Misgendering trans people is considered a bad thing for exactly the same reason that misgendering cis people is: it's rude. It's jarring (for many people, not everyone) to have people refer to you in a way that significantly conflicts with your self image, and not deliberately upsetting people is basic, bare-minimum courtesy in most contexts. There are absolutely, definitely, without a doubt cisgender people in the world who look ambiguous/androgynous enough that you, yes you cannot determine their gender accurately at a glance. If you accidentally refer to a cisgender person by the wrong pronouns, do you consider it appropriate to apologize? If you encounter a person whose gender you are unsure of, do you consider it appropriate to ask how they would like to be addressed? Both of these questions would still exist in a world with zero transgender people, so unless you have a firm belief that "no" is the correct answer, your view has less to do with what you consider the definitions of "man" and "woman" and more to do with preferring to be deliberately rude to trans people in particular.
Now, the tiny kernel of truth here is that communities that support trans rights certainly have a much larger chip on their shoulder about certain sorts of misgendering than anyone would if it were just an issue about how cis people refer to each other. But that chip pretty clearly a result of the fact that trans issues have become a political football lately, and ESPECIALLY a result of the fact that deliberately misgendering trans people has become seen as a sort of activism or point of ideological pride among certain groups. It's particularly common among groups that are hostile to trans people existing at all, so somebody doing it repeatedly and deliberately is providing significant Bayesian evidence that they're part of such a group. Meanwhile, if you're just spending time in trans-friendly spaces and not deliberately antagonizing people, accidentally misgendering someone isn't a big deal at all: it might earn you an exasperated glance at worst, but more usually just a friendly reminder.
No, but if he wants to wear a Napoleon costume and get plastic surgery that makes him look more like Napoleon, and you want to ban this, you are trying to prevent him from existing as he sees fit.
Obviously, this colloquial definition of "existing" still limits the word to cases in which someone is specifically supporting a policy that would restrict the freedom of trans people to live their lives as they please, rather than saying that they believe a woman is an adult human female etc.
"Could you cite at least one example of somebody referring to misgendering as "a form of genocide?"
Tends to be lumped in with all the other things that are considered to make up "trans genocide".
And an organisation called "World Without Genocide" includes it in their explainer about trans rights:
https://worldwithoutgenocide.org/genocides-and-conflicts/background
"Misgendering means using incorrect pronouns when referring to someone’s gender identity. Sometimes, it happens by accident. People can slip up or unknowingly misidentify someone. Other times, it is intentional and derogatory. For example, people may purposefully identify a transgender woman as ‘Mr.’ or ‘him’ in order to undermine their gender identity and make the person feel uncomfortable.
It is important to respect the pronouns that others choose to share. It is also helpful when introducing yourself to share your gender pronouns so that others do not accidentally misgender you. For example:
My name is _____, and I use _____ (she/her, they/them, he/him, she/they, etc.)___ pronouns.
There are a lot of ways that people in the LGBTQ+ community describe their identities. Understanding this language is important to create safe and respectful discussions. Using the proper terms and labels encourages respect and understanding."
They also engage in activism on the topic:
"In 2020, World Without Genocide submitted an amicus brief regarding N.H. and Rebecca Lucero, Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Human Rights v. Anoka-Hennepin School District No. 11. In this landmark case, the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled that Minnesota schools must allow students to use locker rooms which align with their gender identity", and they include "Sexual Orientation and Identity" in their list of "Genocides and Justice":
"World Without Genocide publishes information about many genocides and conflicts around the world.
Use the right-hand navigation to select a topic."
This person explicitly links genocide and trans issues:
https://chican3ry.medium.com/some-thoughts-about-ongoing-trans-genocide-narratives-43d7152c6e3
"Anti-trans activists have really effectively mobilised a strategy of stigmatising communication about harm targetting trans people, on multiple fronts. When we talk about hate crimes, they claim that any rise in hate crime is due to reports of misgendering. When we talk about violence, they cite activists talking about how using the wrong pronouns is “actual violence”. This is an effective strategy at smothering any discussion of anti-trans harm because minimising everything we say and changing the topic rapidly forces us into further debates of degenerating quality and relevance to anything like addressing harm against trans people. One of the things it relies on is seizing on any and every exaggeration of harm that ever happens and maximising that as a “gotcha” to demonstrate that we are playing up rare but tragic events in conjunction with a variety of everyday things that normal people have no problem with in order to manipulate the poor and vulnerable feelings of the general public for some sinister purpose. The confusion is the point!
One of the things that makes this minimise, deny, reverse victim and offender strategy (known widely as “DARVO”) strategy so effective is that it rapidly degenerates all discussion of harm into a community vs anti-community activist version of “He said, She said”. We do not have the same access to the media that cisgender anti-trans activists do, and we are starting automatically from a position of suspicion in relation to being a group labelled as suffering from a catastrophic mental illness — we can’t even figure out what sex we are so how on earth can we be relied to know what’s good for us? And the natural human reaction because as a community we have not been very organised in responding is to increasingly try to counter-escalate, and insist, no really, harm is happening and it’s very serious! This doesn’t work.
And so we start reaching for the lists of stages of genocide, the stories about the sacking of the Hirschfeld institute, the names of trans people murdered under the Nazis, we effectively try to overcome these fabricated communication barriers which at their root are about our relative disprivilege in being taken and heard seriously and we try to overcome them by finding more intense and terrifying things to explain the creeping terror we are increasingly feeling, because we are being ignored when we talk about the harm we are facing and we quite naturally imagine that if that harm and terror about threatened further harm was understandable to cisgender people, they might help us stop various impending disasters.
Except at this point, we’re facing some very serious forms of harm and threat, neonazis in the street working in cahoots with major broadcasters, mass shooters, demonisation, and apparently the best communications strategy that we’ve somehow allowed ourselves to commit to is training the wider cisgender public in obscure niches like the very cutting edge of Transgender Holocaust studies, the nature and typical progression trajectory of an average genocide, the complex ways that existing anti-genocide frameworks don’t quite encompass as a group that isn’t a religious minority but nevertheless we are being targeted as if we are a religious minority. We’re seriously in the weeds! And all we need to do is talk about how many of us are facing increased street violence, harassment, cyber-stalking. About how specifically the government in the UK and the USA are each working diligently to ensure that human rights infrastructure will not protect us when we need it, or in some states is transitioning into active efforts to persecute trans families. When we’ve reached this point, these genocide frameworks have helped train our instincts to recognise the quite grave threats on the horizon but leave us lacking in trying to discuss those threats in a way that is immediately actionable in the present."
So, decide for yourself.
If that is indeed the position you are "hearing", then I can only assume you've been carefully avoiding any political media outside of that written by Scott and his friends for the past several years, because that position has basically no presence anywhere outside of his sphere of influence. The position of mainstream liberals is that "woman" *must* be defined entirely by self-identification and anyone who considers biology-based definitions relevant for any purpose is a hateful fascist.
As far as I know, Rowling has not gotten anyone cancelled. She started getting cancelled for tweeting that biological sex is real. If you think Rowling is the problem for tweeting her definition of sex, then in what sense are you allowing a plurality of definitions to live side by side? Are people only allowed their definition if they don't tell anyone?
There's a symmetry to "who started it" arguments. Both sides see themselves as just acting like normal, reasonable people and the other side as the ones who took the first bad action that started the fight. You see this as Rowling starting the fight while Rowling sees a crusade started against her for an innocuous opinion.
I mean, currently she is being "cancelled" for committing some form of libel or defamation by picking someone who is -- according to all confirmed evidence -- a biological woman and calling them a man.
Unless Joanne has done a test on the boxer herself, it doesn't matter whether no test has been released, asserting something defaming that you don't have substantial (as opposed to purely speculative) evidence for *is the definition of* defamation in the UK - the burden of proof is on Joanne to show it is something she knows to be true.
I'm not familiar with Rowling's latest gender-related tweets, but she was getting cancelled in 2020 for this tweet: https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1269389298664701952
If the parent commenter thought that original tweet was allowable but some more recent tweet by Rowling was not, then I may have just been missing the relevant context.
But if Rowling is just calling a woman a man, then the parent commenter's argument wouldn't apply. They said the problem is Rowling insisting everyone use the same definition of sex. You're saying this isn't a definitional issue - Rowling is just lying about facts.
Right. My point was the reality of the present undermines the claim that she's "just" being cancelled for "tweeting that biological sex is real".
In reality, what people are opposed to is the fact that Rowling believes that in the *social* (and more pertinently, *legal*) context(s), *only* the biological definition should be used.
And that she's a genuinely phobic bigot that sees trans women as "male" predators nefariously invading women's spaces, and sees them around every corner - even in people who are, by biology, women, with all the parts she has claimed in the past to define a woman.
I mean
This case is very complicated, as there are conflicting claims: is Imane Khelif female? intersex? trans? Nobody quite knows for sure, the various governing bodies are issuing contradictory messages, and it's an entire mess.
I don't think there is any "confirmed evidence" about Khelif's "biological womanhood" and I feel sorry for them getting dragged into this fight in such a manner. This is a very personal and private matter, and having to litigate it in public like this is invasive. But there is a real question going on here and a real need for clarification on policy.
The side that invented "racism = prejudice + power, ergo you can't be racist against white people" does not get to retreat to the motte of linguistic descriptivism when threatened. Trans activists are not demanding that trans women be permitted to compete in female sporting events because they believe there are multiple concurrent definitions of women which are not in conflict with one another: they are doing so because they believe that a woman is anyone who believes they are a woman, and the people who believe that a woman is an adult human female are mistaken or bigoted (or both).
There are cases where a plurality of definitions can co-exist, but there are also cases where definitions are not open in that way, but are the first and necessary step for us to even engage an aspect of reality. For example, you probably wouldn't say that many definitions of mammals can happily coexist, some including reproduction by self-cloning, some not. In such cases, if you change the definition, you are talking about a different phenomenon, and that should be clear.
very backwards, the whole point of liberalism is that its meant to make it possible to have civil society under conditions of widespread disagreement about what things are good/bad, healthy/unhealthy, natural/unnatural, sacred/profane
Sure, that's the proclaimed ideal. What's swept under the rug is that it has ever more-or-less worked in largely racially and culturally homogeneous societies, where people may have disagreed about esoteric scriptural subtleties between their Christian sects, but didn't even consider it possible to disagree on what the word "woman" meant.
And yet, here we are today, where liberalism has delivered precisely the opposite of its core stated purpose. Intolerance and hatred is amped up to 11 everywhere, and so far as I can tell, mostly perpetrated by the adherents of "tolerance and empathy."
Like how Socialism is supposed to deliver us unto a utopia, but instead every time we try we get a genocide-cult.
The contradiction is actually reasonably easy to ferret out. Liberals reserve all their good behaviour for the ingroup. The outgroup gets the pointy end, and lots of it.
In case you think I'm being unfair here, recall that conservatives are more able to comprehend and accept the outgroup beliefs than vice-versa. Obviously everyone treats the outgroup awfully. Just that... liberals take it further and do it more vociferously.
And then we get... current year.
> where liberalism has delivered precisely the opposite of its core stated purpose
Eh, I'd say this is what happens when liberalism is in the process of breaking down. Liberalism requires that a decent fraction of the population, especially leaders, be willing to put aside their own preferences and uphold liberal values even when they go against their own beliefs. These days, that's taken as a sign of weakness and insufficient fervor. A liberal democracy can't survive once more than half the voters abandon liberalism.
(I'm taking about liberalism specifically, here, and not leftism.)
"Whereas we're in the middle of a "progressive" revolution so broad in scope that even a core notion like "woman" is no longer uncontroversial."
Is "woman" a core notion, though? I'm sure it feels like one, but I suspect that's more about cultural memory than actual reality.
In centuries past which category you got sorted into at birth "man" or "woman" was extremely, extremely important to the future course of your life. It could determine all sorts of things like your eligibility to own property, your access to education, your ability to manage your own finances, how much say you got in who you married, what jobs you were allowed to work, what hobbies you could pursue, what company you would be welcome in and whether your spouse was legally allowed to rape (or in some extreme cases) murder you.
None of that is true anymore (in typical liberal democracies). Nowadays which category you get sorted into determines a far narrower range of things, stuff like access to a few scholarship opportunities, your overall risk for homeless, dying in war, and being a victim of domestic or sexual violence, how hard it will be to get custody of your kids in a divorce, which washrooms you use and which sports teams you're allowed to play on. Some of those are still pretty important things, but much, much less sweeping and inescapable than the previous list. And for basically every one of them, there's someone out there (usually a great many people) who think that that thing *shouldn't* be determined by your category membership, and are working to break that link. Oh, and it also determines some very nebulous, difficult-to-pin down social stuff around the impressions you make on people and how they treat you.
Note that for pretty much everything listed on the first list, we're not "in the middle" of breaking the link (here in the developed world), we have already done so. We have done so soundly, convincingly, several decades ago at a minimum. Those questions are settled. It doesn't seem remotely realistic to me to expect that wheel to run in reverse any time soon. So the question is, are the items on that second list REALLY important, core, bedrock principles to our culture and politics? Obviously opinions can differ, but it sure doesn't seem like they're *treated* that way. Appeals to incredulity (i.e. "The doesn't even know what a 'woman' is!") seem to be far more common than object-level arguments about why most of the remaining social consequences of category membership are important to defend.
You may note I haven't said anything about biology. Biology exists, of course. Contra various slogans and hot-takes, there's actually very little disagreement in this debate about the *physical* consequences of peoples' genetic makeup, it's almost solely about the *social* consequences. That is, the essence, the entire debate: should there be ONE definition that tries to bind the biological categories perfectly to (what's left of) the social categories or TWO definitions, which lets them be separate.
And here I thought the core notion of "woman" might have to do with one's role in the reproduction of the species. Which feels, I don't know, pretty core.
Biology is relevant to many very important social issues. Which sex you belong to determines which sex you can have children with, which of two almost disjoint sets of people consider you a potential romantic or sexual partner or spouse (which in turn affects how they behave towards you, and how you want them to behave towards you, in many contexts), whether you are the one who gets pregnant, gives birth and breastfeeds when you have children (which likely affect your career and your related choices), what attributes your potential partners find attractive...
?! It seems to me that the central motivating factor in the entire ideology of liberalism was the 17th-century discovery of what happens when people *don’t* have broad agreement on which things are good and try to fight it out, and that the central dogma of the ideology is toleration specifically of things you may believe are wrong.
See here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lukianoff-and-defining-cancel-culture/comment/66226581
Are you saying that, if left-wing people stopped cancelling people, and right-wing people started cancelling people, then cancellation would be a good institution? If so, how do you avoid something like Lysenkoism?
Some people will respond: "Because I support good things and oppose bad things". This misunderstands Lysenkoism. Many people who supported Lysenkoism acknowledged in private that Lysenkoism is wrong and harmful. Cancel culture makes you choose, in that case, between being right and not being cancelled. I can't really take anyone advocating cancel culture seriously until they give some reason to believe that have an answer to that. More broadly, cancel culture can be, and is, abused (another example is described in Ivan Fyodorovich's comment on this thread about the "Racists getting fired" blog). This, IMO, is a fundamental, unresolvable, and significant problem with cancel culture that is sufficient to make the whole institution net harmful.
Agreed for the most part, but this goes back much much further than the 1950s. Cancel culture is pretty much as old as civilization, and Liberalism was our cultural answer to it. Two religions in the same area used to result in wars of extermination, but now we can mostly get along without ongoing violence. That's a big deal. When one side defects, the answer should not be "it's okay when we do it" or "we're just getting revenge from before" but instead "no, this is also wrong."
I'm not upset with the left for some of its members engaging in cancel culture. I am upset with the left that the rest of them seemed fine with it and often egged it on. I am not upset that some of the right is engaging in cancel culture, but I will be upset with the right if/when the rest of the members support cancelling.
I don't agree. I do agree that the right is no less cruel all things considered, but their cruelty takes a different form. Vicious and all-encompassing campaigns of cancel culture are a distinctly and essentially left-wing thing.
Nothing during the Bush years remotely compares to late- and post-Obama cancel culture. You had a handful of people targeted for very direct opposition to the wars or for actually insinuating that 9/11 was justified. If there'd been hundreds of people fired every year for suspected anti-war opinions, or even neutral opinions or pro-war opinions expressed with the "wrong" language, and if the same had also happened with dozens of *other* issues important to the right, then you could make a comparison.
Going back, the Soviet Union murdered *several times* more people than Nazi Germany, yet strangely that receives a tiny fraction of the attention. There's a new Holocaust movie every few years but most people probably barely even know about the Soviet purges, and academics certainly have no interest in drawing attention to it, for obvious reasons. Admittedly the Nazi murders were probably a lot crueler than the Soviet ones, but I'm not really sure because again, nobody talks about it.
(Now try comparing the *McCarthy purges* to the earlier Soviet ones...)
And of course, the very first instance of left-wing cancel culture, the Reign of Terror, literally happened three or four years after the term "left-wing" was coined!
The right does other bad things, but I don't think you can deny that cancel culture is baked into the left's DNA.
Both wings have literally got 99.9% the same DNA, they're all humans.
Allegedly
Still at least two nines of similarity if some chimps got mixed in, and they've got social dynamics including ostracism, so our common ancestor probably did too.
Yeah, you're definitely not on the wrong track at all, claiming that a large fraction of the human populace is in fact inhuman. Keep going down that road!
Stalin was _awful_ but his administration didn't murder nearly as many people as the Nazis did. There's a difference between incompetence leading to mass famine (which happened in the USSR) and rounding people up, putting them in extermination camps, and gassing them en masse (which happened under the Nazis).
This seems to imply that as far as deaths go, Stalin was mostly guilty of incompetence.
Firstly, the GULag archipelago is a thing, with its millions of victims (the exact number is hotly debated) totally intended. Secondly, mass purges and executions outside the GULag system are a thing. And finally, considering the Holodomor as pure incompetence with no ill intent is a position that needs justification.
The specific “body count” Stalin had is debated, but 15 million is _not_ a radical position.
It’s also worth mentioning that his camps did not vanish with his death.
>And finally, considering the Holodomor as pure incompetence with no ill intent is a position that needs justification.
The Holodomor-as-Ukrainian-genocide seems to me a nation-building kind of myth boosted by the current war. It's a more antagonistic version of how Canadians define Canadian-ness as not being American.
There were famines throughout the USSR during that time, and there is at least some evidence that Ukraine was treated better than some of the other regions.
https://econjwatch.org/File+download/1286/TaugerSept2023.pdf?mimetype=pdf
"Yet this reduction set a precedent for more reductions. In August, once procurements began, Ukrainian leaders and leaders of other provinces appealed to the central government for more reductions in procurements. Stalin and the other leaders agreed to cut Ukraine’s grain procurement plan a second time, by 40 million puds (656,000 tons), over 12 percent of the plan that remained for Ukraine to fulfill. This proposal was approved (the decree specified that procurements were to be reduced by 39.5 million puds, holding back half a million puds of reduction in case further reductions were needed) and implemented over the next two weeks.
In preparation of this measure, Stalin wrote to his subordinate in Ukraine Lazar Kaganovich and specified that this reduction was only for Ukraine, the other regions would have to wait:
'As is evident from the materials, not only the Ukrainians but also the North Caucasus, Middle Volga, Western Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Bashkiria willspeak with the Central Committee about reducing the grain procurement plan. I advise satisfying for the time being only the Ukrainians, reducing their plan by 30 million and only in extreme case by 35–40 million. As for the others, postpone discussion with them until the end of August. (Pyrih 2007, 290–298)'
Stalin here clearly indicated that he considered reducing procurements for Ukraine a higher priority than for other regions. These are not the words of a leader who had a strong anti-Ukrainian bias."
First of all: re-reading my comment above, it came out kinder to Stalin than I intended. His government did commit a lot of outright massacre. I just think that (1) the large majority of death caused by the Stalin regime was the result of incompetence and low-grade callousness rather than deliberate murder, and (2) the amount of deliberate murder they perpetrated was substantially less than the amount the Nazis perpetrated.
So I think it's correct that "as far as deaths go, Stalin was mostly guilty of incompetence". Not because he wasn't also guilty of monstrous levels of outright evil, but because the incompetence managed to kill _even more_ people than he deliberately had murdered.
On the specific subjects of the Holodomor and the gulags:
I am not an expert on this stuff, but my impression is that the Holodomor was somewhere _intermediate_ between deliberate genocide and mere incompetence. Something along the lines of "meh, who cares about those uppity Ukrainians". Evil, for sure. Resulted in a fuckton of deaths, for sure. But not a serious attempt to wipe the Ukrainians out.
Millions of people were sent to the gulags, and somewhere on the order of 1-2 million people died either in them or shortly after release (and credibly because of hard treatment there). Again, evil on a grand scale, but not (so far as I can make out) deliberate murder in the way the Nazi extermination camps were: most of the people who died in the gulags weren't _intended_ to die, the government just didn't much mind whether they did. (Whereas the Nazis _did_ want millions of Jewish people dead, and when it looked as if the war was going to end before they managed to work them all to death they accelerated the process with poison gas.)
To reiterate: when I said Stalin was awful, I meant it. It looks to me as if he did somewhere around the same amount of damage to the world as Hitler did. It's just that less of it was a matter of deliberate murder.
also attributing the famine deaths to Stalin while limiting the Nazis just to the Holocaust and other direct purposeful killings and not the full 50-odd million of the Western theater (I'll grant that the Pacific isn't really on them) seems like isolated rigor
Don't forget Stalin's responsibility for the Western theater. Molotov-Ribbentrop plays a crucial role in setting the whole thing up, and that's on both Stalin and Hitler.
I'm not going to bother litigating any of these individually at length but think it's worth pointing out:
1) the absurdity of conflating the political DNA of 20th century Soviet Russia with that of the contemporary neoliberal American Democrat;
2) the similar absurdity in using revolution-era Soviet Russia as your leftist counterpart to right-wing "cancelation" campaigns in stable, mid-century America (McCarthyism);
3) that your focus on war protest firings during the Bush years ignores that America has historically institutionalized employment screening for right-coded offenses (i.e. felonies, sexual orientation, union membership, etc.), making "cancelation" simply the default state for the selected undesirables;
4) that you are straightforwardly wrong about the scale of the Soviet Great Purge (700k - 1.2 million murdered) as compared to the Holocaust (around 11 million murdered);
5) calling the Reign of Terror "cancel culture" robs the term of any specificity whatsoever and allows it to be applied to essentially any period of politically motivated mass killing.
To be clear, this is not an argument that "the left is good and the right is bad" but in favor of better and more coherent reasoning.
1) you used the term "the left", and you used it in a way that seems to be intended to include the modern American left. Thus, the only way I can understand your objection is if you think the Soviet Union wasn't really leftist, which unless I'm missing something is extreme revisionism.
2) Since the McCarthy purges were a direct response to the fears of the Soviet Union, saying that they can't be compared is a bit odd. But I mainly compared the latter to Nazi Germany.
3) So now you're boradening "cancellation" so that it's no longer restricted to speech. I think that's changing the topic, since I explicitly said the right is cruel in other ways than cancelling people (by which I meant, and I thought we all meant, for their words or opinions). But that aside...felonies? Are you actually saying firing people for committing actual crimes should be compared to cancel culture??? Or am I misunderstanding you?
4) I'll concede this point, even though I don't think it's in dispute that tens of millions died due to Soviet domestic policies, because I didn't realise it was in such dispute whether the Ulraine famine among other things was "mere" incompetence. I know hardly anything about this, partly because (as I said) hardly anyone talks about it.
5) You're going to have to elaborate on how the Terror wasn't the exact same sort of thing as modern cancel culture, but to a much worse degree. As far as I can tell they share all the same basic elements: the mob mentality, the frenzy for new victims, the purging of people who are insufficiently committed to the purge, and so on.
I appreciate the point in your last sentence, but I think this "both sides"ism can ignore the fact that while both sides do evil, certain particular kinds of evil are much more present on one side.
ClearChannel banned a large number of bands for anti-war views. The Dixie Chicks were banned by CC and everyone else for being disappointed in the President. Murdoch owned 146 newspapers around the world and they all supported the Iraq War. Maybe it was a coincidence that they all chose not to write about it.
I suspect you have a narrow definition of "cancelled".
"The Dixie Chicks were banned by CC and everyone else for being disappointed in the President."
This is widely sighted as equivalent but it is absolutely not what happened. The Dixie Chicks came out against President Bush and the core fan base of country music stopped wanting to listen to her (essentially case A2 from the article above, except widespread). A better analogy would be if Taylor Swift came out tomorrow endorsing Donald Trump and arguing that the election was in fact stolen from him. The vast majority of her fanbase (regardless of anything else they did) would instantly stop listening to her.
Gabriel Rossman of UCLA has written on the subject.
Your paper confirms that the Dixie Chicks were widely banned by Clear Channel for saying "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas" just before the Iraq War started. Your Rossman paper confirms that the radio stations were more likely to ban the Dixie Chicks depending on how close they were to a military base. Perhaps that was a coincidence.
The paper says that stations had some editorial control and chose to continue playing them but the vast majority stopped.
I maintain that you still have a narrow definition of cancelled.
Or perhaps if JKR came out as a transphobe and much of her audience stopped wanting to support her.
I think your definition of "cancelled" is too wide. Probably the right answer is somewhere in the middle. In addition to the Dixie Chicks, as pointed out by the other comment, I also disagree with the Murdoch example. That's manufacturing consent (as described in the book by Chomsky and Herman), but not cancellation. One could argue that the threat of cancellation partly underlies manufacturing consent, but there are lots of other reasons that journalists avoided writing critically about the Iraq war.
It seems hard to find a definition that includes JKR but not the Dixie Chicks
>I have never heard of a company with an open policy of not hiring people with any type of conservative views.
They don't need to announce it, they just do it. Specifically limiting this to "open" policies is gerrymandering your definition to exclude leftists.
I'd love to see data on this if anyone is aware of some.
"I have never heard of a company with an open policy of not hiring people with any type of conservative views"
Because they don't need an open policy - it's the default assumption.
The right is only more cancel-happy if you disregard the left's cultural hegemony. Yes, I'm sure in the Red Scare era it was pretty tough to be an openly Communist screenwriter, but it has always been *impossible* to be an openly Fascist screenwriter.
> even today they have major law firms openly announcing policies of not hiring people with pro-Palestinian views, whereas I have never heard of a company with an open policy of not hiring people with any type of conservative views.
A play I saw was an Israeli actress's last performance because other actors were refusing to work with her due to the current Gaza conflict. These things aren't always reported in the news.
There are boycotts of Israeli academic institutions and professors, regardless of their individuals views or relation to the war in Gaza.
> and right-wing people started cancelling people
That ship sailed looong ago.
Basically you aren't part of my alliance on speech, even though we might collaborate occasionally to fight left wing suppression of speech. If the balance of power switches, I'll end up allying with leftwing people to stop you from censoring them. (or if you don't identify as right wing, I'll probably end up defending whoever it is that you think are saying bad stuff that needs to be cancelled)
Whether this describes you specifically, Hanania and a lot of right wing people are very clearly not in it for protecting speech rights in general, but for protecting their own speech rights.
The reaction to people suffering consequences for being connected to pro Palestinian speech on the right made this very clear.
Yeah, indeed. I am not American or liberal, so I do not believe in a society that protect free speech at all. It is the sovereign who decide, and I want the sovereign to be on my side.
Well, at least the quiet part is out loud for you
> The reaction to people suffering consequences for being connected to pro Palestinian speech on the right made this very clear.
Also the Disney affair. Who would have guessed that the right would become the champion of explicitly using government power to arbitrarily punish companies for criticism of government policy? That's like the most archetypal anti-Free Speech thing you can do.
Every society cancels stuff in the broad sense that every society has laws that people are expected to follow. So murder is "cancelled", theft is "cancelled", etc...
Not every society included speech in the things that should be cancelled. At a bare minimum, I would consider America during the 70s through 00s to be a society that largely respected free speech and there were very few things you could say that would cost you your job. This sadly seems to be fading in the last 10-to-20 years, as gradually more and more opinions are considered fire-able offenses.
I agree that much of what we cancel now are good things, but it is possible to have a society that "cancels" genuinely bad things (murder, theft, etc...) while still giving people free speech.
The analogy is not to things being outlawed, but to there being opinions and attitudes which will invite social shunning and ostracism. I think it's reasonable to say that basically every civilisation has had opinions you can espouse in the town square that would get you metaphorically tarred and feathered. Perfectly-protected, socially-encouraged free speech has basically never been the norm of any known large-scale society. Late-20th-century America got further than most, but far from all the way there.
This is only because the decades of not acknowledging homosexual sex as part of the human range is a stunningly effective example of cancellation, but it's more rightwing than left, so it doesn't fit the standard schema.
It has always been acknowledged as a part of human range. Even as far back as the Bible, where it's called an "abomination". And while opinions on that have changed in some parts of the world, they mostly haven't (yet) on another part of the range that the post mentions, pedophilia.
Opinions did change on pedophilia. Most pre-modern societies had vastly different views on the appropriateness of sexual activity between adults and youth. Homosexuality sometimes, too - ancient Greece and feudal Japan are good examples of both.
ISTR that modern-day Afghanistan still has a fair bit of adult man/young boy stuff going on as a standard part of the culture.
Thank you for saying the quiet part out loud. So much of "anti-cancel culture" (not all, but much) is really just people who don't like progressive ideas and have use "cancel culture" as a way to suppress those ideas without acknowledging their own censorship.
There may be many people who only oppose suppression of their own views, and would like to suppress their opponents' views, but that doesn't mean that their opposition to the suppression of their own views is itself a way to suppress the ideas of their opponents.
Also, they are right when they oppose the suppression of their own views, for all the reasons actually consistent opponents of cancel culture like Scott say, they are only wrong when they want to suppress their opponents' views.
Yeah, the Colin Kaepernick saga certainly supports your shallow tribalist fingerpointing
I don't have a unified theory of how to treat cancel culture. But I think you definitelt cross the line when you begin punishing non-punishers, or insisting that other people take up a position between you and the thing you are canceling and no neutrality is allowed.
Yeah, A9 is where it becomes an autocatalytic problem.
I think that “punishing non-punishers” is hard to define here. Is it “punishing” to vociferously criticize someone in public and demand they go away? Because that’s what a lot of cancel culture consists in, and it’s also a lot of the behavior that so-called cancel culture is acting against.
It depends on who you are vociferously criticizing I guess. Saying "I stopped listening to this podcast since they started inviting guests like X / speaking in support of Y" should be fine.
Attacking otherwise innocent people who are just associated with the podcast, like other guests or listeners is crossing the line I think. They have not themselves done the bad thing, they are merely one degree of separation from people who have, and they could have a hundred good reasons for that.
What about just calling for a boycott then? I don't know. Ideally I am OK with putting pressure on the guilty, and I am not OK with pressuring bystanders to make them put pressure on the guilty. Calling for a boycott is technically OK then, but it can very easily cross the line.
I don't claim this is a total solution, it's just where I am at right now.
"Is it “punishing” to vociferously criticize someone in public and demand they go away?"
In this context, I think it's clear that the answer is yes if you want them to go away because they're not actively on your side, and no if it's because they're actively against your side or values. Can you think of any situation in which the former attitude isn't completely toxic?
this seems like a genuinely useful distinction
It sure seems like there is an important difference between:
a. Criticizing you for your expressed ideas, saying you are wrong, wrongheaded, a fool, a shill for Putin, whatever.
b. Trying to organize some kind of bad consequences for you outside of having me say your're wrong or call you names.
I think (a) is not the thing those of us who object to cancel culture object to. That's speech being responded to by other speech. It can still be plenty nasty, but it's nasty within the bounds of communicating ideas.
(b) is the place where cancel culture comes in. And there's not a clean line between those, because (for example) if you are an academic and I criticize your research in ways that makes your tenure committee decide your work is not very good, I'm causing a bad consequence for you--you don't get tenure. If you write a substack and I mock you and your ideas and convince lots of your subscribers to unsubscribe, that's speech but still imposes some consequences. But also, those seem kind of noncentral.
Suppose you find my political writing on the internet, and you disagree with my ideas.
So you contact my employer to let them know about my evil beliefs and ideas, make sure my kids' school hears about what a terrible person I am, etc. This seems pretty fundamentally different. You aren't trying to argue against my ideas with your own, even to the point of calling me an idiot or a monster. Instead, you are trying to screw up my life as a way of silencing me or punsihing me for having those ideas. I think this is a pretty central version of what people mean when they talk about cancel culture.
I agree with this, it's a good heuristic to regard "those that aren't with us are against us" as an attitude that indicates your movement has gone off the rails.
Straw man Alert: Your basic premise is wrong. Cancel culture arose during the #metoo movement as a broad boycott technique, with the aim to withdraw individual support from celebrities who had committed sexual crimes yet who remained very powerful within their industry, nevertheless. To attack it as if it were something else is the essence of the straw man argument.
I don't think this is really correct. For example, c. 2014- 2015 the "Racists getting fired" blog was dedicated to finding random people saying bigoted things on the internet and trying to get them fired from their jobs, typically jobs that had nothing to do with expressing opinions. The blog would then post their successes. A lot of random blue collar nobodies lost their jobs thanks to that blog.
The blog eventually got some heat when some guy changed his Facebook page to look like it belonged to his ex-girlfriend, then said some toxic things to rain down hell upon his ex. If he had been a little less sloppy he would have gotten away with it and her life would have been ruined.
Anyway, to me this is the clearest example of cancel culture. Trying to get people fired from jobs that have nothing to do with take-having.
This is ahistorical. Brendan Eich getting forced out as CEO of Mozilla because of his opposition to gay marriage is the canonical example of what we now call "cancel culture", and it happened in 2014.
I think the canonical example was Justine Sacco, or perhaps the "drunk pirate photo" teacher. Eich was barely a footnote in comparison.
I'm not familiar with the drunk pirate photo thing. I assume it predated MeToo, which is the only point I was making.
From looking into it:
- In 2006, Millersville University refused to issue an education degree to one Stacy Snyder. She was instead issued an English degree.
- She sued, arguing that her degree had been denied because of a photo she appeared in, in which she was drinking from a plastic cup and wearing a stupid-looking hat with a skull and crossbones on it.
- In 2010, she lost her case, with the judge noting that Millersville couldn't have given her an education degree because she hadn't fulfilled the requirements.
- The requirement she hadn't fulfilled was to gain teaching experience at a local school; she had been trying to do that, but the school barred her from its campus before her requirement was complete.
- The local school's formal complaint was that she was overly familiar with the students, interacting with them as a social equal.
- Evidence appeared in court that she had been badmouthing the school to the students there, which is a more likely reason for getting kicked out of the program, but wasn't the formal basis for it.
The photo doesn't appear to have been relevant to events in any way, except that it was Snyder's theory of why her university was wrong not to award her a degree in education. To the extent that cancel culture is implicated, it's only that Snyder appears to have believed in its existence enough to make it the heart of her very flimsy case.
Eich and Justine Sacco (both 2014) are much better examples, which is to say that they are examples.
"Donglegate", which is to me an iconic example of a cancel culture pile-on mess, was in 2013. As was the Justine Sacco affair. "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" was published in 2015. MeToo wasn't that prominent until the hashtag campaign started in 2017.
One of the things I found so darkly amusing about Donglegate is that the two guys shamed in the photo lost their jobs, but so did the woman who did the shaming. Nobody won here, but everybody lost.
Molloch won, and dined on clicks and attentions and outrage. The humans lost.
#CancelColbert was 2014 and afaik is the genesis of the name "Cancel Culture", if not the idea.
I very distinctly remember seeing #CancelColbert trending in 2014 and feeling like some major vibe shift had occurred that I couldn't put my finger on at the time. At least for me and my exposure to it, that's definitely the beginning of Cancel Culture.
“Cancelled” was a term used in various subcultures to talk about celebrities who had said or done something that made you want to stop watching them, as though their show had been cancelled, even before there was any specific demand to cancel someone’s show.
Huh. Do you recall whether it was specified who was doing the cancelling, or whether it was presented as a random bit of fate? "He cancelled himself with that remark" vs. "He might as well have been cancelled, for me, after that remark" vs. "After that remark, he's cancelled."
One useful things that the FIRE guy's definition does is just declare that we're only talking about the recent wave of free speech limits when we talk about cancel culture. This neatly sidesteps everything from before 2010 that maps neatly onto what we currently think of as "cancel culture", obviating the need to incorporate that into our reckoning.
This is different from saying it "arose" at some time that you think is more right. It's a fundamentally arbitrary distinction, so one's choice can't be "right" or "wrong." Thinking otherwise is myopic.
Having arbitrary definitions is fine, provided you're aware they're arbitrary and acknowledge it.
What’s the point of rigorously defining it? So you can get some group to agree on the definition and then collectively police the boundary?
It’s a good question, honestly, but I think these mechanisms just don’t work due to technological advances and the fact that there are evolutionary pressures seeking illegible strategies. “Get a group of people to collectively enforce a norm” I think only works for recruiting crowds with excessive time and desire to control others. Mob enforcement basically only works to enforce stupid norms.
The “person at a large employer fired for saying something unpopular” is a problem with large scale employment in general. If you want to be free, I think you have to be self employed. This was the thesis of “the radicalism of the American revolution” by Gordon Wood: the presence of a large number of small business owners in America (think blacksmiths, printers), made people uniquely interested in self government. Most of human history has consisted of appeals to the authorities to make the bad people go away. I think that’s where we are headed in the absence of a thriving culture of entrepreneurs. Absent most people owning some business - where there are numerous customer relationships - I think you invariably end up in an place where businesses enforce whatever cultural norms attract the most aggressive mobs, which by definition are going to be unreasonable and controlling persons.
The definition helps to define obligations of members of a coalition to each other.
Lot of people can't afford the seed capital for entrepreneurship, so this might be yet another problem trivially solved by UBI.
Because no UBI payment will ever get "delayed" or stuck in some bureaucratic hell for people who said the wrong thing at the wrong time?
All UBI does is centralise the power back to the state, precisely where you don't want it to be. Even if you believe you do want the power there... no really, you do not.
If you think centralized states having power is unacceptable, I've got bad news for you about who's in charge of most of the riflemen, as well as basically all the planes and tanks and nuclear weapons. Property rights exist in their current form because all that stuff is, push comes to shove, available for enforcement.
If you ask me, the problem isn't having a centralized state with monopoly over the legitimate use of force - beats the hell out of random banditry, which is the historical observed alternative. Real problem is the stochastic, irresponsible centralization of rent collection, through the medium of land speculation. Put simply, slumlords fuck everything up because they get the benefit of all those guns without paying for their fair share.
A Georgist land value tax would force said slumlords (and various other land speculators engaged in less visible but fundamentally equivalent sorts of villainy) to, in the most literal possible sense, stop wasting space. It does so impartially, without giving any busybodies new excuses to pry into what exactly the space is being used for - in fact, it permits many existing excuses to be abolished, and can fund UBI.
Point of non-means-tested payment (the U stands for "universal") is how bureaucrats in question can't and shouldn't know or care who's who, apart from bare necessities to confirm that an account is associated with a specific real person, or otherwise prevent outright fraud. Social security taxes and retirement benefits seem to do a decent job of keeping overhead low and policies apolitical, so we know it's possible.
I would also not be in favor of the US government owning all the newspapers, and am not advocating for that. My suggestion is basically just taxing land at a much higher rate, and many other things (including structures on the land) at a much lower rate, then redistributing most of the resulting revenue uniformly to all citizens, intended result being that whoever owns the newspapers wouldn't also have the power to capriciously render employees homeless and destitute.
Is there anything that doesn't make you think of UBI or Georgism?
There are many subjects which would not remind someone who is drowning, or engulfed in flame, of the various tactical differences between water and oxygen-rich air, but when discussing immediate plans those other subjects usually seem less relevant.
"What’s the point of rigorously defining it? So you can get some group to agree on the definition and then collectively police the boundary?"
To get people to think more carefully about their political positions so they can (hopefully) adopt better, more-consistent ones. One needn't even settle on some particular rigorous definition: pointing out the conflicts is often enough to encourage positive growth.
The point is to attempt to build a coalition to fight for meta level changes (i.e. freedom of speech) rather than just the object level (freedom of MY speech) which is what everyone does right now.
Cancelling is using the moral highground to bully somebody. Cancel Culture is when it becomes a group activity.
But you cede the moral highground as soon as you use it to bully others.
The paradox is that you can't take the moral highground against cancel culture bullying and use it to bully the cancellers...
But we need to emphasise that it's bullying. Call it what it is: cancel culture bullying.
Aldous Huxley said it best (Crome Yellow):
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
Parenthetically, this is why combat sports are fun.
As a non-believer I have to admit I neither understand combat sports nor your comment. But that's just me. Don't bother explaining. As for watching grown men kick a ball around... Really?
I gotta, sorry. If you lack remorse hurting people can be fun. Common approaches to lacking remorse are sociopathy and alcohol, but social structure can do it too. What football players do to each other, for example, would be felonies if they did it in another context, but: everyone on the football field is a volunteer, and roughly as good as everyone else, and knows the rules; there are referees...
In England we don't regard football as a combat sport... :)
I dunno, I've seen a fair number of players rolling around in agony... ;-)
I don't know anything, but I heard a lot of it is pretend
Till somewhat recently, in England they seemed to regard football *fandom* as a combat sport.
>Cancelling is using the moral highground to bully somebody. Cancel Culture is when it becomes a group activity.
So every religion, then?
Good point (altho I believe a few preach tolerance). Don't forget atheists, political parties, the various human races, car drivers vs bike peddlers, electric vs ICE cars, Canon vs Nikon users, Macintosh vs Windows vs Linux, dog owners vs cat owners, in fact almost every group seems to claim some moral high ground. Seems to be the default human state: everybody needs somebody to look down on.
Personally if somebody gets heated about something I say I feel I've done a good thing and made their day. We should all try to spread a little happiness. :)
[Sorry, getting sarcastic, but there is often ill-concealed glee when people pounce...
I see Eric Berne's "Games People Play" is still available. Google NIGYSOB]
One thing I would distinguish about is mediation analysis versus root cause analysis. In the case of pedophilia, mediation analysis would be studying the effects of child molestation and root cause analysis would be searching for pedophiles/pedophile networks/child molesters to target.
Mediation analysis is not directly actionable because it doesn't inherently give you a leverage for action. In principle it can serve as information for priorities, though a lot of mediation analysis is poorly performed and thus mainly reflective of researcher biases. Presumably the point of having mediation analysis is to eventually use it, so if it is poorly performed and entirely dependent on researcher opinions, it seems like it would be more transparent to shut it down and replace it with opinions. (Though it would be even better to fix the research methods so it actually works, but nobody seems to be moving towards that, so that's kind of a hypothetical idea.)
Root cause analysis is mainly useful when the root causes are bad. Generally we agree that child molesters are bad, so we can agree to suppress them. Progressives think conservatives are bad while conservatives think communists and sometimes also progressives are bad. Really they are all correct about this BUT it's rare that someone's political orientation is the most important part of their activity (unlike child molesters, where it seems reasonable that if e.g. you've got some priest diddling children, he's a child molester first and a priest second), so the politics should be viewed as negligible and therefore can't constitute basis for removal.
One major exception is politicians, who of course are mainly oriented towards politics. If a politician has the wrong political opinions, it is appropriate to try making them lose their job, e.g. by voting against them or encouraging others to vote against them.
A major issue is that currently voters are gradually building up misinformation, making them less informed. It might be tempting to do mediation analysis to convince them to have better views, and then we're back to the whole question of cancel culture again. My proposal doesn't really solve this, but it seems like the focus on cancel culture needs to be narrower on how to solve this particular problem, rather than how to address cancel culture in general.
I guess maybe I didn't explain the issue with mediation analysis well enough.
Let's say you study child molestation and find it to be harmful. Ok, but what can you do about this? There's no child molestation dial you can just turn. In order to do something, you need to first perform a root cause analysis to find a variable you *can* perturb to reduce child molestation - the classical approach being to identify a child molester or child porn viewer and incapacitate them (by jailing and publicly registering them? Idk).
This individual approach might work for child molestation, but there's a lot of crime it doesn't really work for, e.g. Patrick McKenzie sometimes writes about fraud networks where the people who commit the criminal actions are barely involved and instead the masterminds have an entire organization to coordinate and recruit people. This is still solvable by root cause analysis, you just have to look deeper in what those organizations are and properly purge them instead of addressing the superficial bits.
All of this is oriented towards bad people, which makes it very cancel-ish. But this same principle applies to ordinary stuff, e.g. for factory safety you might search for places to put up fences so people don't fall or get too close to machinery.
This was related enough to my own thoughts that I'm replying it to your comment (love your work btw)
I think there is utility in having a succinct description of some of the norms that cancel culture breaks as a way to respond effectively, even though notm enforcement is kind of the issue in the first place.
Scott points to one: a barrier between people's professional and personal lives. I think a clarification to make it match our intuitions more is:
People who do not engage in Discourse professionally should be insulated from professional consequences for their private beliefs, except where:
They are elected officials
The "belief" is actionable policy and their profession gives them opportunity or authority to advance it.
So Bob the mechanic shouldn't be fired for posting on Instagram that he thinks gay marriage is sinful and eroding society or that trans women are groomers.
A blog writer would not be insulated from that though: their profession is engaging in Discourse. If they engage in Discourse that enough people don't like and get fired, it doesn't bother me or break the norm in the same way as firing bob the mechanic would.
Not would an elected officials be insulated from pro Palestine rhetoric.
Where the distinction gets a little more useful is in cases of actionable policy. I would have an issue with a social media mob demanding successfully that some appointed bureaucrat be fired for saying, not in their official capacity, that trans women aren't women. But if the same bureaucrat created a policy proposal document for preventing trans adults from receiving hormones, I am 100% okay with a social media mob demanding they get fired - this is literally just the machinery of protest and the only realistic mechanism we have to influence the appointed state armature. But if Bob the mechanic says we should prevent trans adults from receiving hormones, I don't think it's appropriate to target him, Bob is not in a position to forward policy.
What do you make of firing people because they have strong negative opinions about part of the public they deal with on their job?
If they say some people are disgusting and deserve whatever punishment they get?
Surely depends massively on how correct the opinions are and how they influence the job. E.g. police addressing addressed child molesters in this way seems good while teachers addressing bullied gay teens this way seems bad.
It can get a little complicated, but generally:
If a checkout girl says on tiktok she hates gays or hates rednecks, she shouldn't be targeted professionally - her job will determine if she's doing her job with appropriate customer service.
If the checkout girl harasses a particular gay or redneck, and that harassed person complains about it on social media, and social media responds that she should be fired, this isn't the same situation. Complaining in the public square is how (one of the ways) we deal with mistreatment.
If a criminal sentencing judge says Jews are disgusting, a social media mob to get him removed is fine - he's in a position where his personal judgement is actionable policy.
If a marketing director says at a party that Jews are disgusting, he shouldn't be targeted professionally.
Basically, if someone says X is disgusting and deserve punishment and they are in a professional position to advance that agenda, it is not the same thing as cancel culture to demand they no longer have that position, that's just politics.
It's cancel culture when some random rocket scientist at NASA gets skewered for wearing an offensive shirt. Even if he was a rampant misogynist privately, of it didn't come out at work then rocket science isn't a position to advance misogynist policy.
Let's say someone who writes for the blog at a political party which opposes gay marriage writes on the blog that gay marriage is sinful. In that case the party shouldn't fire it, but voters should vote against the party.
Let's say the political party instead is in favor of gay marriage. In that case it seems like the blogger isn't doing their job of representing the party, and they should be fired (unless the point of the blog is to explore alternative opinions, in which case it gets more complicated).
Let's say the party instead has a wide range of opinions on gay marriage. Presumably it would be a problem for him to just assert that this is the full party's opinion, but if it's framed as a personal opinion or something he's exploring, presumably it would be better for the party to orient itself towards productive discourse around it than to orient itself towards internal purgefights, until it has worked out some sort of informed position.
Though realistically you are probably thinking some independent blogger rather than a party-affiliated blogger? There's two questions in this:
1. How should readers decide what content to pay for?
2. How should Substack moderate its content?
From a reader perspective, presumably ideally you pay for information production that you consider valuable and unsubscribe if a blogger turns to destructive fake mediation analysis. It seems legitimate for you to share information about why the mediation analysis is fake and destructive. But it also seems like often the mediation analysis can be fake and destructive without being the main thing the blogger does (e.g. if Scott Alexander argued gay marriage was bad for fertility or something and thus shouldn't be permitted, that would be less important than his other writing), and in that case it still seems appropriate to support him. Plus often the information about why some mediation analysis is fake and destructive is itself fake and destructive, and in such a case it seems appropriate to send the protestors back to do their homework properly.
As for Substack's moderation, presumably they have to make their own calls about which bloggers are more destructive and which bloggers are more constructive, and favor the former. It seems implausible to claim that Substack is net-negative die to misjudgements made on that, and so bad for people to try to force Substack to shut down/lose payment processor access/etc.. The judgement will instead have to stay at Substack.
I think in general engaging in Discourse professionally just strips away the normal expectation you should have that your professional life won't be targeted for your private beliefs, the same way we have legal precedents about expectation of privacy in different circumstances.
If a blogger took an odious position and social media demanded that Substack remove it and Substack acquiesced, I may personally agree or disagree with the decision but I don't feel like it's the societal discourse destroying absolute-public-bad of cancel culture - the way firing that NASA scientist for his shirt or the random girl who posted the AIDS tweet on the flight was bad. Being engaged in Discourse professionally at all makes you allowed to be targeted for deplatforming by your audience.
I personally believe in a strong norm of the marketplace of ideas and leaving odious opinions available to be viewed for a number of reasons, but I accept that even for me there would be times that some persons speech was so odious or liable to danger or to bad policy action (read: bad outcomes) that id support a social demand that they be deplatformed (but not suffer legal consequence). This is something that must always be allowed if we will truly have freedom of association. I hope we use it sparingly. But there are correct times to do so
To be clear, when calling for someone to be deplatformed, there is an appropriate and inappropriate scope of the campaign. Petitioning Substack that they should remove the content because of their own policy, or at threat of their own boycott, or that they will attempt to organize a wider boycott, is fine. Attempting to use state power or threaten regulation, or threaten the job of individuals at Substack, or trying to get payment processors not to work with Substack, or doxxing or being violent against anyone anywhere in this chain, we should consider unacceptable by norm
I'm not super informed about either story but my immediate thought is participating in the aggressive pile-on in both cases is bad, though Matt Taylor should probably have been told by his boss not to wear that shirt on video (though he wasn't fired for it, right?), and I could buy that Justine Sacco should not be working in a PR position.
And both of them seem like examples where there was very little value to the pile-on. If I was running a social media company, I'd set off a qualitative investigation into the participants of the pile-on to figure out how to prevent similar things from happening. E.g. if there are certain types of users that should be banned, or if there are certain big users who can be negotiated with to stop, or certain UI changes that could discourage it.
> A blog writer would not be insulated from that though: their profession is engaging in Discourse. If they engage in Discourse that enough people don't like and get fired, it doesn't bother me or break the norm in the same way as firing bob the mechanic would.
A *political* blogger anyway. No reason to fire someone who say, blogs about knitting over that.
For sure - Blogging about knitting is hardly "engaging in discourse". I spoke in shorthand
I guess another thing to add is:
Sometimes an activist collects a large number of inattentive people who are ready to send a massive flood of negative energy towards good people for bogus reasons. Such activists are bad and should be incapacitated.
A root cause analysis is an appropriate tool for this. For instance, one can find the most effective such activists who have the least other valuable contributions and try to stop them, e.g. by negotiating with their platforms to find some way of removing them, or by suing them for libel, or similar. (Maybe it would be civilized to first try ways of negotiating with them to stop with their destruction, though I don't think this would work.)
Things that can drain the vitality of such groups would also be helpful, e.g. if one can find the root cause of the grievances that make people support the activist, and then address this root cause in ways that divert energy from the activist. That seems like a longer-term solution, though.
The most important part to make this not just another cancel culture is sound judgement (target bad people, not good people, and pick effective means, against important targets).
For me personally there is a somewhat bright line at A8, with a little bit of bleed into A7. You choosing what you do/don't listen to is totally fine and the idea of someone feeling you shouldn't have that freedom of choice here is a foreign concept to me. It is when you start trying to tell other people what content *they* should or should not engage with that I start to have a problem.
While I am not advocating for any sort of legislation to prevent such things, I am largely uninterested in participating in a social group where the group members try to control (even via soft mechanisms like social signalling) what content other group members engage with.
I think it is fine to say, "I personally liked X for reasons Y" and I am *generally* OK with people saying "I disliked X for reasons Y". The problem is specifically when they start trying to tell others what content they should/should not consume that is the bright-ish line.
Re: A7: My problem here is that this is an emotionally charged statement designed to give off a strong social signal. The message's content is fine, it is the delivery that I can see bleeding into A8. Saying it in a more metered way would make me not have a problem with A7.
Edit: To add a bit more color, I am fine with "Based on our history of interactions, I don't think you will enjoy X because of Y". Here you are just trying to make a good recommendation to someone you have a history with, but you aren't trying to control (implicitly or explicitly) what content they consume. I think I would even be okay with a generalization of this like, "I suspect most people will not enjoy X because of Y", though I think one must tread carefully here and avoid crossing the line into, "I think people shouldn't consume X, because of Y"
Are book reviews okay?
If your book review is describing your dislike of a book along with your reasons, I think that is completely fine. It is when your book review says, "you should not read this book" that it starts to get near the line (rather than "I don't think you will enjoy this book") and when you imply in some way that you will excommunicate or think less of a person who reads the book that you are clearly across the line.
I think one can still get away with "You should not read this book" as long as one makes sure to frame why in terms of criteria related to the literary quality of the book (eg "You should not read this book unless you like reading very linear detail-thin retellings and of someone's life expanded by lengthy quotes from contemporary newspaper, and also you have lots of spare time on your hands"). These are all valid criticisms of books.
I can say I often come across (especially book) reviews where it's clear the reviewer didn't like the author's politics/social beliefs but couldn't figure out how to really frame that in their review (or weren't even able to isolate that as the reason).
I am fine with A8. A8 you have not yet used leverage to compel anyone else to do something they are not already predisposed to do. Anyone who feels my argument is compelling may choose on their own accord to unsubscribe. A9 and A10 introduce forms of leverage but pretty weak. A11 is now a forceful attempt to compel spotify to take an action they would not otherwise take, and looks a lot like cancel culture
A8 through A11 are all just a spectrum of the same behavior IMO. It is a person trying to control the content someone else consumes using varying amounts of leverage/pressure.
* In A8, it is just the social pressure of someone telling you not to do something, which means if you then go and do it you will be burning a little bit of social capital with them (because you ignored their request).
* In A9 they are putting up their relationship with you as stake for their demand, so rather than just some small fuzzy social cost of ignoring you would incur a clear and extreme social cost.
* In A10 they are leveraging any social credit they may have with a third party to actively prevent you from consuming the content.
* In A11 they are leveraging social credit they have with a broader network of people to prevent you from consuming the content.
I think there are two important things about crossing from A7 to A8 that don't exist when crossing between A10 and A11:
1. It is a bright line. The person went from expressing their opinion to prescribing behaviors other people should take.
2. I don't think there is any *good* thing that comes from the As above A7 other than cancellation. For everything up to A7, there is significant social value in sharing opinions about content and experiences with others. Regardless of whether your sharing of experiences has any downstream effects, it can help calibrate people to each other's mental contexts and this is incredibly valuable all on its own. The additions from A8 on aren't adding value in other ways, they are *only* supporting cancel culture.
Another way to put (2) is that someone who says A8 could just as easily have said A7 and I think the world would be a better place (assuming you don't agree with cancel culture in general). Same goes for A9, A10, etc. None of them are adding value to the world, A7 was the last step that positive non-cancellation value was added.
I dont want to use leverage and pressure interchangeably. A8 has no leverage because there is no threatened punishment.
Leverage is an important distinguishing feature because it allows ppl with power to use that power to make others take an action they dont want to take. That is bullying.
Without leverage, it is advocacy, and the success of your campaign depends on the strength of your reasoning not your power base.
Pointing to leverage is how I rebut the argument that cancel culture is just another form of speech and if I oppose it, I am not free speech
My preference is to live in a world where people don't attempt to control the behavior of others through any kind of pressure or leverage, including light social pressure and implied minor threats.
Do you believe there is value to society in having people attempting to control each other's behaviors, rather than just information sharing and letting each person make up their own mind free from social pressure/leverage/coercion?
This is, of course, beyond the "socially agreed" forced behaviors like "don't murder" and "don't steal". Specifically the stuff that society has decided is not illegal, is it beneficial for society to have people trying to control each other's behaviors?
So when you say control, I think use leverage to achieve. If I tell you dont do this its bad here are all the reasons its bad. I dont think I am controlling you, even if I am quite aggressive in my pitch. If we werent talking about firing someone, thats just speech right? Absolutely i want the world were ppl advocate with speech.
Its still speech when we talk about firing someone though we might be more concerned with the motives of someone making that pitch.
A7 to me just has no element of control as it is presented above. In some other context like the speaker is your boss, fine thats leverage. I reject the idea that I fear punishment no matter how small of not following the recommendation of someone online.
For clarity, I don't advocate for any kind of legal constraint of speech. This is specifically a discussion about the tools utilized by social groups I want to support and participate in.
For me the line is between these two simplified statements:
A. "Don't do X for reason Y."
B. "I don't recommend X because of reason Y."
(A) comes with the implicit threat that the speaker will retaliate if you do not do what they say. (B) comes with no such implicit threat.
Imagine your mom says, "don't eat the candy." and "I don't recommend eating the cookies." The first comes with an implicit assumption baked in that the mother will retaliate against you in some way if you eat the candy. The second, on the other hand, comes with the implication that the mother is giving you a warning that you may regret your decision, but there will not be retaliation from the mother should you ignore the warning.
Language is fuzzy and this delineation isn't the case 100% of the time, but I *believe* it is one that is fairly pervasive in US English, or at least pervasive enough to serve my purpose here of illustrating where I see the line in the sand.
On the A examples, the cancel culture line is A8(organising boycotts because of people's opinions), with the true evil being A9 (enforcing boycotts under threat of boycotting non-boycotts). Personally deciding not to engage with something you don't like is fine.
This then gets you to what people who don't like cancel culture want, which is "don't fire/harass people because of their [non-work-related] opinions." The difficulty with that is that once boycotts start, basically any objection on the basis of opinion becomes work-related.
For the other examples, I think C1 isn't in this bracket; the NYT wasn't expressing a viewpoint that "We think Scott Alexander's name should be published," they were publishing it (the equivalent would the pedophile posting child pornography) which is an act in itself. I'd agree that writing an open-letter because of a general pro-doxxing stance would be a form of cancel culture, but that's not what happened.
For C2, you personally not buying the Atlantic is not cancel culture, but you trying to incite others to not buy it is.
The B examples highlight the rationale of all this. There will always be some opinions which are so odious that the price of advocating them is ostracism. The sin is trying to artificially drive other opinions into that category. Thus a company that fires an employee because otherwise no-one will buy their products (each making a personal decision) is broadly fine. But trying to pressure bystanders to join a boycott is where cancel culture comes from, and what creates the culture of silence where lots of people might think holding an opinion is acceptable but be too afraid to come out and say it.
I believe you once referred to this as "trying to build a super weapon."
Hmm, so Mozilla firing Eich wouldn't count as cancel culture, because they didn't express the opinion that he should be fired, but instead did an "act in itself"? Doesn't seem like a useful definition.
That's a good point; I think I'd probably bundle in political donations and some organisation-membership along with speech.
Suppose a bunch of key employees at Mozilla were gay and felt like they couldn't be comfortable working under Eich. Would Mozilla be right to fire Eich in that case?
Probably. If we're operating under the assumption that liberalism is doomed, there's no good reason not to escalate against political opponents that make you uncomfortable.
Suppose a company has a bunch of employees that aren't comfortable working under a female manager. Would the company be right to fire the woman?
Firing people for making coworkers 'uncomfortable' only encourages people to feel uncomfortable, especially when not tied to on the job behavior. The only fair solution is to have an explicit objective policy covering acceptable on the job behavior and execute it fairly.
>Personally deciding not to engage with something you don't like is fine.
How is there a distinction? Me and a couple thousand other people don’t like you and also don’t like people who like you. We have decided not to engage and to make sure anyone who is like-minded hears about why we have made this decision.
It’s really just people personally not engaging with what they don’t like and sharing their opinions with others all the way down.
For what it's worth it seemed instinctively obvious that A10 is when it crosses the line.
But getting to the real point: your argument mostly rests on "where do we draw the line" doesn't it? And isn't that a bit of a Fully General Counter-Argument against pretty much anything? What's the difference between shooting an innocent black man and executing a genocidal middle eastern dictator? What's the difference between concentration camps and taxes? What's the difference between a grain of sand and a heap? Unless you think *all* of these answers need to be meticulously worked out before we can opine on any of those issues, isn't demanding that here the very definition of an Isolated Demand for Rigour?
But actually, I don't find the line drawing exercise too difficult in this case. The question that destroys most of cancel culture/wokeness is "who decides?" Who decides what's bigoted, or what's unacceptable? As soon as you frame the question, it becomes obvious that the wokeists' answer is always "I do!" And they lose all credibility forever.
Any actual principled answer would lead to a reasonably fair and stable situation that may not be perfect, but would be an absolute fundamental difference in kind from cancel culture. For example, you can't criticise gay marriage because the Supreme Court has declared it a human right, and you ALSO can't criticise gun rights for the exact same reason. Or, you are defined as an extremist if and only if you support a view that has less than 20% popular support in polls. These wouldn't all be great approaches, but they'd be fundamentally stable and fair. Good luck finding a single person who supports such actual principles.
The *essence* of cancel culture is defecting from any pretense of a consistent and democratically determined *principle*, and just having "whether I like it or not" as your highest law. Everything else is window dressing.
Excellent post that strikes right at the heart of the matter. I agree that A10 is when it crosses the line into clear-cut cancel culture.
I suppose this is the problem. A8 seemed to me to obviously be the start of the problematic behavior. The problem is when you start telling other people what to do in response to speech
This argument proves too much. In case A2, Scott decides to unsubscribe from a podcast that promotes pedophilia, because he doesn't like pedophilia. According to your definition, since that was an action decided by "whether I like it or not," Scott is trying to cancel that podcast.
I think you do have to look at actions rather than motives when coming up with a principle like this, otherwise it just turns into a fight over Our Consistent Principles vs Their Idiosyncratic Personal Tastes. The people who support cancellation for supporting gay marriage will say they're just upholding universal moral principles about family values, the people who support cancellation for racists will say they're just upholding universal moral principles about equality, etc. etc.
In practice, "cancel culture" seems to mostly mean "punishing speech that doesn't deserve to be punished, or punishing speech more than is merited". Getting somebody fired for writing pro-paedophilia articles isn't really cancel culture, because writing pro-paedophilia articles is a very bad thing and it's reasonable to punish people who do this. Conversely, getting somebody fired for calling a woman "bossy" is cancel culture, because calling a woman "bossy" isn't very bad and the punishment inflicted is grossly disproportionate to the offence.
I think people often struggle to define cancel culture because everything nowadays is supposed to be based on impersonal rules or processes, without involving any value judgements. We can't just say "Calling a woman bossy simply isn't the same as advocating for paedophilia, and it's absurd to treat the two alike"; we have to pretend that both cancellations are equally bad (which is absurd), or that they're both justified (also absurd), or try and launder our value judgements through some purportedly more objective standard, like harm (which inevitably end up being gamed -- "The presence of this speaker on campus is causing us great emotional harm, therefore he must be disinvited").
I don't agree with this interpretation. There is not universal agreement on morality, and we want (at least I want) to live in a reality where different moralities can co-exist as much as they are compatible and compete in the marketplace of morality (may the best morality win). By saying that "X is very bad and acceptable to cancel over" starts with an implicit assumption that there is agreement about what set of things are bad enough to cancel for.
I suspect many people would say that anyone advocating for color blindness is doing such a bad thing that they deserve to be cancelled, but there are many others who disagree with that moral position. I don't think either group should try to cancel the other just because they disagree on morality.
But we totally fully agree on a wide number of things, across most/all societies. Cancelling someone over murder is totally something we do, and it's totally okay to do that in any culture. Every culture also does way worse than firing people for murder, we send the murderer to jail. I doubt there's anywhere you would find social or criminal rules against buying household food, or similarly anodyne activities.
What we're struggling with is the grey areas where there isn't a strong consensus. The progressive left is trying to expand the list of items that should be treated like crimes (even if not as bad as murder), while those being accused of these new crimes are very much against it. The reason this became such a big deal is that rather than just advocating for the new social norms, mobs were able to get the norms enforced without the norms first having become a consensus.
Having rules and social norms in a society to curb certain behaviors is quite different from rules and social norms that try to curb speech or thought. While I generally believe we should curb as few actions as possible so there is maximal opportunity to explore alternatives, I feel much more strongly about speech/thought for the reason @timunderwood9 mentions below.
I personally agree that both speech and thought should get a lot more leeway, but it's too hard to make that actionable in a lot of society. Some people have jobs that require them to censor what they say. The boundaries used to be clear about who these people were - politicians, company leaders and PR people, school teachers, etc. If my kid's teacher posts about legal but shameful things, like doing legal drugs or visiting a legal prostitute - or worse, advocate for adult-child relationships - I may care a lot about that and I think it's legitimate for the employer to care about that too.
Social media makes it possible for everyone to see everyone else's (publicly shared) views, so a lot more people are being scrutinized than were before. Although I think this is very bad and should stop, I can think of some edge cases where I find it tricky - a writer for a popular show that shares socially shameful views may have an impact on that show. In the 90s that person would have gotten very little publicity and likely been ignored. That's a new reality, and often sucks. It's why I have no social media and post anonymously.
So yeah, speech and thought should be much more free than they are, but even in my ideal society I would still care about the speech of certain people and would almost necessarily react in a cancel fashion to that speech.
Your teacher example is very good, but I think we can handle that in some societies without any sort of cancel culture. If you don't like the way a teacher is teaching your child, then stop sending your child to that teacher. You can share your experience with others, and that is also acceptable. It only crosses a line when you say something like, "if you send your child to that teacher I won't be your friend" that I think it switches to cancel culture. Of course, this breaks down because many societies have a socialized education system with little to no freedom of choice of teachers, and this provides some very interesting insight!
Perhaps one of the underlying issues is that freedom to choose who you interact with is necessary for a functioning society *without* cancel culture. When people do not have the freedom to choose who they interact with, then cancel culture is the *response* to that problem. If you can't change your child's teacher, you instead try to get the teacher that "society" assigned to you fired and (hopefully) replaced with someone you like more.
Perhaps this is why democracies tend to deteriorate into what is essentially a battle of cancellation and people don't even really try to talk about their own merits anymore. Since people do not have the freedom to choose their government, they must resort to "cancelling" the government they dislike in hopes that something they dislike less replaces it.
Then what we actually need a less centralized, extractive system, to give people back their de facto freedom of association.
In that case the problem is the legal requirement to send a student to school and the default being a public school. If all schools were private it would be much easier - stop going to that school. Most people do not have the money to go to private schools. A school that has multiple teachers may be able to move students to another teacher. This should work fine for most problems - teacher speech that doesn't make them persona-non-grata to the whole community. If a teacher is promoting adult-child sexual relationships, there's a good chance the entire community is going to be against that and the teacher would have zero students if the parents can make that decision.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/02/be-nice-at-least-until-you-can-coordinate-meanness/
> I doubt there's anywhere you would find social or criminal rules against buying household food,
Rationing during a famine is a rule against buying certain quantities of food.
I wouldn't be surprised if such rules happen during imposed famines like the holodomor or the holocaust.
The pro cancelling position on arguments in favor of pedophilia is designed to intentionally make us stupider by making it impossible to consider particular options. Even if a view is probably bad, it is a good idea to be able to actually hear the arguments in favor of it, so you can actually know that they are bad. You should not be confident that they are bad if you have not heard them, and you will not hear them if anyone who says what they are gets severely punished. Thus to avoid making yourself and your society in general stupider, you need to let people say what they actually think.
I think this gets at one of the divisions in discussions around free speech:
Some people care about this because it is a matter of personal rights
Some people care about this for epistemic reasons
In many ways pedophilia is a bad example, because of how strong society feels against it. Even in a much more just society that is willing to hear someone out on their arguments, A1-A6 example will still leave that guy with very few friends and unlikely to find and keep a job. Even a far less divisive area of research will find a mentor telling someone to pick something else. That's not cancel culture, that's just good advice for his life. If he chooses to stick with something that far outside the Overton Window, he's signaling that it may not be intellectual curiosity but personal interest (implying he's a pedophile, rightly or wrongly) and that makes it even harder to justify.
I consider pedophilia is a good example, for the reason you stated. 😁 It lets you know whether a person's proposed rules are content based or not. If it is not content based, the proposed rules should be the same for pedophilia and yoga pants in public. If it is content based, then their rules will depend on the specific behavior in question.
I'm a fan of rules that are content agnostic as much as possible. Freedom of speech in US law, for example, is quite explicit about being content neutral (with a very small number of explicit exceptions). I feel like these are much better rules to run a society by than content-specific rules, because content-specific rules end up with no end of fighting over shades of grey.
I very much agree that we need content neutral rules about speech. At some point, though, society can change some legal rules and it's no longer neutral to support certain things. It's not legal to solicit a prostitute, despite that being pure speech. We can discuss whether that's a good idea or whether it's effective at its purpose, but by changing the rules behind something (making prostitution a crime) we can change the nature of the speech to something that is allowed to be content-specific, anti-crime. If racism was a crime, then racist speech would be considered a crime. Pedophilia is a crime (and society very much wants it to remain so), so speech about pedophilia can run into some problems that even offensive and controversial non-crime speech does not.
FWIW, I think criminalizing speech in *any* context should not be allowed. Soliciting a prostitute, offering to sell drugs, or even asking someone to murder (mainly for consistency/simplicity) should not be illegal, even if engaging in prostitution, selling drugs, or murder is illegal. We should criminalize acts, not criminalize talking about or planning acts.
If you want to stop crime before it happens, then criminalizing planning seems like a good idea, but I don't think the benefits of stopping crime in the planning phase (which rarely works) is worth the cost on society of a more complicated rule system and a suppression of free speech.
I see your point, but I have doubts it would work in practice. And you know people are going to push that boundary very very hard, and it's nice to be able to stop people who are threatening some illegal activity where we have very good evidence they are going to carry it out.
Finally someone more of a free-speech extremist than me! I think conspiring to commit a crime is logically also a crime, but making abstract arguments in favor of crime is not.
Out of curiosity, at what point do you consider 'planning' to end, given the example of a murder? Because if society can't do anything until the trigger is pulled (metaphorically or literally, as the case may be), then there is a serious risk.
So if you catch a guy pouring gasoline around the perimeter of your house, and then he says (awkwardly, around the book of matches in his mouth) "you can't arrest me for arson, I didn't even get it lit yet!" you think the cop's response ought to be "he's right, you know, the worst he'll face is a fine for illegal dumping" ?
> despite that being pure speech.
Soliciting e.g. a professional assassin definitely isn't pure speech, it's also an indication of intent to take some sort of action. If the action is illegal, and has serious irreversible consequences, responding proactively to that intent may be justifiable.
My problem with the opening vignette of the movie Minority Report comes down to one word: "you're under arrest for the *future* murder" when they ought to have said "for the *attempted* murder." Literally grabbed the guy's arm with a deadly weapon mid-swing, that's as clear an attempt as it gets. That whole precog thing could've worked fine if they'd simply stuck with all the existing legal definitions. Catch somebody premeditating? Just send them a form letter:
"We have reason to believe you're intending to murder [VICTIM_NAME]. If they die before [DATE] you will land in jail less than an hour later, and be thoroughly investigated as a prime suspect.
"On the other hand, if you abandon any plans you have which could result in their death, no further action will be taken on our part; if you come forward voluntarily and identify co-conspirators, you may be eligible for amnesty regarding other related crimes.
"In the unlikely event this letter has been sent to you in error, we apologize for the inconvenience. You might want to consult OSHA guidelines on preventing dangerous accidents, just in case."
Minority Report got around this by saying that crimes of passion gave very little notice, so it was a rush to get to the murder site. Pre-meditated murder showed up when the planning took place, so that could likely work better (though it really was "future murder" they would get in trouble for). I think it was on purpose for the movie to not call it "attempted" because that was built into the dystopian nature of that society. They are leaning into it being wrong for the viewer, and "attempted" wouldn't get that point across.
I would have no problem with police sending such letters to people planning something, nor using their planning as evidence for a conviction should something bad happen. It creates an incentive for the would-be murderer to try to *protect* the would-be victim if they can.
I think this is quite different from arresting someone because they talked about killing someone, but didn't actually go through with it.
It may indeed be hard for someone to have many friends. But we don't have to fire that person for their writings.
That filtering effect is part of a general theory of political correctness: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/a-theory-of-political-correctness/
The disgust reaction is a basic survival instinct, and training yourself out of it by listening to arguments for disgusting actions doesn't make you smarter.
Is this even possible? I can imagine someone restraining their disgust reaction (as US law requires a great many people to do), but not eliminating or even mitigating it.
What do you have in mind?
It works like any kind of desensitisation. The more you entertain disgusting thoughts ("Maybe raping six-year-olds is OK, actually"), the more desensitised your mind gets, and the more willing you are to entertain further disgusting thoughts. It's like the intellectual equivalent of someone who works with raw sewage all day until he no longer notices the smell, or a porn user whose tastes imperceptibly get more and more extreme until he barely reacts to stuff which would have horrified him a couple of years ago.
Aren't those examples more like someone directly observing pedophilia, rather than reading abstract arguments about it?
The logic you proposed suggests people might be desensitized by merely reading about how "sewage is good, actually", which contradicts everything I've seen or read.
The disgustingness of raw sewage comes from the physical accidents -- the smell, the sight, the feel of it -- so it's fairly easy to consider it in the abstract, without thinking about these things. (Though somebody who spends a lot of time thinking about the smell and feel of raw sewage probably is going to end up with a pretty weird psychology.)
With paedophilia, on the other hand, the act is disgusting by its very nature, so it's hard to consider even abstract arguments about it without feeling disgust on some level. (If you doubt this, try engaging a friend in a dispassionate conversation about sewage treatment, and then try engaging them in a dispassionate conversation about the ethics of paedophilia, and compare their reactions.) This is one reason why it's good to have strong norms against discussing paedophilia publicly -- you're not only desensitising yourself, you're desensitising everybody who hears you, whether or not they want this.
My view is that child molestation/abuse is very bad. Pedophilia or being attracted to children is a condition that cannot be helped, like homosexuality, and pedophiles who do not act on their urges are to be pitied not vilified. Acting on their urges with real children, should result in immediate and harsh criminal penalty
That's a definition that really begs the question about what deserves to be punished. By that definition, nobody is pro-cancel culture, even the activist who wants to fire every author that calls a woman Bossy. They would believe that because that causes harm to Women, it deserves to be punished
<i>That's a definition that really begs the question about what deserves to be punished.</i>
It involves a value judgement, but that doesn't make it question-begging.
<i>By that definition, nobody is pro-cancel culture, even the activist who wants to fire every author that calls a woman Bossy. They would believe that because that causes harm to Women, it deserves to be punished</i>
Maybe nobody perceives themselves as pro-cancel culture, just like nobody perceives themselves as pro-tyranny, or pro-murder, or pro-injustice, but that doesn't stop them from being meaningful terms.
I will disagree and oppose firing people for writing pro-pedophilia articles (unless it was their job to write such articles and they wrote them poorly, or their job was to write anti-pedophilia articles and they did the opposite).
There are good reasons to categorically oppose certain forms of cancellation (e.g. firing someone for off-the-job speech unrelated to the job, or denying web hosting services) regardless of the opinion expressed.
If the norm is that all forms of cancellation are justified against sufficiently abhorrent speech,
- we risk that some valid opinion becomes thoroughly suppressed if society decides it's sufficiently abhorrent. If society makes that mistake, it's very hard to correct it, because arguing that it's a mistake requires arguing in favor of the suppressed opinion, which itself gets you in trouble—except if you argue it based on a content-independent opposition to speech suppression.
- Any decision-maker (e.g. employer) that refuses to yield to a demand to suppress some particular speech implicitly says that the speech in question isn't sufficiently abhorrent. Anyone who argues that it shouldn't be suppressed says the same. That may already be a PR liability or a source of ostracism, especially in a society where the speech in question is on the verge of becoming cancel-worthy.
- To convince anyone not to support suppressing some opinion, you have to go into an object-level debate and convince him that the opinion isn't sufficiently abhorrent. In a society where the opinion in question is already considered highly suspect, you likely won't win that debate in the relevant people's eyes.
If we established a norm that some forms of cancellation are unjustified against any opinion,
- you could bring up this norm to oppose the suppression of any view you care about, without having to defend the view on the object level to some extent or give away that you support it to some extent, which could make you look bad.
- As a decision-maker (e.g. employer), if a cancel mob targets you, you could refer to your principled stance to never suppress views by e.g. firing people from unrelated jobs, without appearing like you don't the view in question isn't abhorrent.
- People who do consider some view you care about abhorrent would be somewhat more inclined to still defend the right to express it, because eroding the norm would make it more likely that views *they* care about will also get suppressed.
I seem to not think these are as hard as you do.
For the A's, it seems to be there's a pretty clear line between A8 and A9. A8 is expressing an opinion. A9 is putting out deceitful statements about this podcast and pressuring others to punish it. 1000 people doing A8 would not murder a popular podcast, but 1000 people doing A9 would.
For B2, I don't understand the conflict --- he has a side project which is acceptable but mediocre research, and it gets some positive attention; why would you think about doing anything?
For B3-B5, the journalist is not part of cancel culture if he truly is unbiased, but the hecklers are. It's still not an easy question, but the nature of the moral quandary is "should you do a personally beneficial thing that will enable others to do something unethical." which is not related to cancel culture. It's similar to things like whether to open-source a software package that could be used for both good and evil.
C1 and C2 are both about people pressuring corporations for the actions of those corporations. This is perfectly legitimate. It is not about punishing a corporation for not punishing an employee for behavior outside their job duties. That's cancel culture.
B1 is the only one I struggle with. I would suggest requiring him to distance the university from all his side work. Tenure exists exactly to enable this kind of thing, but obviously the grad student is not tenured.
I think you have misunderstood A9: you sound like the unforgivable part is that the statements are “deceitful”, but I think in Scott’s formulation they are the honest opinion of the person making them, and the only thing that distinguishes A9 from A8 is the step from saying “you should unsubscribe as I have” and “you should unsubscribe or else I will block you.”
It seems like a really small step to be such a bright line, but of course the point is that they are all small steps.
I think it's both, and that makes it a large step. Calling it a "pedophiliia-promoting show" is at best disingenuous. Regardless, A8 to A9 is where the jump happens from expressing personal preferences and opinions to coercion and mob tactics.
If it was instead the less aggressive "I actively wish to not interact with people who like a show that platforms a pedophile," then that for me is right on the edge.
Fair. I'll grant that A7's "would platform a pedophile" does sound a little gentler than A9's "promotes pedophilia".
I wonder if Scott was conscious of the fact that A8 kind of hides that shift. Would one personally unsubscribe for platforming a pedophile, or does it have to happen so much (and is one time enough?) that one concludes the show is actually *promoting* pedophilia?
And again, maybe we are niggling uselessly. I don't think Scott was hoping for a consensus about where to draw the line, but rather hoping to show that there isn't one.
The relevance of B2 is that if you do nothing in that case but suppress the research in the case of B1, it results in biased research.
I think that to the extent that coalition-building is the concern, that purpose is best served by just explicitly saying what the coalition you want is.
Rather than searching around for some objective principle that delineates exactly who is in and out in a way that is clear and that no one can argue with or be confused by, just say exactly what are the kinds of people and kinds of statements you want freer speech for.
“No one should be punished for supporting a mainstream political party or for accurately reporting the results of their research.” What about paedophiles? “We aren’t defending paedophiles, this is about allowing normal people to participate in democracy and do science.”
The distinction isn’t explicitly principled but it doesn’t need to be. A group or a movement is made up of many different people with different kinds of moral frameworks. You’re trying to coordinate them towards a common objective rather than necessarily a common philosophy.
"No one should be punished for supporting a mainstream political party" is sort of ambiguous.
It could either be taken to mean 1. any MAINSTREAM political party is by definition acceptable to a major part of the populace, so in some sense it's "OK".
OR 2. the "sheep defense": it's unreasonable to expect everybody to be prepared to be a martyr.
The Nazis were a mainstream political party in 1930's Germany. But I agree "No one should be punished for supporting a mainstream political party" but I guess it depends on the party and how far the support goes...
Maybe add something about "no one should be punished for *failing* to support a specific political agenda."
I'll defend pedophiles for making pro-pedophilia arguments, but not for actually engaging in pedophilia.
I didn't take Scott's post as trying to say that any kind of platforming of pedophilia should exclude one from the coalition, but as using pedophilia as a stand-in for other typical targets of cancel culture like racism, but without the partisan valence.
"I’m slightly confused about this, because all Lukianoff’s examples are about government officials; my impression is that the First Amendment mostly doesn’t constrain private businesses."
I think this should say "none of Lukianoff's examples"?
The line is at A5-A6. Not because of the gradation in pushback, because "I don't think they should platform a pro-X activist".
For me the line is at trying to stop other from diffusing the opinions you find offensive. Not stopping listening/supporting those with such opinions (because you listen/support what you want), or not diffusing/promoting those opinions (you advocate what you want). The later is not cancel culture, the former is (a term I find quite well chosen because it's largely self explanatory).
The border will always be a little muddy, but it's a quite classic symmetry issue like freedom stop at the freedom of others, or do to others what you'd like them to you. Exactly the same kind of tradeoff.
I disagree with this -- I think the line has to be located after A6. Private personal listening/purchasing decisions, with no attempt to coordinate those actions with anyone else, are the essence of individual freedom. Someone unsubscribing from the podcast because their horoscope said something about "Make a change to free yourself from negative influences" would be equally stupid, but I don't think worthy of censure.
Let me clarify a little bit my line: I do not think A6 should be punished, or is morally wrong, or even discouraged. But it's already cancel culture. I do not like cancel culture, but I do not like paedophilia either. You can still talk about both, think both are good idea, even say so in public. But you can not molest, rape or abuse a child. Nor (in my opinion) cancel. A-6 can be classified as cancel culture. It's not a cancelling action (and can not be, because the only difference with A5 is the internal motivation, which being, purely internal, should probably never be used in deciding if something is allowed or not (even if it is, in most justice system, for other things - and i am uncomfortable with it).
I agree with you that, should cancel culture be 'criminalized', it can not start earlier than A8: the first concrete act of cancelling....and A8 still can be interpreted as an 'advice', so this is cancelling without any constrain, even attempt at a constrain. I do not want advices to be a problem, even bad ones (even if, right now, some already are, in fact with very serious punishments, in many liberal democracies ).
A9 is the first cancelling act with a hint of constrain/menace. So if anything has to be prevented it's at A9 and after, no earlier.
This means A6-A8 is acceptable cancel culture to me ;-)
Purely internal factors like motivations are sketchy when used to decide whether something is *allowed* (i.e. not punished), but they are fine as factors deciding whether something is wrong, or whether it's a bad idea (e.g. because it does more harm than good to society).
We can say that it's morally wrong to make certain purchasing decisions, but it would be wrong to punish people for them, as that would violate their freedom (in this case, it's also practically unfeasible).
We can also say that those purchasing decisions aren't morally wrong, but they make society ever so slightly worse, and we can encourage people to refrain from making those decisions. A criticism of cancel culture at the level of A6 can be read as doing just that, and if people didn't make that criticism (perhaps based on your argument), then the only opinion expressed about the matter would be the one encouraging people to stop purchasing the podcast.
Indeed. Morally wrong is also an individual decision. It is also completely free and without consequences. It's at the encouragement/discouragement level that things have to be decided (OK? To what extent?)
A1-A6 all have to be fine. A society where social norms push people to subscribe to a podcast that they personally find offensive is worse than the alternative. A7/A8 I even think should probably exist because it's too hard to police and there's too many useful things there (like movie critics saying a movie is bad). A9 is where I think it's reasonable to start drawing lines, and A10 especially falls into all the bad definitions of cancel culture.
A7 and A8 are permissible in themselves but cause for further scrutiny, since somebody making a few subtle A9 autocatalytic threats would usually be making a lot of noise on those levels first.
I'd say A6-A8 shouldn't be *policed* (i.e. people shouldn't be punished for them, socially or otherwise), but we should try to convince people not to do them, perhaps with specific pushback against the person engaging in A7 or A8.
Without "social punishment" what kind of pushback are you envisioning against the person?
Tell them that you think it's a bad idea.
By social punishment I mean something stronger than that, harming someone in informal but material ways, or at least ostracizing them with the aim of punishing them or similar.
This all may be red herring territory. If A5 is the case, and one is unsatisfied with the pushback, it should make one consider what the pushback ought to be. This can then be publicly communicated to the podcast and others; there used to be "Letters to the Editor" or people who called in to make a point. Maybe the host wasn't as quick-thinking or forgot something; followup fills in these gaps. Having the discussion reinforces our values.
While one should feel fine canceling their subscription if the show violates their moral/ethical standard, anything beyond this (i.e., A5) is unwillingness to think and engage. It is bad culture and makes culture worse as it spreads.
I've long thought of the health of a culture (or individual) in terms of how many action-reaction "tiers" they have between (0) standard of moral badness that would have you shoot someone on sight, and (n) standard of moral badness that would have you reject lifelong marriage. In my best efforts, I've managed to get close to 40, and yet I think I've known quite a few people who have no more than seven. Your examples just about perfectly replicate my thought process with this exercise.
Interesting. I try to be incremental in my responses, but 40 layers is... aspirational. Thanks.
That is in my most focused attempts! I probably mostly operate in the low 20s. ;-)
I understand the desire to define it, but actually I think we need to zoom out here and say "If the zero tolerance policy I am pressing for is universally accepted, to what extent can I protect my extended family and friendship network? Do they all neatly fit into the party system?"
I have known people who gleefully applied zero-tolerance policies directly to their own extended family and friendship networks, then complained in a vague not-actually-planning-to-do-anything-about-it sort of way that they ended up lonely as a result.
I'm sure there are people like that, I also think there is a foggy middle where most people live their lives and form only loose connections with political tribes.
What I mean is, most of the pro-cancel-culture types hardcore enough to be worth worrying about probably aren't going to be slowed much by that "zoom out." Those with something better to do, personal connections they consider worth defending, wouldn't be trying to burn down society by screaming at strangers on the internet.
Or are you imagining the anti-cancel alliance as zero-tolerance? That would be silly.
Every now and then some animal rights activists release a load of mink and everyone else thinks it's stupid. Perhaps you can't stop the crazy people but if everyone else has a consensus that still seems useful, possibly in a nebulous way but we're dealing with quite a nebulous idea.
> My impression is that everyone wants to allow A1, and anti-cancel-culture people near-universally oppose A12. Everything in the middle, I’m not sure. So where’s the line?
In this specific case somewhere between A11 and A12 for me.
(Also I think there’s a big leap there, could be a 100 numbers between pedophilia and bossy).
One of the things, in practice, that’s happening is there’s a cancel culture largely for the left - particularly the academic left but it doesn’t affect the right.
It looks more comprehensive than it is because some left wing feminists who have had moderate fame (like Bindel) are actually cancelled and other liberal feminists, like Rowling, are monstered on Twitter to a certain degree, which is not the same thing.
To a centrist or right wing comic like Chapelle or Gervais being anti trans is part of the appeal. Dawkins is touring away.
If we were looking back at an era, say the late Roman Empire, where the emperor could not be criticised in the academy or the senate but there were massive gatherings at the theatre to see him being ridiculed every day we would probably not consider it a totalitarian regime.
Rowling is a super special case because she is so fantastically successful and rich that it is basically impossible to cancel her in the strict sense you seem to insist on. If everybody were that immune we could just say it’s all free speech and we should just thicken our damn skin.
But that’s my point. Most people are immune.
I have no idea whatsoever what you could possibly mean by this.
No one who has an employer is immune. No one who a bank or credit card company can afford to cut off is immune.
I think this is where my intuition diverges. On an admittedly non-linear scale of severity from 1 - 10, I'd put "fired from current job" at like.... 3. If you get blacklisted from your current field and none of your friends will speak to you, you're pushing a 5. Mind you, getting anywhere on the scale is definitely bad! But if we're talking about how much damage collective group action can inflict, "cancellation" is on the low end of the scale.
I suspect part of the definition of cancel culture is that the "cancelling" must be disproportionate to the "offence". And that is such a matter of judgement that no definition will ever be sufficient to adjudicate this for every case. But I guess this is normal for terms that are used to criticise rather than describe.
> 12th-century Siberian stamp collecting
Off topic but this is pretty anachronistic (unless you're talking about solid seal stamps). The first postage stamp in the world was the Penny Black in Victorian England, introduced in 1840, well after the 12th century.
*well after
Really good spot - nice!
Yeah, noticed the typo just a few minutes ago. Corrected, thanks.
That's why he rapidly switched to another topic!
Host: “Welcome to our podcast on Siberian stamp collecting in the 12th century!"
Producer, whispering: "Stamps weren't used until the 19th century, and Siberia was only occupied by illiterate herders and hunter gatherers until the late 16th century."
Host, after a lengthy pause: "Welcome to our podcast on pedophilia!"
There's got to be a difference between expressing something like "CPS should take away the children of stay at home fathers" and "I think the ideal family arrangement is for the mother to be more involved with kids". The former is an actual threat to the people it targets. The latter is a general statement about a broad scope that wouldn't take precedence over any specific situation.
Likewise, "it should be illegal to get HRT" is a threat in a way that "it's probably better to check for comorbidities and not rush into treatment for a new dysphoric patient" isn't.
These are issues of scope. Different size scopes are best viewed with different tools. If you are talking to an individual, a broad "men are generally more like this" statement is kind of useless in the face of what that specific individual is telling you. If you zoom out and are talking about society (or your specific community/institution/etc), that broad statement is more applicable and is something that leadership should heed.
People are very bad about differentiating these scopes and the correct tools and frames to use for each one. For example, when you talk about being mad at "The Atlantic", why aren't you mad about the specific person who wrote that article? Add in the editor and other people involved in the direct decision if you like, but if you talk about "The Atlantic" how is this different from seeing that the writer was a man and now being angry at all men? Or American and being angry at all Americans?
That sort of guilt by association is another big drawback to cancel culture. You should scope your upsetness appropriately to the people who were directly involved and leave everyone else out of it.
The alternative would be to drop media which trend toward opinions one detests rather than dropping them over single articles.
What's the difference between the size of the staff of the Atlantic, 4 billion, or 330 million? I'd say his possible scope error - and of course he may also be mad at the writer and editor - is much, much smaller than your proposed ones.
Yes, I agree with that
"The Atlantic" is an organization that employs specific people. At some level the decisions that those people allow *IS* the feeling of the organization. When The Atlantic hired and fired Kevin Williamson, The Atlantic was saying that they didn't want to allow/promote his type of thinking through their medium. I'm not a fan of that decision (namely hiring and then firing, I'm perfectly fine with them never hiring him in the first place), but it's clearly the organization's right to do that.
If they printed an opinion, that's the organization's opinion. This is different than a post on Facebook or X, where the default is to allow anyone to post anything, while only removing stuff that crosses certain defined lines. I don't think Facebook or Mark Z. supports some stupid right wing meme because it shows up on someone's Facebook feed, but I do think that Jeff Goldberg agrees that it's okay to print something if The Atlantic prints it.
I disagree with this. The Atlantic is a brand name. Certain people have worked under that brand, and they do make decisions about what gets published or not. But there is a spectrum from something like a party platform, where everything is vetted and can be presumed to align with the brand, and a social media network where people can just post whatever.
Conor Friedersdorf works as a staff writer for the Atlantic and almost certainly disagrees with the article that angered Scott. He writes articles that would have a different perspective. It would be just as wrong to read one piece by him and assume that this is The Atlantic's opinion as it would be to read the one on noise and racism and assume that is The Atlantic's official opinion.
There is some information about The Atlantic in the decision to not deny an article's publication but in the spirit of opposing cancel culture, I would like the range of opinions that are acceptable to say and/or publish to be broader, not narrower.
The Atlantic has an editor-in-chief who could reasonably read through, and more or less unilaterally approve or reject, every single word they print. Facebook doesn't, and logistically couldn't, and has a distinct legal status accordingly. Libel posted on Facebook isn't Zuck's problem, as the owner of a common carrier, the way it would be for the owner of an edited publication.
What The Atlantic prints falls within its Overton Window, by definition. A racist screed by a neo-nazi would not be printed there, and everyone knows that. The specific process for this is the Editor-in-Chief (Jeff Goldberg) reviews what gets printed and has final say. In turn, his boss(es) decide whether he has a job. Whatever "The Atlantic" is, a brand, a company, whatever, it acts as a single entity with an opinion. The leaders can change, and therefore the opinion. I highly recommend people reconsider a publication or other source when a change in that leadership takes place. While a particular formulation is in place, I think it's more than fair to consider that the publication's perspective.
If you want to be upset that they published something that you think should fall outside the Overton Window, you can do that.
I think you should be much, much less upset at someone deciding that an opinion is not outside the Overton Window than the person who wrote the opinion, and therefore, most of whatever ire exists should be directed at the specific writer.
This seems to endorse Facebook, 𝕏, et al. view that they're platforms immune from liability over the content they … disseminate (read as: "publish") even while they exercise editorial judgment. I reject this view: either they're content-neutral platforms, only taking down material when literally ordered to by the government, or they're publishers responsible for their content just as much as The Atlantic, The New York Times, et al. would be.
While I agree with your position in terms of what happened in the Twitter Files, I think there's room for a clear third category. Clear terms of service with what isn't allowed, but no vetting outside of that. They can remove racial slurs or swear words, or porn - things that clearly have some neutral public policy goal, but not moderate beyond that. So if someone complains that a Republican made fun of a Democrat, or vice versa, that doesn't get moderated by Facebook, because that's not one of their clear criteria. If they want to moderate to that level, they lose legal protections that currently exist.
All the current moderation is being justified as an exercise of "terms of service." Do you believe the "clear third category" you propose will be any different?
Yes, if Section 230 were changed to make it clear what moderation was allowed. Right now social media companies are living in the best of two worlds - complete immunity for it not being their own speech, but significant freedom to moderate as well. I would make them pick between the two, and if they choose the freedom option, they would be much more limited on what they can moderate. Maybe not all the way to full 1A, but closer to that.
>or porn
Ah yes, porn, a famously easy-to-define category of content. There's no way a rule against porn could be exploited to, say, censor the discussion of LGBT issues.
But also, there's an even bigger problem, which is that many websites *exist* to provide politically biased moderation. /r/conservative is a subreddit specifically for conservatives, which aggressively bans liberal opinions. If they had to be completely neutral on politics, the subreddit wouldn't exist - it would be a copy of /r/politics. But at the same time, the mods of /r/conservative shouldn't be held legally liable for every far-right crazy who posts about how they want to shoot Joe Biden.
This is true for basically every website with a comments section, including this one. Scott Alexander is pretty tolerant about who he allows to post here, but he still bans people occasionally, and a lot of times it's over their political opinions (or at least, being really obnoxious with their political opinions.)
There's no way to allow a website to curate its community and subject matter without allowing politics into the moderation decisions, and no way to have user-posted content at all without giving websites immunity for it not being their own speech. And that's true whether it's a small blog or a giant social media platform.
We may not be able to 100% define all porn, but we can definitely create some pretty solid rules that will remove almost all of it, while only leaving some edge cases - such as classical art, sex education, etc. If LGBT issues is indistinguishable from porn, that sounds like an LGBT problem, not a labeling problem.
Your preferred rules would kill small, independent forums that have some moderation but don't vet all comments in advance. They would likewise make it impossible to have Facebook pages or groups, subreddits etc. with some moderation but without vetting all comments in advance if the administrators of the Facebook group, subreddit etc. could be held liable.
I'd support using liability to strong-arm the biggest social media sites into refraining from *site-wide* moderation of content that's not illegal (my proposal: sites with a very high traffic of user-generated content only get the liability shield if they don't engage in site-wide moderation; there can be moderation in subcommunities if they are individually below the traffic threshold and anyone can create them and decide their moderation on an equal footing, independent sites below the threshold get the liability shield like today).
But forcing sites of any size to choose between full liability (which practically requires thorough pre-vetting, unaffordable on the scale of a forum or a comment section like this), and no moderation at all at any level (which would only allow sites full of spam and trolling) would be ham-fisted. It sounds right in the sense of poetic justice ("if you choose what you publish, you are responsible if you publish illegal stuff") but it would do enormous harm in practice.
You're conflating censorship and moderation. See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship
> A minimum viable product for moderation without censorship is for a platform to do exactly the same thing they’re doing now - remove all the same posts, ban all the same accounts - but have an opt-in setting, “see banned posts”. If you personally choose to see harassing and offensive content, you can toggle that setting, and everything bad will reappear. To “ban” an account would mean to prevent the half (or 75%, or 99%) of people who haven’t toggled that setting from seeing it. The people who elected to see banned posts could see them the same as always. Two “banned” accounts could still talk to each other, retweet each other, etc - as could accounts that hadn’t been banned, but had opted into the “see banned posts” setting.
I'd view this moderation-without-censorship as reasonable for platforms to enact without become publishers of everything they DON'T specifically moderate into the "opt-in" setting.
Then they could just force users to choose between not seeing the comments the platform wants to suppress for e.g. ideological reasons, or seeing a flood of spam and trolling, with the interesting comments the platform wants to suppress lost amid it.
They could, yes, but since I claim to want a neutral platform without censorship, complaining that comments I don't want to see are being allowed would be grossly hypocritical.
I feel there are several separate problems and they have different causes and solutions:
A) A number of people believe in a weird and obviously false Tabula Rasa view that denies basic reality and wants to censor or fire everyone who points that out no matter how reasonable their opinions are.
B) Lots of people in the West refuse to interact with half the population who hold different but moderate and mainstream views including in Academia.
C) There are a small number of people who hold weird or unpleasant views but are generally harmless. Scientologists, Quakers, Jacobites, Stalinists
D) A share of the population is paranoid and believes that their enemies are well coordinated and if they are allowed to express themselves terrible things will happen.
E) Some views are moderate, but expressing them is seen as an indicator that the holder secretly believe far more unpleasant snd extreme views, so you get a taboo treadmill.
F) There are bad people who want to cover up their corruption or fraud etc and want to restrict free speech for rational but nefarious reasons.
Before I start linking to Jacobite songs, do you mean "Jacobites" or "Jacobins"?
If the former, then sirrah! the beauteous fairy maiden will never appear in *your* dreams!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2NZNpkGJRo
https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2013/08/seamus-heaney-1939-2013/
I mean Jacobites, if you deny the legtimacy of the rightful monarch you are bad and dangerous, but if your politics revolves around being angry at something 335 years ago, it is also harmless and irrelevant.
To think I should have to share online space with a Hanoverian!
Or worse - is that "Oliver" a reference to Cromwell? 😁
Less harmfully, 1690 was 334 years ago, and it's still causing trouble:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelfth
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cljyw9gz9nro
Northern Ireland has entered the chat.
James the Shit and the Wee German Lairdie were both illegitimate. Lady Anne Stanley was the rightful monarch after Elizabeth died: Henry VIII's Third Act of Succession was still valid law, and it specifically named the descendants of Henry's younger sister (Mary, Duchess of Suffolk and Dowager Queen of France) as next in line after Henry's line was exhausted. If I'm reading the genealogy charts correctly, Anne's granddaughter Elizabeth Brydges was the rightful monarch at the time of the 1715 rising.
Henry kept changing his mind on the succession, and the interference after his death by various parties left the issue muddy, to say the least.
Do we take Edward's (heavily influenced) decision to name Lady Jane Grey as his successor as valid or not? What about Elizabeth's decision?
The text of the Third Act seems not to mention the children of his younger sister, who had incurred his displeasure by her marriage without royal consent to Suffolk. It was her grand-daughter, Lady Jane Grey, who was manoeuvred onto the throne (and then very hastily off it), so I think any claims in her family line to rights of succession would not have been well-received.
https://www.luminarium.org/encyclopedia/thirdsuccession.htm
"The act, which gained Royal Assent at the close of Parliament in February 1544, established the new line of succession as Edward, then any children he were to have, then a son Henry VIII might have with Katherine Parr, that potential son's possible children, then children from marriages after Queen Katherine, if any, then Mary, Mary's children, if any, then Elizabeth."
Any provision for "and if none of them have kids or the kids die, who gets the throne" seems to be "whatever is in the King's will or letters patent".
"be it therefore enacted by the authority of this present parliament, that the king's Highness shall have full power and authority to give, dispose, appoint, assign, declare and limit, by his gracious letters patents under his great seal, or else by His Highness' last will made in writing and signed with his most gracious hand, at his only pleasure from time to time hereafter, the imperial crown of this realm and all other the premises, to be, remain, succeed and come, after his decease and for lack of lawful heirs of either of the bodies of the king's Highness and Prince Edward begotten, and also for lack of lawful heirs of the bodies of the said Lady Mary and Lady Elizabeth to be procreated and begotten as is afore limited in this act, to such person or persons in remainder or reversion as shall please His Highness, and according to such estate and after such manner and form, fashion, order or condition as shall be expressed, declared, named and limited in His Highness' letters patents, or by his last will in writing signed with his most gracious hand as is afore said; anything contained in this present act or in the said former act to the contrary thereof in any wise notwithstanding."
So what did Henry's will say?
"Henry VIII made a final revision to his last will and testament on 30 December 1546. It was signed using the "dry stamp", a device in use since 1545 and under the control of Anthony Denny and John Gates. It confirmed the line of succession as one living male and six living females. It began with:
1. Edward
2. Mary
3. Elizabeth
Then the three daughters of Frances Grey, Duchess of Suffolk, who was the second child and eldest daughter of Henry VIII's younger sister, Princess Mary:
4. Jane
5. Katherine
6. Mary
Finally the daughter of Eleanor Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, who was the third child and younger daughter of the king's younger sister, Princess Mary:
7. Margaret."
We know what happened to Jane; Katherine, the second daughter, copied grandma by contracting a marriage without royal consent and was imprisoned by Queen Elizabeth; she had two children (again, later declared illegitimate) and the younger died without issue. That leaves the elder son:
"While imprisoned in the Tower, Katherine gave birth to two sons:
Edward Seymour (1561–1612)
Thomas Seymour (1562/3, Tower of London – 8 August 1600).
...In 1562, the marriage was annulled and the Seymours were censured as fornicators for "carnal copulation" by the Archbishop of Canterbury. This rendered the children illegitimate and thereby ineligible as successors to the throne. Nonetheless, this did not stop their being courted as potential heirs to the Crown."
I think that once your scheming family has tried leap-frogging the conditions in the will by getting Jane onto the throne while Mary and Elizabeth were still alive, that makes future claims from that branch of the tree very shaky, whatever the legal situation.
The third daughter, Mary, *also* made an unwise marriage and incurred royal displeasure and eventually died without issue.
So that brings us back to the second, surviving daughter, of Mary, Duchess of Suffolk - Eleanor Clifford, and her children. Eldest child was Margaret Stanley, who died before her cousin Elizabeth. Margaret's eldest son was Fernando, who died suddenly and mysteriously, but not before fathering children, and that brings us finally to Anne Stanley.
This is where it gets murky, because Anne only has a claim *if* we accept that Katherine's kids were illegitimate and had no claim. If, however, Edward Seymour is legitimate, then he (as son of the second daughter) had the prior right.
So we've got a situation where there are several potential heirs floating around, and the very situation that drove Henry VIII's marital adventures - the desperate need to have sons so he could establish a dynasty to solidify the Tudor claim to the throne and prevent civil war between rival claimants - was rearing its head once more.
No wonder James VI of Scotland looked like a better bet; he was a man (not yet another one of these women whose husbands would be trying to be kings by virtue of their marriages), he was already a king himself, and by making him the heir, the dream of uniting the kingdoms of England and Scotland under one crown would come true.
That's about the size of it. Lord Beauchamp (the Edward Seymour in question, not to be confused with his grandfather Edward Seymour (Duke of Somerset), his father Edward Seymour (Earl of Hertford), or his son Edward Seymour) is legally considered illegitimate as of 1603. His parents had been unable to produce a living witness to their purported marriage or identify the priest who performed it, so Elizabeth's council declared the children illegitimate and fined Hertford £15,000 for the crime of "seducing a virgin of the royal blood".
It was only after James took the crown that the Seymours were able to find a priest willing to testify to having performed the ceremony; he might have been the actual priest, but the circumstances strike me as suspect. James's backside was securely on the throne by this point, and he had an heir and a spare, so he allowed Hertford's sons to be slotted into the line of succession after his own kids (Henry, Charles, and Elizabeth) and his English-born cousin Arabella Stuart. Political considerations may have also figured into this, as this was post-Gunpowder Plot and there was some suspicion that Anne Stanley was a closet Catholic.
Arabella, incidentally, had also been seriously considered as a potential heir for Elizabeth. Her claim, like James's, comes from descent from Henry VIII's older sister Margaret. The legal arguments for her being ahead of James were:
Arabella was English, and generally only English subjects were permitted to inherit English titles at the time. When the succession was settled in favor of James, this was handwaved away with the legal fiction that Scotland had been a vassal state of England for a few years in the 13th century.
Arabella's descent from Margaret Tudor was via Margaret's second marriage. On his mother's side, James was descended from Margaret's first marriage, which was contracted via a treaty (the 1502 "Treaty of Perpetual Peace") that supposedly (I have been unable to confirm details of this, since I can't find an English translation of the treaty) excluded their descendants from the English succession. James was also descended from Margaret on his father's side, this time from her second marriage, but his claim on this side was junior to Arabella's: James's father, Lord Darnley, was the younger brother of Arabella's father the 5th Earl of Lennox. This argument was dealt with by ignoring it.
As it happens, Arabella would wind up secretly marrying William Seymour (one of Lord Beauchamp's sons) in 1610. James ordered both of them arrested. They tried to flee. The authorities caught Arabella, who would later die in the Tower of London, but William escaped to the Spanish Netherlands. James eventually allowed William to return and restored him to favor after Arabella's death. William would wind up inheriting the Seymour titles, serving as a minor Royalist general in the English Civil War, and even getting his great-grandfather's duchy restored to him after the Stuart Restoration.
Early in Elizabeth's reign (particularly in 1563, when Elizabeth was sick with smallpox and not expected to survive), Henry Hastings, 3rd Earl of Huntingdon had been in the mix as a major candidate for the succession. His claim came via descent from George, Duke of Clarence (the ill-fated middle brother of Edward IV and Richard III) by way of George's similarly ill-fated daughter Margaret Pole. I'm not sure what the legal argument for him had been over the several candidates actually descended from the then-current dynasty. The political arguments were that all the other major candidates at the time (Katherine Grey, Mary Queen of Scots, and Margaret Douglas Stuart) were all too female, the former two too young and too unmarried, and the latter two too Catholic.
There were also a few European Catholic potential claimants distantly descended from the House of Lancaster, most notably Infanta Isabella (daughter of Phillip II of Spain and Archduchess of the Spanish Netherlands) and the Dukes of Parma. I don't think there was any serious chance of any of them taking the throne, except maybe if the Armada invasion had succeeded, but fairly late in Elizabeth's reign English Catholics were semi-privately talking them up as candidates and some of Elizabeth's councilors were hedging their bets by kissing up to Isabella.
The whole thing was an ungodly mess, and Thomas Wilson (writing in 1600, near the end of Elizabeth's reign) had the right of it when he said "This crown is not like to fall to the ground for want of heads that claim to wear it, but upon whose head it will fall is by many doubted." It went to James for the reasons you raised, plus the simplicity of the core argument for his claim (male-preference primogeniture), and also James being Protestant but not too Protestant and spending the last couple decades of Elizabeth's reign cutting deals, making promises, and generally running for King of England. And succeeding to the point that when the Earl of Essex attempted a coup against Elizabeth's councillors in 1601, part of his stated justification was to ensure that James would be the heir, accusing the Cecil faction of cahooting with the Infanta. Cecil, despite sending one or two sycophantic letters to Isabella to keep his options open, was actually at the center of the (successful) plot to ensure a smooth succession for James.
I think Hastings really had no chance, what with the Pole connection. Elizabeth's father, Henry, had had a damn good go at exterminating them, mostly on the basis of her son's activities: Cardinal Reginald Pole, who was *very* loudly and publicly against Henry's messing around with the Church and declared separation from Rome.
The Poles also had equally as good, or even stronger, claims to the throne as against the Tudors, due to their Plantagenet blood and descent directly from Clarence. Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty, had a much less clear claim and that was a very strong motivating force behind his, and his surviving son's. desire to have sons of their own and establish a clear line of descent.
When Henry had no legitimate sons and was in the midst of his marital troubles, he had a genuine fear that the Poles claim would be pushed forward. Margaret Pole wasn't helped by the fact that her sons got caught up in the tangle of treason (or alleged treason) plots that were constantly swirling around, and she was a game old bird who took no shit from anyone, so she maintained her support of Mary (Henry's only surviving child by Katherine of Aragon) in the teeth of Henry declaring her a bastard and demanding her fortune back.
(As an aside, Henry had a habit of being parsimonious, not to say miserly, with other people's money. He would demand back gifts and jewels from an ex-wife and have them re-purposed and re-gifted to the next one. All the time spending lavishly, not to say wastefully, on his pet projects. Demanding back his daughter's jewels and patrimony was totally in line with his spiteful nature).
All that contributed to Henry finally imprisoning and then executing her. After that, being put forward as a candidate for the throne was just, or even more likely, to get your head lopped off as to have a crown placed on it, if you were a Pole descendant.
Henry really caused a lot of the trouble himself, by declaring his daughters bastards and not eligible to inherit. Because he never managed to get the horde of hardy and healthy sons he hoped for, he was forced into re-legitimising them, and that final will (and how much was his own idea and how much was down to the jockeying of nobles for power in the wake of his death is hard to decide) just made it even more confused.
The Tudor problem really was "too many daughters, not enough living sons", but Henry made it worse by his treatment of his children. He didn't *have* to declare Mary a bastard, though that was down to legal requirements about cutting her off completely from any claim to the throne. Catholic doctrine permits, in the case of an annulled marriage, that the children are not illegitimate. He could have used her for marriage alliances with other European powers, but of course that would lead to fears that Spain or France or wherever would then try to lay a claim on the English throne.
But marrying her to an English noble of a great family would have at least stabilised matters until he got that long-desired son. Everyone of course expected that Edward would get married and have children of his own, so his early death was one more shock that the Tudor dynasty didn't need - and Henry's will now opened up an entire range of claimants, due to the addition of the children of his sister Mary being included in the succession.
Now there was every incentive to "play the game of thrones" and for cousins to backstab cousins, court alliances, and plot and scheme. The fact that Mary's grand-daughters kept making the same bad marital choices (from the viewpoint of allaying rather than stoking royal fears) didn't help one whit.
Reading about Anne Stanley, my God, the poor woman. In Henry's time, there had already been some marital scandals* among the nobility but this one takes the cake:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Stanley,_Countess_of_Castlehaven
"In 1630, her second husband, the Earl of Castlehaven, was arrested and charged with being an accomplice to her rape by a servant. He was also accused of sodomy, found guilty and sentenced to death.
Anne Stanley's testimony against her husband was crucial in ensuring his conviction and set the precedent that a wife could give evidence against her husband. After the trial, she lived a very secluded life; her reputation had been severely damaged by the scandal.
...In 1630 Lord Audley, Lord Castlehaven's son, appealed to the Privy Council stating that his father was planning to disown him. Audley claimed that his father had encouraged his (Audley's) wife Elizabeth to have sex with Henry Skipwith, a favorite servant of Castlehaven's. Should Elizabeth become pregnant by Skipwith, Castlehaven planned to make this child his heir, thus depriving his own son of his inheritance. Audley also stated that his stepmother Anne Stanley behaved in a lewd manner and had taken servants as her lovers.
The Privy Council started an investigation in November 1630 and interviewed family members and servants at Fonthill Gifford. Elizabeth Audley admitted to having been coerced by her father-in-law into having a sexual relationship with Skipwith. According to Elizabeth Audley, her mother Anne Stanley had been raped by one of the servants at the instigation of Lord Castlehaven. When questioned about this, Anne Stanley testified that soon after their marriage, Castlehaven had declared that as a husband he had absolute control over his wife's body, and that she was obliged to do whatever he demanded. He had ordered her several times to sleep with one of his servants, but she had always refused. Eventually, Castlehaven had ordered the page Giles Broadway to rape her in his presence; he had assisted in the rape by restraining his wife. Anne Stanley stated that she had made a suicide attempt after the rape, but she had never discussed the incident with anyone.
The inhabitants of Fonthill Gifford told the Privy Council's investigators that Lord Castlehaven had sexual relations with both male and female staff, including the footman Lawrence Fitzpatrick, and that he was a voyeur. He showered his sexual partners with gifts and had his eldest daughter marry one of his favorites, who had joined the household as a page. Anne Stanley's account of the rape and her subsequent suicide attempt was confirmed, also by the alleged rapist Giles Broadway."
*Such as that of the Duke of Norfolk and his treatment of his second wife, where he openly moved his mistress in to take her place (and probably had a few more mistresses on the go as well):
"Thomas Howard's marriage to his second wife, Lady Elizabeth Stafford, which had apparently been mutually affectionate at first, deteriorated in 1527 when he took a mistress, Elizabeth Holland (died 1547/8), whom he installed in the Howard household. Lady Elizabeth formally separated from her husband in the 1530s. She claimed that in March 1534, the Duke of Norfolk 'locked me up in a chamber, [and] took away my jewels and apparel'. Howard then moved her to Redbourn, Hertfordshire, where she lived as an actual prisoner with a meagre annual allowance of only £200. She also claimed to have been physically maltreated by Howard and his household servants."
Can't let that song go by without a reply from Robert Burns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftfkoax6cvc
He seems to have re-written an extant song and this is his version of 1791.
However, in 1791 he also wrote something less sunny about the union of England and Scotland:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Such_a_Parcel_of_Rogues_in_a_Nation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLaYLDuxvQ8
And so I can only come back with Ráiteachas na Tairngreacht:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIxEuZmNid8
I like this version, myself, but that one's really good too!
https://sevennations.com/track/595634/ye-jacobites-by-name-the-rights-of-man
Presumably "... and cultists generally". And the Freemasons?
"generally harmless" except they abuse their children by passing on the same views.
I feel like Quakers don't fit in that group.
They come under the general category of people who opposed to allied effort in WW2 but are clearly no longer a threat.
> C) There are a small number of people who hold weird or unpleasant views but are generally harmless. Scientologists, Quakers, Jacobites, Stalinists
I think that, while some Scientologists are indeed harmless, Scientology in general is a litigious cult and is therefore quite dangerous. True, their power had been severely broken in recent years, but that only makes them comparatively less dangerous, not safe. I don't think this applies to Quakers, Jacobites, or even Stalinists.
Scientologists defend their own interests, while Quakers will always be aligned by definition with a country's enemies whether they are the Kaiser, Nazis or Houthis.
I am very much with Orwell on all pacifist movements.
"Pacifism. Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that ‘according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be “objectively pro-British”.’ But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious ‘freedom’ station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.
I am not interested in pacifism as a ‘moral phenomenon’. If Mr Savage and others imagine that one can somehow ‘overcome’ the German army by lying on one’s back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen. As an ex-Indian civil servant, it always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi named as an example of the success of non-violence. As long as twenty years ago it was cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the British government. So he will be to the Japanese if they get there. Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force. But though not much interested in the ‘theory’ of pacifism, I am interested in the psychological processes by which pacifists who have started out with an alleged horror of violence end up with a marked tendency to be fascinated by the success and power of Nazism. Even pacifists who wouldn’t own to any such fascination are beginning to claim that a Nazi victory is desirable in itself. In the letter you sent on to me, Mr Comfort considers that an artist in occupied territory ought to ‘protest against such evils as he sees’, but considers that this is best done by ‘temporarily accepting the status quo’ (like Déat or Bergery, for instance?). a few weeks back he was hoping for a Nazi victory because of the stimulating effect it would have upon the arts"
https://www.buzzfeed.com/rosebuchanan/meet-the-british-quaker-famous-in-yemen-who-tried-to-smash.
> I can’t tell whether or not he’s advocating an implied “we should hold private business to the same standard as the First Amendment holds the government” here.
FWIW this is my read of the linked essay: when you're evaluating a firing, you should apply all the same tests the Supreme Court does when it considers whether the government had the right to fire one of its employees. I do not see how to generalize this to the bullying-people-off-of-Twitter case, where there's _also_ a lot of caselaw but it all says that personal insults are allowed.
But maybe we should distinguish firings from other kinds of cancel culture anyway? When one person cancels their subscription to your podcast, or calls you a dick on Twitter, it isn't cancellation by anyone's standard. When a million people do, things maybe change. To treat those cases differently in a moral sense, we have to impose a coordination requirement: before you call someone a dick on Twitter, you have to figure out collectively how many people "should" call this person a dick, and then check and make sure that not too many other people have done the same thing. That's pretty chilling!
On the other hand, in the firing case there's just one corporation and probably just a few people making the decision, so the coordination costs are low. Instead, the conflict is with at-will employment, which (with a few carve-outs) says that companies can fire anybody at any time for any reason.
The subscription case is an interesting middle ground: the podcasters aren't your employees, but you do pay them for something you want, and if you're not getting it it makes sense that you shouldn't pay them anymore (suppose they switch from Siberian stamp collecting to Mayan dentistry). Maybe the rule is that you should treat canceling a podcast like firing an employee: do it if they're not delivering what you want, but don't if their actions don't affect the podcast. This view blesses A2 through A12, but forbids A1.1 ("you discover that your Sumerian stamp collecting podcast host also has a pro-pedophilia podcast, but he keeps them strictly separate. You unsubscribe") and requires a facts-based analysis for A1.2 ("the host has a pro-pedophilia podcast, and when you learn that you suddenly remember some odd stuff he said in the stamp collecting podcast, that might in retrospect have been about pedophilia").
I don't think this makes a lot of sense, just TBH.
When the supreme court considers whether the government had the right to fire one of its employees, it uses tests like the one in Pickering "to arrive at a balance between the interests of the [employee], as a citizen, in commenting upon matters of public concern and the interest of the State, as an employer, in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees."
Later Cases (Connick) have recognized that the test in Pickering focusing on "the right of a public employee "as a citizen, in commenting upon matters of public concern," was not accidental. This language, reiterated in all of Pickering's progeny, reflects both the historical evolvement of the rights of public employees, and the common sense realization that government offices could not function if every employment decision became a constitutional matter."
The *public* nature of the employee's statements as contrasted by the quasi-*private* nature of the government acting as an employer is the whole point of the tests. To put it another way: the tests we're talking about here recognized *the right of a private employer to fire people for what they say*, even for silly reasons like "office politics". So, I don't see how a test could treat a private employer the same way as the government, for the purposes of this analysis.
Part of the test for what the government can do is considering what private employers are able to do.
I'm not sold on Lukianoff's framework either, but I don't get your objection to it. To be concrete, here's the kind of analysis I imagine doing when I'm "treating a private employer the same way as the government":
1. Walmart fired a cashier for privately wishing death on Donald Trump. That's definitely legal, but was it Cancel Culture?
2. It's Cancel Culture when a private company fires someone for a reason, and the government wouldn't have been allowed to fire them from a public job for that reason.
3. So: can a government employee be fired for privately wishing death on Donald Trump?
4. Rankin v. McPherson says no.
5. So yes, the firing was Cancel Culture.
(n.b. I haven't actually read Rankin v. McPherson, I'm just accepting Lukianoff's summary of it for the sake of the hypothetical).
I can understand not liking that outcome, or disagreeing that that's the right process, but what's incoherent about it?
I think the issue is one of circular dependency. If the government test says the government can fire someone when a private company would fire someone for similar speech, you can't then have the rule be private companies can fire someone when the government could for similar speech.
Sure you can. Private company firings need to meet some conditions C, public firings need to meet C plus some additional conditions D. Cancel Culture firings are those which either don't meet C or don't meet D.
If you still disagree, try to construct a specific example. Is there a firing where this process loops forever, or gives two inconsistent answers?
The point is you need to define C without talking about public companies. If you're hand wavy about it then either you've done nothing or you prevent all firings.
So we're trying to decide "when does a boycott become cancel culture", sounds like.
In the case of A, my own personal opinion is that it starts shading into cancel culture from A9 onwards. A8 is calling for a boycott, and that's something people can decide if they want to do or not for themselves. Starting to put sanctions or penalties on people for not doing as you want them to do is starting to cancel them. "I'll block you, and I'll get my friends to block you, and I'll have you put on a block list, and if anyone asks why you are blocked I will explain it's because you support paedophilia, and you have no right of reply to any of this".
In the case of B, the real-world consequences seem to be "your grad student will go on to attain a doctorate, become a trustee of a trans youth activism charity, continue to attend pro-paedophile support conferences, and only be thrown under the bus by the charity once it gets it own troubles due to being investigated for other issues. Even then, some will continue to defend him":
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-63137873
The problem being posed to us here is "if the activity will negatively affect the university, should the professor tell the grad student to knock it off, or else?" and probably most of us would say "yeah, sure", *but* suppose it's not about paedophilia, it's about the word 'bossy'.
Again, personal opinion? If the bad stuff is illegal/immoral, you're within your rights to tell him knock it off, or at least do it in a way that strongly differentiates his work from the university. The journalists should be willing to write the story, be it about paedophilia *or* bossy, *but* they should be fair-minded as possible when reporting - no "this guy wants to rape kids" *or* "this guy wants to chain women barefoot and pregnant to the kitchen sink". The job is about reporting factual instances of activities in the real world, but not to be an activist for getting your preferred outcome.
In the case of C, "it would personally warm my heart if the Atlantic failed as a business and everyone associated with it died of starvation" - I think that's a perfectly normal reaction 😀
On your own private blog or Substack, it's your rules. You can choose what content you allow, how you handle disputes, everything. Nobody is being forced to read it and if they don't like the way things are done, they can leave. You are not obligated to give free advertising to the Atlantic or any other publication or media outlet or blogger or 'vote for us in this competition'.
The instances of "Thousands of stay-at-home fathers get angry and write in saying they’re cancelling their subscriptions" is a boycott, not cancelling. If the CEO says "you frickin' idiots are costing us a fortune, we're firing your dumb backsides", that's a business decision. It becomes cancelling if there's a campaign to doxx the journalists or cause personal and reputational harm, by organised action, to them. Saying "I'm not buying your crappy magazine any more" is not cancelling, and neither is "those idiots should apologise for their offensive remarks". The CEO can choose to defend and retain them or not, and if they get fired, that's the economic power of boycotts.
"(Does this mandate that the current real-world CEO of the Atlantic hire a writer who wants to pen an article about how stay-at-home dads are pathetic failures who should lose their children? Why not? How come it’s okay to chill this opinion ab initio, but not post facto?)"
Again, we've had real-world examples of "media outlet announces hire of new journalist, certain parties blow their tops, and the hiring is rescinded". That is cancelling and it is cowardice on the part of the media outlet involved. If the person was good enough to be hired, and if you hired them *specifically* for their spicy takes, then backing down like that is bowing to cancel culture.
I don't think we'll ever have a clear, bright line and clear-cut definition. There will always be fuzzy and edge cases. It's going to be one of those "I know it when I see it" instances.
> In the case of A, my own personal opinion is that it starts shading into cancel culture from A9 onwards.
Same here.
Although A9 arguably includes people wearing T-shirts saying things like "I only have sex with vegans", which seems OK to me as a way to spread veganism.
I don't object to the T-shirts as any kind of cancellation, particularly as they serve the useful purpose of warning others "This person is appallingly over-bearing, avoid at all costs".
A1-A6 is obviously fine. Individuals have freedom of association and freedom of economic choice; these are not cancelling in any sense.
A7-A12: This is slightly tricky and I think rather depends on how you want to define "wrong". On one level I would support the legal right of any individual to engage in any of these actions (even A12), in the same way that I would support the right of an individual to, say, deny the holocaust. That doesn't mean I think they're correct, kind, or sensible to do so! I wouldn't like, and would attempt to push back against, and probably wouldn't be friends with, most cases of people doing A7-A12. I think I would say that anything from A8 onwards could loosly be described as a cancelling attempt.
B1: Oooh. I think it's OK to have a view on what more junior staff in your own academic department are working on. I think either of these courses of action are in fact OK; you are entitled to judge an employee by the quality of their work, where that includes the relevance and rigour of their research, and the way they present that publically.
B2: Ideally you have an employee evaluation system that takes the same action here as B1. This is probably a pipe-dream, but it's the ideal. Given that peadophilia is in fact pretty bad for children, the first papers must in fact be fairly bad, so if this second lot are the same quality they must also be pretty bad and adding little or nothing to human knowledge. So you should probably tell him to stop, or get rid of him.
B3: No, you shouldn't write the article. It's not likely to improve anything for anyone and very likely to do the opposite.
B4: As B3; no, except this is obviously even more trivial and not worthy of a news story.
C1: I am not a huge fan on petitions, and would probably never sign one. I don't think signing one is fundamentally immoral, but you should consider what the likely effects might be.
C2: Your refusal to read or link to the Atlantic is fine. See A1-A6; individuals have freedom of association and economic choice. You are entitled to make your own decisions for any reason or none.
P3 is correct, essentially. Bosses are allowed to fire their employees for being rubbish at their job. That's not the same thing as accepting all cancel culture. If they were fired for expressing an opinion privately, outside the context of their work (whatever that opinion was), I would strongly object to the CEO's actions.
For me, A6 is the beginning of cancel culture: The guy unsubscribe not because he do not like the platform, not only because he do not like paedophiles, but because the platform diffuse an opinion he do not like, in a clear opposition to the principle of freedom of speech. The action (unsubscribing) is not objectionable, but the goal [ of restricting the information given to others, because one do not like this info] is.
Like all beginning, even from a very anti-cancel-culture point of view (mine ;-) ), it's not really morally bad, it's clearly in the grey area: The action (unsubcribing) is perfectly OK, it's the goal that seems wrong, and this is in fact unknowable as reason for unsubscribing is not public, maybe it's known to the unsubsciber alone (it's just there to show the gradation). Still, this show (for me) it can theoretically be classified into cancel culture.
I'm somewhere between P1 and P3 myself: the dads can certainly get *angry*, but it's unwise to shoot messengers, in the same way it's unwise to do many other things just because you're angry. P2 is right out, unless, y'know, the publication made some explicit promises beforehand on the matter.
Defining what constitutes cancel culture becomes slippery and circular is because what cancel culture really is is enforcing a system of morality via social pressure. I imagine this has happened many times over the course of human history when a social group is attempting to gain or consolidate power over others. The obvious examples are religious enforcement (inquisitions, witch hunts) or more recently communist or fascist struggle sessions. The pedophilia examples are going to be relatively straightforward because pedophilia is already widely considered immoral. It only starts to “feel” excessive when It’s a moral stance you don’t already agree with, which is ultimately relative. This can be harder to see in our relativist, post-modern, liberal enlightenment society but would be much more obvious if you reimagine your examples with explicitly religious terms (let’s say arbitrarily Christian, Islamic, whatever - firing someone because they say Muhammad is not the true prophet)
Emphasis: our current system of morality is Enlightenment Liberalism (science, focus on individual rights, equality, acceptance of other’s beliefs, universalism, etc). If this was switched to Sharia law it would “feel” pretty intensely like cancel culture. The examples given are more difficult to untangle because they are only subtly (but meaningfully) different than our current accepted system of morality. Think Catholicism vs Protestsnism.
I might be giving away that I'm a lawyer, but I think there's kind of a vague three or four part test towards determining if we're dealing with cancel culture. Let's use criticism or attempted cancellation of a football player to walk through the examples.
First, are the critics part of, or connected to, the group they're criticizing? The people criticizing the player--are they fans of the team? Football fans in general? They have no connection to football at all except they heard about this guy's transgressions and they want to punish him? The more of a connection you have, the less likely it is to be cancel culture.
Second, is there a nexus between the proposed punishment and the action? With the football player, are you saying he needs to be kicked off the team because he's a bad player? Or are you saying he needs to be kicked off the team because of some off the field activity? The less of a nexus, the more likely it's cancel culture. This is why you always see people making tenuous connections--"how can you trust this guy to be a teacher when he's shown bad values and therefore might not be nice to all his children."
Third, is there secondary criticism going on? By that I mean, are the critics limiting themselves to going after the player? Or are they saying that if someone else (like the league, or the team) doesn't punish him, they'll punish that other actor? Or are they going another level removed, like going after the sponsors, to pressure the team, to pressure the player? Basically, where do we fall on the spectrum between "I personally will make different choices" and "I will force everyone else to make different choices." The more removed you get, the more it's cancel culture.
Fourth, and finally, is what they said or did really that bad? This is obviously the squishiest and least objective, but still, if you try to get someone fired for something pretty unobjectionable, that's more likely to be cancel culture than if they did something truly heinous.
There might be other broad guidelines, but I think that usually when you see people criticizing cancel culture, they're identifying that a critic falls into one or more of those buckets. And really, I should be clear that I'm kind of using "cancel culture" as a synonym for "bad" here. As in, I think if your criticism falls into those buckets, it's more likely to be a poor use of your time and a behavior I want to see less of in the world, and when I call something cancel culture, I'm really trying to send that signal of moral judgment, rather than identifying it in a taxonomy (this is a very common tactic in politics I think--assign some set of obviously bad actions a label, and then when you run into other actions that you don't like but are less obviously bad, you fit those new actions into the label and take advantage of the bad vibes associated with that label. Very similar to the noncentral fallacy Scott has discussed before). The discussion of an act's moral rectitude is I think a lot more important and interesting than whether it falls into the label of cancel culture, which is really just an argument about how to define cancel culture--and again referencing Scott's previous work, remember that categories were made for man, not man for categories.
One interesting thing is that you can have a reaction that only meet the fourth bit of the test, yet intuitively the response is not likely to be regarded as cancel culture in a pejorative sense. If a football player said "I'm a massive Nazi fan, I want a massive holocaust 2.0 where we kill almost everyone alive for being a subhuman. I also support all rapists and murderers everywhere and would encourage my fans to commit hate crimes and steal from their elderly relatives" Few people would find calling for his sacking objectionable- or even boycotting the team if they don't sack him.
I think there's a very important tricky bit hidden in with "[...] are the critics limiting themselves to going after the player? Or are they saying that if someone else (like the league, or the team) doesn't punish him, they'll punish that other actor?" The tricky bit is, are they pointing out the player because of perceived hypocrisy on the part of the league? Is their real goal forcing the league to change its standards, especially when it comes to other speech?
My recollection specifically with regards to the Colin Kaepernick affair, part of the complaint was that the league had cracked down on other players showboating and wearing unauthorized apparel and that by allowing only him to violate the rules for his cause, the league was in effect endorsing his cause. If the league had come out and ended the rule for everyone regardless of cause, the end result would have been less animosity overall. Colin Kaepernick himself is ultimately an entertainer. People are allowed not to like him for his public persona. As long as they can perform, plenty of athletes do very well with a hated public persona (they're called 'heels').
The problem is that it's hard to identify when someone is using the situation to force the institution to change its policy, because admitting to doing so weakens your case. These issues are paid attention to because of the amount of furor people generate over being offended.
You can't rigourously define "cancel culture" any more than you can rigourously define any other sort of culture.
Looking for a non-conversial example here... the Dutch have a cycling culture. They do a lot of cycling. How can I turn that into a rigourous definition? I can't. The Dutch don't cycle everywhere under all circumstances, nor are they the only ones who cycle. I can't define a certain metric of cycling kilometres per person per year that separates cycling culture from non-cycling culture. But that also doesn't mean that it's a meaningless statement when I say that Dutch culture is unusually bicycle-ish.
Cancel culture is made up of normal things -- the thing where you get annoyed at someone who does or says things you dislike and you use social or economic power to punish them. It's just a matter of degree -- the problem we're pointing to when we say "cancel culture" is the problem that the social punishments are becoming bigger and the triggers for them are becoming more slight -- instead of boycotting the local butcher because he has "I luv paedophilia" signs in his windows we're suddenly boycotting the baker because he failed to denounce the fact that his sister wrote a letter in support of the guy who didn't denounce his mother who tweeted that (etc etc)
I'd say up to A8 is fine and A9 onwards is when it starts to get iffy. It's the difference between only taking personal action against stuff you dislike + recommending others to do the same with no coercion vs coercive behaviors applied to third parties. A9 would be fine if the person just blocked people who kept listening to the show without announcing it.
Making the announcement, even if it is completely true, creates a distortion and that's what is bad. It's in a way similar to situations in finance where you can be dinged for market manipulation if you publicly precommit to a trading strategy that other high sophistication participants can build around in such a way that it leads to higher profits for both you and them at the expense of the common man.
An example is e.g. if you're in a market which has two market makers competing to provide to a bunch of customers then the first company publicly saying "we will only trade in the first half of the day but during this time we will aggressively penny any orders from the second firm making it impossible for them to make money, the second half of the day is free for them to make money" is very illegal because it screws over the customers once the second market maker takes the hint (now at any point in the day there's only a single market maker present who can widen the spread and squeeze out more money from customers). This strategy would be fine from a regulatory point of view (don't quote me, this is not financial or legal advice, IANAL etc. etc.) and pretty shitty from a money making point of view were it not for the public announcement and precommitment which turns it into a form of tacit collusion.
On similar logic to that market manipulation issue, though, a thorough alliance against A9 might need to push back against A8 somewhat as well, for tactical incentive-gradient reasons.
Ah yes, the great debate of liberalism goes on... which rights should be more protected than others? Someone's right to say what they want? (Anything they want?) My right to try and get someone who said something I hate fired because I don't think people who say that should have it easy? (Or I think silencing them will reduce criticism of my position, which if left unchecked my turn into gov policy against me? think: rights to HRT or smthg). But what if I'm wrong and that strategy backfires? Was I in the wrong even though I was ignorant?
I suspect what Scott's (and most people in this convo one way or another) are really trying to get at here is mapping out the short and long term consequences of different actions people make, and the consequences of reacting to those actions in different ways, and then spreading mechanistic knowledge on how to most effectively judge/respond to actions other make in a utility-maximising way so as to bring society & discourse down to a more stable state that is less likely to cause emotional distress to its members.
A bunch of thoughts:
1. I think maybe cancel culture is just the combination of a world where many more connections are known, and a world using the copenhagen interpretation of ethics.
2. The more straightforward value of Diversity of opinion can be achieved by subsidizing the amount so that the marginal cost of subsidy equals the marginal social value of diversity.
3A. On guilt by association: Seems improper to not allow people to update on the totality of evidence but it is possible that humans are bad enough at updating on this kind of information that they are better of not.
3B. Threat to cancel: This is people threatening X to cut their connection to Y, seems like this is bad for the reason threats are generally bad. Note that its often hard to distinguish between Guilt by association and Threat to cancel.
4: there is something to be said for locality/unbundling/decoupling as neceasary for society to work, but sadly the world doesn't obey those rules, eg the atlantic bundles many writers together, peoples private lives and work lives are connected. Which makes it hard to make rules that enforce such decoupling, but if everything ends up coupled then action/functioning becomes impossible, eg how it makes it easier to hire if one can ignore peoples private lives.
The human impulse to loudly shout down a viewpoint they disagree with (and even to wish negative consequences on the holder of that viewpoint) is not new. Certainly not something that bubbled up in 2014-2017 due to some political "moment." What changed is that social media became sufficently robust and integrated into our lives that the loud shouting down could travel widely and be heard by everyone. And the social media tail now wags the mainstream media dog. Thousands of voices can now bandwagon a viewpoint in a way that simply was not possible in a like 1983 or 1949 or 1912 even if those voices were all saying that same thing back then but just to their one neighbor or whoever.
This is not a new problem of human nature (it is an ingrained feature of human nature) it is a problem with the way voices are amplified and distributed (for good and bad) by social media and the internet more broadly and an anti-cancel-culture coalition will probably have more luck focusing on the distribution issues and how social media operates (e.g. optimizing for engagement) than they will with changing fundamental human nature.
I gave Claude (the AI) Tim Urban's book "What's Our Problem" and your article here and asked it how it thinks Tim Urban would define Cancel Culture:
--------------------------
Tim Urban doesn't provide a single, concise definition of cancel culture in "What's Our Problem?". Instead, he discusses it as part of a broader phenomenon of illiberal tactics used by what he calls "Social Justice Fundamentalism" (SJF). However, based on his discussion, we can piece together how he characterizes cancel culture:
1. Part of a broader set of coercive tactics: Urban sees cancel culture as one of several illiberal methods used to enforce ideological conformity, alongside other tactics like mandatory trainings and forced speech.
2. A form of social punishment: It involves using social pressure, often amplified by social media, to punish individuals for perceived transgressions against a particular ideological orthodoxy.
3. Disproportionate response: Urban emphasizes that cancel culture often involves reactions that are disproportionate to the alleged offense, sometimes for actions or statements made years in the past.
4. Threat to free speech: He frames cancel culture as a threat to open discourse and the free exchange of ideas, particularly in academic and professional settings.
5. Digital cudgel: Urban describes cancel culture as wielding a "digital cudgel" - using the amplifying power of the internet and social media to exert pressure on individuals and institutions.
6. Lack of due process: Cancel culture often bypasses traditional processes for addressing grievances, instead relying on mob mentality and public shaming.
7. Chilling effect: Even when not directly "cancelling" someone, the threat of cancellation can lead to self-censorship and a chilling effect on free speech.
8. Ideological enforcement: Urban sees cancel culture as a way of enforcing adherence to certain ideological positions, particularly those associated with SJF.
9. Institutional capture: He discusses how the threat of cancellation can lead institutions to capitulate to demands, effectively allowing activist groups to capture and redirect institutional power.
10. Erosion of liberal norms: Urban frames cancel culture as part of a broader erosion of liberal democratic norms and institutions.
While Urban doesn't provide a single definition, his characterization of cancel culture aligns closely with the definition provided by Greg Lukianoff that you mentioned in the ACT post. Both see it as a recent phenomenon involving campaigns to punish people for protected speech, resulting in a climate of fear and conformity.
Firstly, I assumed you've read What's Our Problem by Tim Urban.
https://waitbutwhy.com/whatsourproblem
If you haven't, I've posted a basic summary https://www.kublermdk.com/2024/03/06/whats-our-problem-by-tim-urban-summary/
Your definition of Cancel Culture is probably aligned with the difference between his idea of High Rung and Low Rung political thinking.
But looking at the Claude response there's something specific that it highlighted for me. Point 6 Lack of Due Process.
You got very angry at The Atlantic for their post about noise.
I'm someone who sleeps with ear plugs in, I'm more sensitive to sound than my partner is. I've also got some kids and they are LOUD.
I usually work in another room with noise cancelling headphones on, so I resonate with you.
Side note: My partner, she's much more sensitive to smells. She's also more likely to detect an actor from how their face looks and I'm more likely to detect them by their voice.
Anyway. Point 6. Lack of Due Process.
I think that's something that's missing. You can for example contact the Atlantic and let them directly know you are offended by their post.
They can then flag the post for review and see if it should be modified, removed or some extra qualifiers added.
E.g Changing their article to say something more like "There's an unfortunate level of noise in a city, but having lots of people together is how knowledge and information is shared faster but also how humans bumping into each other more often leads to a more interesting life" and basically have them admit that they prefer the noise and hustle and bustle of city life compared to the boredom and silence of being in the country. But maybe they could reflect on the fact that social media, Short form (e.g Tiktok) videos and the like are all likely making it harder for people to sit in silence. But there's a power in silence. There's also some people who are charged up by it. Possibly similar to the introvert vs extrovert scale.
I haven't read the article you talk about, but I'm guessing that basically they could have a more nuanced perspective.
If you try to cancel the entire newspaper which was founded 166 years ago, for a single post, then you aren't actually letting them detect the flaws in their processes and maybe they'd been trying out some AI generated articles or letting a newbie who's a smart phone addict write whatever they want because it's the bosses son.
If they are cancelled, they don't have a chance to evolve and refine. There's bound to be outlier articles on anything that size and also bound to be ones that get missed through the Quality Assurance processes.
I personally think it's cancel culture when you actively ask others to cancel their subscriptions. It's even worse when you ask others to not just block, but also attack the newspaper.
But I'm not a Social Justice Fundamentalist. I have seen the work of plenty of people who've been "Cancelled" and still love their work, even if some of the things they do or sometimes what they've said wasn't very nice. But maybe I've not been angered enough.
Actually I saw that Cancel Culture got some pushback when they tried to cancel James Gunn for some stupid tweets something like 10+ years ago. Then people saw that he's changed and has also done some really great work.
We shouldn't live in a world where people delete their tweets and Facebook posts when they are a week old because they are scared that whatever is considered morally outrageous has changed and their old posts might get them cancelled. Instead of being able to show how they've changed as a person and no longer believe those things.
As an example I grew up with my Dad telling me things about Vegans not being possible and they cheat and basically hating on them. But then I met some and looked into it myself and changed my mind and now am good friends with a very ardent Vegan.
I'm also friends with gays, trans and other types of people from various races and don't really get offended by any of that. Yet I've had a conversation with family members who can't understand how people would vote for Barack Obama because he's black and thus genetically less intelligent. This was a bewildering line of reasoning to me but when I tried to ask them more about it they didn't want to delve deeper and explain any nuances. Very low rung alt-right thinking.
But I was also a part of some activist groups just at the start of the cancel culture SJF style of thinking and saw how that was also an alien type of thinking to me.
Both are low rung.
Sorry, I know I've not helped you define Cancel Culture enough. Just trying to add some context.
"If you try to cancel the entire newspaper which was founded 166 years ago, for a single post, then you aren't actually letting them detect the flaws in their processes and maybe they'd been trying out some AI generated articles or letting a newbie who's a smart phone addict write whatever they want because it's the bosses son."
That is a very reasonable idea in general, but it wouldn't work in this specific case; the authoress was nominated for a Pullitzer Prize for this very article (https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/xochitl-gonzalez-atlantic, under "Let Brooklyn Be Loud"), so it doesn't seem likely that the Atlantic will remove or review the post because of Scott Alexander's opinion, or any of ours for that matter.
This is probably a good place to drop this link:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-whats-our-problem
Ahh, the book review is only available for paid subscribers.
That's why I hadn't seen it.
"How come it’s okay to chill this opinion ab initio, but not post facto?" Abortion versus infanticide?
But abortion is a different thing, 1 month embryo is very far from a formed human being (toddler)
I am perfectly fine with A1-A6, they are all personal choices. I am ambivalent about A7 and A8, but against A9-12. "Against" or "fine with" are all based on ideas of social norms - I don't want to make A10 illegal, as that would be similarly bad to what I'm against in the first place.
As we're mostly talking about jobs (everyone seems to agree that you can stop being friends with someone whose views you hate), I think it's important to categorize different jobs in regards to speech, especially public speech.
The most important category is the press. The New York Times chooses what to print, and it's not an easy process to get something in that newspaper. Random people cannot do it, and nobody can do it without the express permission of the NYT. So anything that the NYT prints is something that they objectively chose to print. Because both the NYT and any journalists who write for it are expressly producing material for public consumption, it is not wrong for the public to share what was written, even in a negative light. This will have the natural (and morally okay) result of people subscribing or unsubscribing. It's the NYT's choice what kinds of subscribers to seek, and a business decision to platform some kinds of content over others.
The opposite of that kind of job would be the Home Depot-type employee. Unless they work in PR, they have very few duties that are meant to be public, or shared with the public. The pay rate, job description, whatever, all indicate that this position is not intended to deal with the national news or be held to national news standards. It is morally wrong to promote this person's opinions to a national audience, or to try to get this person fired.
Leadership at any organization would face higher scrutiny, with the bigger and more nationally known, the more okay it is to talk about their opinions. Big companies like Boeing or Disney, and their leadership, can and should expect more scrutiny than small businesses (especially so small that they are akin to attacking the owner-operator running them).
To me, there are no hard lines here, just a long sliding scale.
"But the more work we put into solving these questions, the more robust an anti-cancel-culture coalition will be. "
I disagree. Political coalitions often keep ideology somewhat vague to maintain disparate groups, or groups with differing levels of the same position, on the same side. The second-wave feminist movement had women who wanted to work traditionally male jobs, women who wanted to rewrite the whole power structure, and women who wanted to exterminate men (remember Valerie Solanas?), but they worked together and got the right to work. Environmentalists disagreed on whether they wanted to regulate pollution or destroy capitalism and go back to the land, but they worked together to pass things like the Clean Air Act. "Black Lives Matter" was such an effective slogan because it brought together people concerned about police brutality and people who wanted to defund the police entirely.
The only movement I can think of that stayed ideologically pure and got what it wanted was the pro-life movement, but they were relying on the judicial system and even then had to make themselves part of the larger conservative movement first.
tl;dr: you don't win by being ideologically rigorous, you win by getting lots of people on your side. (In a democracy, anyway; to the considerable degree the US is non-democratic, you win by getting *powerful* people on your side.) I would instead think about the people who don't like cancel culture (which includes me, by the way) and find a broad enough statement that attracts as much as possible of :
1. a broad coalition of people who don't like it (people who fear at the HR commissar, for instance)
2. powerful people whose interests are threatened (Harvard was free to abuse all sorts of right-coded groups but a little antisemitism scared the donors)
That broad statement still needs to be carefully calibrated to attract the optimal set of people.
For your Atlantic-bashing-stay-at-home-fathers, this doesn't really represent the modal case. Oftentimes the firing for an unpopular opinion occurs in the absence of any evidence that the expression hurt the bottom line.
Examples:
Tom Cotton Op-Ed leading to the firing of James Bennet, largely driven by internal employee pressure.
Hachette firing Kate Hartson, their last editor who was willing to publish books by Trump/other conservatives (which were extremely popular moneymakers, one of them the best-selling political book on Amazon).
For that reason I don't think replacing the actual beliefs with pedophilia is very enlightening. Very unpopular views don't get cancelled, they just get quietly ignored and die for lack of oxygen.
Similarly I think boycotts aren't really relevant here. A boycott only works if a large fraction of the customer base thinks the same way about an issue and sees it as important enough to change their purchase preferences. A lot of cancel culture moves involve getting someone in a position of responsibility in order to get rid of the offender, long before an organized boycott is in place. Don't most of these firings occur on the order of hours to days?
I personally think the objectionable cancellations almost always involve a principal-agent problem.
On paper Hachette book is supposed to make money from publishing books, so when its management fires an editor for (profitably!) publishing the wrong kinds of books, that's obviously acting against the organization's stated goals due to the political leanings of the person making the decision.
Universities are supposed to be places of free inquiry and education, which is why they are so often embroiled in cancel culture. There's no customer demand to accommodate, the culture has the whole concept of tenure, meant to shield holders of unpopular ideas, and students are supposed to be challenged with new ideas. So pretty much any firing with a political aspect fits the bill.
If James Bennet was fired "largely due to internal employee pressure", that is evidence that him staying in the workplace would have been detrimental to employee cohesion, hurting the bottom line (even if it is hard to quantify how much). Imagine if coworkers had complained that he smelled bad, or that he left the toilet lid up, or that he painted his desk green when yellow would have been much better, or anything else anywhere between "fully justified complaint that any decent person will agree with" and "crazy and irrational nonsense". If such complaints were numerous and persistent enough then it *is* definitely justified for management to discipline him, not morally as a ruling about what is the best desk color, but practically as a way to quell workplace unrest.
Of course you can slippery-slope that argument into violations of anti-discrimination laws ("I don't fire you because you're Black, but because other employees are racist!"), but "ran an op-ed by Tim Cotton" is not a protected class. If you think it should be, virtually everything is, and then the only philosophically-consistent rule is "no firing unless for cause with clear causation between your actions and the harm suffered by the company"; the fraction of people advocating for that among the "anti-cancel coalition" is virtually zero.
Similarly, did Hachette fire Hartson because its executives are fire-breathing wokistanians, or because they made the calculation that yes, the alt-right books sold a lot, but it made other books sell less via reputational effects and it was net-negative on the whole?
In the past, the Times employees would not have felt any cohesion problems from Bennett publishing an op-ed they disagreed with. The premise of opposing cancel culture is that being so upset about it is on some level a choice (in a way that being bothered by an obnoxious smell is not), and people (especially those working in institutions that are all about expressing different ideas, like newspapers and universities) should make a different choice. That’s the “culture” part.
The other thing missing from your analysis is that even if the employees being upset hurts the Times’ bottom line, that doesn’t settle the question: for his continued employment to be negative-EV, the bottom line would have to be hurt MORE than it’s hurt by the paper not being able to publish certain op-eds, along with other changes to the content of the paper.
> The premise of opposing cancel culture is that being so upset about it is on some level a choice
Or alternatively the people could have unknowingly self-modified to be unable to not be upset about it.
It's difficult to square the "reputational effects" angle for Hachette with the fact that they were using a separate imprint already precisely to avoid those (If you go look at the books on Amazon, the listed publisher is "Center Street", not Hachette).
Besides, while the profitability argument can always be plausibly made, it only ever is made long after the fact. In the moment the statement that led to her firing was much more clear about this being about putting moral values above profitability: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vS_tiz6ATX5piqGmFlu6FqNwJinahlYJqn7JtGoiDOUIFEEx3MuvXubKQJi6BGpTlsyJpqLgk-pyhiE/pub
> We all love book publishing, but we have to be honest — our country is where it is in part because publishing *has chased the money and notoriety* of some pretty sketchy people, and has granted those same people both the imprimatur of respectability and a lot of money through sweetheart book deals.
Emphasis mine. Note how the accusation is putting profit above higher considerations.
It's true that you can't easily operationalize this kind of line drawing into the law, and I'm not suggesting we try, but it is still pretty easy to spot in practice for informal judgment. The people doing it rarely bother dressing up their decision in terms of the financial impact of retaining vs. firing an employee.
Reputational effects could still be a factor if social media made the usual defense tactics less effective.
True, there will always be a "profit motive of the gaps" for a private employer.
Which is why it's easier to point at cancellation when it's happening in universities, whose whole social value is supposed to be getting free-thinking people to pursue the truth, and shielding them from the social consequences thereof.
The NYT is no longer willing to be bullied by its staff, so it turns out the people complaining about their coverage of, for example, trans issues, are unable to actually convert their frustration into anything actually affecting the paper.
Your second paragraph isn't a slippery slope scenario, it's a description of what actually happened with the groups of people switched out. The NYT editor was fired because he published an op-ed from a conservative politician, which pissed off all of the leftists working there (so basically every employee). It would be exactly the same if he published an op-ed from a prominent black man at a paper where the staff were all racists. Protected classes only exist as the byproduct of the Civil Rights Act, which as evidenced in other ACX posts leads to bad law and bad outcomes. If you accept the James Bennet case under the rationale that firing for employee morale is acceptable, it is equally acceptable to fire an employee because other employees are racist and it causes problems for them to work together.
I feel like letting coworkers decide whether your employer should continue to employ you is one step shy of mob violence. The workplace isn't a democracy; if you want to have a coworker fired, you better have some kind of policy violation you can point to. "Cohesion" isn't a compelling reason.
The definition specifically mentions "campaigns". Therefore an individual making their own choice not to listen doesn't fall under the definition (as long as they don't make that choice out of fear of how they might be perceived were they caught listening by someone else). If they then try to influence others not to listen, however, then it may fall under the definition.
Pedophilia may be widely accepted as a bad thing, but freedom of speech means someone has the right to advocate for it if they choose to. That doesn't mean you have to listen to or agree with them. Choosing not to listen to someone is not cancel culture, organising to influence others to punish them or to ignore them can be cancel culture.
A1 to A6 are clearly not cancel culture under the definition. You haven't organised any sort of campaign, you've listened to what they've said and decided you aren't going to continue listening. They still have the right to say whatever they want. You still have the right not to listen.
A7 and A8 are edge cases, and might depend on how many followers you have. If two people read it, maybe it doesn't matter, if two million read it then maybe it does.
A9-A12 are part of cancel culture since there is a clear campaign. A10 is perhaps not, since Spotify is a private platform and can have whatever content rules they want. If advocating pedophilia is against their rules I think you'd be fine informing them of the content.
B1 & B2: There is no campaign here. The student has the right to publish papers saying what they want, but you (or the university) is under no obligation to fund that. If you stop them because you think the papers are generally bad or immoral, then its clearly not cancel culture. But if you stop them only because you are afraid of a backlash then it is cancel culture.
B3: The article itself is not cancel culture, its just an article unless you specifically call for the guy to be fired or action to people. The reaction of people to it, and the campaign they organise, is cancel culture.
B4 & B5: If you fire them because of the public response or because of fear of one, it is cancel culture. If you do it because of your own reasons - you personally find it immoral or whatever - then it isn't.
C1: The petitions are all forms of cancel culture. But you are asking about morality here. The definition of cancel culture does not say it is immoral or not. In some cases perhaps it is, in others perhaps it isn't. But freedom of speech is not about morality, people have the right to say immoral things.
C2: Again, morality is here. The definition does not mention morality. If you personally decide not to mention The Atlantic again in your blog then its not cancel culture. If you organise a big campaign to get lots of people to boycott The Atlantic to intimidate them out of writing such articles then it is.
I think there's a couple of general points here. The first is the association you seem to make between freedom of speech and morality. Its not at all clear that link exists. Speech does not have to be moral. You can say all sorts of immoral things and you still have the right to say it if you invoke freedom of speech.
Secondly, people are free to speak, but others are equally free not to listen. There's no obligation to listen to anyone, nor can you even listen to everyone.
And third, not all opposition to free speech falls under cancel culture. The definition speaks specifically of campaigns that intend to intimidate people out of speaking freely. There are other ways to oppose free speech that wouldn't fall under such a definition.
i guess a final point is that cancel culture itself should be protected by freedom of speech. Even organising against cancel culture is itself a kind of cancel culture.
Writ large, it's the thinkers vs the feelers; writ small, it's the thinking self vs feeling self.
Should we constrain our emotions, or should we constrain our intellect?
Should the self conform to others, or should others be ignored by self?
Take your answers and multiply by the number of people involved.
+1
Warriors vs Worriers.
All should conform to me!
This article's examples ably show why "cancellation" is, at its core, "speech or exercise of freedom of association I think is a disproportionate response to other speech," and is often "speech or freedom of association I don't like in response to speech." The line you're trying to draw here is "what is proportionate?" I think it's impossible to be for free speech without embracing free association and the right of others to say speech you disagree with, even in response to speech you agree with. Most complaints about cancel culture I've seen privilege the initial speaker over the response speech.
I agree that there's lots of speech I think is a disproportionate response, and I think the best way to respond to it is to say so (and to say why). I'm for "more speech" solutions.
The problem is when disproportionate speech carries disproportionate material consequences, such that few want to cross the line because the consequences are too scary. Then there’s not as much speech that will check the disproportionate response.
I strongly believe that the problem with "cancel culture" is not the category of actions like "complaining on social media", "calling for someone to be fired", "circulating petitions", "firing people for the opinions they express", etc.
There *exist* things we'd all agree are okay to complain on social media about. There exist situations where it would make sense to fire someone for their publicly expressed opinions, where that's relevant to the performance of the job.
A communications director for a company should be fired if she publicly insults that company or its customers. Making a good impression is her job. And I'd definitely call for firing, e.g. a teacher at my kids' school who made anti-Semitic remarks in public -- a teacher's job is taking care of & teaching students, which is incompatible with hateful views towards any of those students.
The problem with "cancel culture" is entirely about disproportionate and inappropriate responses to people's opinions. What counts as "inappropriate" or "disproportionate" is, unfortunately, a judgment call, but that's unavoidable. Some questions do have to be decided that way!
Let's think about a prototypical "cancel culture" situation -- comedian makes an arguably offensive joke.
In a lot of cases I think it's fine to be offended and not watch that comedian, even if some people think you're being oversensitive. It's also fine to complain on your personal social media account that you can't stand that darn comedian.
It's probably bad to start a coordinated campaign to make sure the comedian can never find work again. It's *definitely* bad if the comedian's works are all deleted from streaming services so nobody can ever find them again -- that's destruction of information and I seriously disapprove of that.
What if the comedian isn't just "arguably offensive" but very, very beyond the pale, like a pro-pedophilia activist? Then yeah, I'd actually support circulating petitions and news articles with the goal of getting him de facto banned from mainstream entertainment! But it's still protected speech, so he shouldn't face any *legal* penalties.
See how case-by-case this is?
It actually relies on judgment calls about what ideas belong in the "public square." My moderate common-sense view is that Republicans/conservatives and their views are *obviously* part of the "national discussion" just because they're *so numerous*, and it's not fair for even more liberal/progressive cultural zones like media and academia to totally exclude them from the range of legitimately debatable opinions. But that doesn't mean there are *no* views that it makes sense to coordinate to exclude.
Yeah, most of the time when students protest a speaker being invited to campus, that's dumb. A conservative anti-feminist may be *controversial*, but that's in some sense a view that lots of people legitimately want to debate and compare to other views. On the other hand, I could imagine there being *someone* so crazy (maybe a pro-pedophilia advocate) that I might actually worry it harms the public discourse for them to be given the prestige of an invitation to speak at a major university, and I could sympathize with a (peaceful) protest trying to prevent them from coming. Or not -- maybe by the time there's a student group that wants them to come, trying to silence their views is counterproductive. It's complicated.
We should definitely (in the US) stick to the 1st Amendment, and I wish more of the rest of the world had similar legal protections. But once we're in the zone of "what *private* responses to objectionable speech are Not Cool", I think we need to be honest about the fact that there are totally types of speech reasonable people object to and are entitled to respond to in various ways!
I like the suggestion that the problem is disproportionate over-reaction to whatever thing was said. And with comedians, the social convention is that they are permitted to say *slightly* offensive things.
Way before the current concern over cancel culture, in 1993, comedian Julian Clary got into big, big trouble for telling a joke about fisting Norman Lamont. (Who was actually in the audience when the joke was told, and so might be regarded as having taken on the risk that he might get roasted as part of the stand up routine). (The punch-line might require familiarity with UK government procedures to get, and be incomprehensible to Americans)
I've argued elsewhere in the thread that there are good reasons to categorically oppose certain kinds of responses to people's opinions, like firing people for opinions expressed off the job from jobs where their opinions aren't inherently relevant (as it is for e.g. an opinion columnist), regardless of the content of the expression. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lukianoff-and-defining-cancel-culture/comment/66291041 In short, it allows us to oppose "cancellations" without having to go into an object-level debate about the controversial subject involved; and with such a norm, an organization can defy a cancel mob without having to thereby implicitly assert that the opinion expressed is at least not very beyond the pale.
Firing a teacher for making antisemitic remarks off the job is sort of like shooting the messenger, even if it would be desirable to not have teachers with antisemitic views because they may act in a biased way towards Jewish kids. The vast majority of teachers with antisemitic views will refrain from discussing them in public if doing so gets them fired. So firing teachers who express such views off the job is not a viable way to significantly reduce the number of antisemitic teachers; instead, they will just keep quiet, and still be biased against Jewish kids if they would otherwise be. It just prevents us from assessing how many teachers are antisemitic. Absent a significant, job-related benefit, we should default to not firing people for views they express off the job. Of course it's another matter if the teacher expresses antisemitic views while teaching: speaking to the children is the core of the job, the employer can of course have expectations about it.
Well, I suppose if we fired people for antisemitic views in a few especially sensitive jobs, we could hope antisemites would prefer to choose jobs where they can speak their minds, so it may actually reduce the number of antisemites in those sensitive jobs. But that would require that we actually don't fire antisemites in other jobs. Also, most jobs require one to work with customers, students or at least co-workers; one could use that as an excuse to fire anyone who expresses views that indicate he might be biased against some of them from any job, but then we're back to the point of shooting the messenger.
Why would you support trying to get someone very beyond the pale, like the pro-pedophilia activist, banned from all mainstream media? If it's really so beyond the pale, chances are he isn't convincing anyone. (Also, chances are he wouldn't get published in mainstream media even just because of a lack of viewer demand.) Or if some view is currently very beyond the pale but you think an exponent might be able to convince many people, how can you be sure it's not because it's actually correct, and you'd be convinced too if you listened to him?
I'll give a rigorous definition: Cancel culture is the hypocritical practice of censorship by libertarians. It's distinguished from ordinary censorship in that those doing the censoring are betraying their previous commitment to free speech.
This is confusing, in the US, because both major parties are currently confused as to whether (and how much, and of what issues) they're libertarian versus authoritarian. In the past (say, 1950s-2010s) the Republicans were the authoritarians: they had a positive vision of morality, and were mostly willing to push against US legal libertarian institutions (the Bill of Rights, traditions of journalistic independence, etc). People ought to live a certain way, and it's good to use power (of various kinds) to make them do so.
In that same time period, the Democrats were the libertarians: they had a negative vision of morality, specifying mostly what _shouldn't_ be done, and they fought to defend and uphold US legal libertarian institutions. We shouldn't use power to force people to live how we want, people should be allowed to speak out against institutions.
Starting around 2014, for what reason I do not know, powerful segments of Democrats found that they actually do have a positive vision of morality. There is a right way to live, and we should use various forms of power to make people live that way. Republicans, who traditionally agreed with that general thesis, but disagree with the Democrats' application of it, needed a term to express the sense of betrayal and hypocrisy they felt. Us millennials grew up hearing about this political party boldly protesting for the right to print criticism of the Vietnam War; now that same party is calling criticism of the war in Ukraine "Russian disinformation". That's not even original, it's just synonyms for the "Soviet propaganda" label Republicans were putting on Vietnam War criticism in the 70s!
If you try to define "cancel culture" as the violation of some specific libertarian code of conduct, you'll run into problems with cases of Republican censorship in the 50s-90s that meet your definition, but clearly aren't cancel culture. That's because the determining factor for "cancel culture" is the perceived hypocrisy. Cancel culture is the violation of any libertarian code of conduct regarding speech, by a person, group or institution who has committed to upholding that code of conduct.
My definition is agnostic as to the particular libertarian code of conduct being betrayed, except that it have to do with free speech. It's agnostic as to the particular forms of power used to betray it. The necessary ingredient is that somebody who deliberately cultivated a reputation for libertarianism betrays it with authoritarian actions.
So it wouldn't be cancel culture for a nice silver-haired old Nixon-era lady to write a letter to the editor of her local paper saying she doesn't think people should be allowed to publish scientific defenses of pedophilia. She's always believed in censorship, this is normal for her. We expect this. But it's absolutely cancel culture for a young tech bro to write an email to the dean of a college saying people shouldn't be allowed to publish scientific defenses of pedophilia, after he's been on the Internet for ten years making libertarian arguments against liberals who are trying to shut down scientific criticisms of trans gender affirming care. He's being a hypocrite.
Same violation of libertarian codes of conduct; he's doing cancel culture and she isn't.
(Edited to align overly broad restatement of definition with original statement)
12th-century Siberian stamp collecting is about to pop off bc of this
Cancel culture is a culture-wide phenomenon, not individual actions. Big surprise!
It's totally fine, as individual, to refuse to pay for products you hate or to work with people you don't like. It's necessary even! If we want good products and pleasant coworkers. Cancel culture is a set of trends across the whole society:
- It's life-and-career-ruining to be accused of something from a narrow list of sins, even falsely. It's not particularly dangerous to accuse people of those sins falsely, and in fact can benefit your career.
- People refuse to pay/hire not because of personal dislike, but because someone told them to.
- Companies are changing policies not because of popular demand and direct profit motive, but because they think they will lose investors/clients, who themselves don't object to old policies but are afraid they will lose ratings/partners, who themselves don't object but fear... (anti-CC people usually don't say "people should defend free speech at personal cost", they say "get woke, go broke")
- An opinion that majority of people hold somehow can not be said in public.
It's even sometimes fine to personally contribute to those trends! If a friend you trust says a particular company is biased against your race, it makes sense to just hire another company without checking. But if too many people do stuff like that, we get critical mass of power given to complainers and end up with a cluster of opinions/orgs who hold the power to irrevocably ruin your life comparable to the government, and therefore that power should be put in check with something comparable to First Amendment.
...
...
Also, maybe don't equivocate pedophilia and CSA? It doesn't help anybody. Seems like you either don't know the difference, or didn't take to heart a lesson from Politics is the Mind-Killer - don't use politically charged examples to make an unrelated point.
Back in 2014 Matthew Klickstein, who’d written a book about old Nickelodeon shows, came to NYC to give a lecture (I think perhaps as part of NY Comic Con). My friends were very excited, and the proposed lecture was very popular, at least with my demographic. Shortly before the lecture, Klickstein gave an online interview where he came across very badly. He was a little whiny, a little unlikeable. He didn’t like shows everyone else liked. He said something (IIRC) about how he was bad getting his point across orally. After the interview my friends got upset. They all decided not to attend the lecture. In some online spaces, not attending the lecture became the default position. Everyone decided not to go. Catching wind of this, the sponsors canceled the lecture.
At the time I thought this situation was weird. Already I was familiar with the concept of people losing jobs for bad jokes (Justine Sacco) or beliefs (Brendan Eich), but Klickstein had said nothing actually offensive. Maybe he was constantly almost offensive, though. He didn’t signal he was one of us. He criticized “girl” shows and valorized “boy” shows. He was (in the language of the time) insensitive. And the response had been what was in effect a boycott. People on Twitter or Livejournal or wherever we were hanging out in 2014 exercised gentle social pressure until no one was going to the lecture. It was a successful boycott.
When I would bring this weirdness up to my friends, the ones who had participated in and furthered the online boycott, they thought nothing weird had happened. It turned out, with the new information they had, that they didn’t want to see the lecture. The lecturer seemed unpleasant, and why pay to hear someone unpleasant be unpleasant for a hour? His shows were not their shows, so even the subject matter was different than they had anticipated. “You will not enjoy this lecture that is on a topic you don’t care about” seems like a perfectly good reason not to attend a lecture.
Even the social pressure, which at the time was gentle (“you’re not going to that, are you?”) in contrast to what it would become (“unfriend me now!” or Warren Ellis’s famous statement that anyone who disagrees with him on punching neonazis should also be punched). I once had a group of friends and one of us (we learned) had never read Hamlet; we mercilessly mocked him until he read Hamlet. I don’t really feel bad about that, so why should people feel bad with their much smaller and less cruel persuasion of others to avoid a lecture they have reason to believe would be no fun.
I had never intended to go to the lecture (not being a Nick-head); how was I any different from people who decided later not to go to the lecture.
This was my edge case. I felt uncomfortable at the time, but when I tried to articulate it I had a hard road. Everyone seemed reasonable, and yet the result of their reasonableness was an uncomfortable result.
Ultimately I think Klickstein got canceled because he signaled he wasn’t one of us, and this is what I think is most pernicious about cancel culture so-called. Canceling real out-there yahoos (Nazis, for example) has never been controversial for most Americans. Reducing “everyone outside of a particular marketing demographic” to the status of out-there yahoo is something that we didn’t have the luxury of even trying before our marketing demographics took over our identities.
Back in 2014 Brendan Eich got canceled for a mainstream position that millions of other Californians held. It just wasn’t a mainstream position in one of “our” spaces, so we got rid of him. But you still hear academics say that they are cautious in their speech at a faculty wine and cheese, while down the street frat boys are saying whatever they feel like and everyone knows it; but it’s had to police their space and easy to police our own, so we watch for anyone who steps out of line, while ignoring the overt outsiders beyond the Pale.
Eventually of course we decided that “our” space was everywhere we looked and we entered the late-teens hellscape of demanding everyone be one of us—or else!
Of course, cancel culture got associated with a particular demograhic, but a rival demograohic has always been happy to cancel the Dixie Chicks, or anyone who complains about a cop’s funeral, or that lady who took a “wacky” picture at Arlington. But they hate cancel culture! But they love keeping their demographic pure, so they, too, will harm anyone who steps out of line, assuming they have to power to do it.
As long as we value the purity of our marketing demographics more than a generalized value of free expression, we’ll be stuck with these cancelations.
(I tried to say a lot very fast and I haven’t done the best job. But I’m groping towards something here.)
The Dixie Chicks were "cancelled" for things they said in their public persona as entertainers, to their audience as entertainers, and it was that audience which "cancelled" them by refusing to give them money.
The left is constantly bringing up this one example. It's just about the only example they can find unless you go back to McCarthy, and even then it doesn't really qualify.
I don’t think the Dixie Chicks are the worst examples of cancelation, but I can’t say they don’t count. But if you want people ridden out on a rail by the right for personal moments unrelated to their job, I’ll offer Lindsey Stone (2012) & Jacqueline Guzman (2022), alluded to in my post though I was too lazy to look up their names.
Please note that I am not trying to make a claim that if you add up every cancelation that the right has done exactly as many as the left, or that one side’s cancelations are better or worse than the other’s.
I, for one, am just pleased to finally see an instance in which Scott overreacts to something on an emotional level and can't just decide to step back to the rationalist objectivity. It makes me feel a little better about my failings in that regard. 😜
Kidding aside, The Atlantic is really good about publishing a diversity of viewpoints. I hate when people diss the publication because of one thing they said, because I guarantee you it's not the official stance of The Atlantic and that there are a ton of staff writers who find the position equally absurd as you do. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them has already said so in an article.
It 'helps' that the author of that braindead piece got dragged because she'd also written about moving to the countryside for a time to write her book in peace and quiet.
Seconding the support for The Atlantic. The quality of any individual article varies wildly but overall the contrast and variety makes up for it.
I'm not sure this is sufficient, but part of the issue is I believe people are being punished for positions that are held by either a majority or a very sizeable minority of the polity. This doesn't apply to pedophilia, but if someone is canceled for an opinion held by 40% of Americans that seems like a problem (even if that opinion might actually be wrong).
Copy-pasting another comment:
But that just leads inevitably to the tyranny of the majority. I wouldn't want to live in a society in which a peaceful religious minority don't feel safe practising their religion or prosleytising for it.
And as rationalists are so keen to point out, many opinions which are currently widely-held (e.g. "women should have the right to vote", "black people are entitled to the same human rights as everyone else and should not be kept as slaves") were once extremely unpopular and could land you in huge trouble for expressing them in public. The whole point of the First Amendment is to protect the expression of unpopular opinions, because popular opinions (for the most part) require no protection.
I do agree that something has gone badly wrong when people feel uncomfortable expressing an opinion that probably 90%+ of people in their immediate vicinity would agree with, although I don't think this has much bearing on the cancel culture debate.
You make a good case for free speech and reducing cancel-culture-ish responses. All I'm saying is that's the case for even MORE openness and, as you gave the nod to at the end, that's even more reason to not punish people excessively for fairly mainstream beliefs. I tend to agree the criteria I outlined doesn't go far enough, but it's alarming when even that criteria isn't being met.
As far as definitions go, I think we can define cancel culture in a way that's analagous to blackmail. What makes something blackmail isn't merely threatening to reveal something bad about someone -- it's perfectly legal to say "you said you would fix my pool if I paid you so if you don't finish fixing it I'll tell everyone you aren't trustworthy" because the negative information shared is sufficiently connected to the claim being made against them (claim of right) but if the threat was "finish fixing my pool like I paid you to do or I'll tell everyone about how you cheated on your wife" that's blackmail.
I'd argue that the definition of cancel culture needs to be similar. It is an attempt to use tools of social pressure to enforce compliance with certain desired speech patterns that's sufficiently unconnected with the speech in question. And yes, on one side is choosing not to pay to read content that expresses objectionable views on the other is getting someone fired for their job bagging groceries for there non-work related tweets. But in between there is certainly a grey area.
But I also want to argue against the idea that we should try to define that too clearly. Indeed, I fear any attempt at too sharp a definition here might even be harmful. The issue is that we all naturally do feel that the more unacceptable the remark the less closely connected the response needs to be. And that's fine.
We can agree directionally that maybe things have gone too far and too much speech is being harshly punished without needing to try and agree on precisce boundaries of those notions. That just bogs down into unhelpful hypotheticals. I'd argue it's enough for a coalition to point to a bunch of examples -- we mean to oppose things like this -- without a need to delineate exactly where one thinks the boundary needs to be.
This sounds logical, but it would backfire in practice. A racist lecture by a biologist, geneticist is directly related to their job, yet is more harmful than grocery baggers being racist. Jordan Peterson is widely believed because a clinical psychology professor is likely to be right about male and female brains? Doing the relevant job implies expertise which implies authority which implies responsibility.
But firing a geneticst for saying things we find objectionable about genetics isn't cancel culture. It's a problem because it violates academic freedom but that's a different concern.
If you were running a center for treating gender dysphoria not a university of course you should be able to fire someone like Peterson for endorsing a view at odds with the job you want him to do.
There are multiple ways punishment for speech can be bad and trying to push them all into one term doesn't help.
Great post.
For the As - A10 is when it crosses over into clear-cut cancel culture, in my opinion. It's where this situation stops being about a specific podcast, potentially just an one-off, and threatens to grow cancel culture in general by impacting a major platform in Spotify. I think one of the main things that strengthens cancel culture are getting platforms directly involved at all. It's this sort of thing that leads to all sorts of normal words being literally unspeakable on YouTube now, a ridiculous and embarrassing state of affairs imo. If a particular YouTuber talks about rape or pedophilia in a way that you find morally egregious, and you decide to unsubscribe from them and strongly encourage others to do the same, fine. But don't go to YouTube itself directly about it, because that results in ridiculous things like the words "pedophile" and "rape" now being borderline banned in general on YouTube.
For B1, I think it's fine to quietly fail to renew his contract. The first option is also maybe fine, but I'm less confident there.
For B2, if you want to distance yourself from pedophile discussion in general, I think it's fine to quietly fail to renew his contract.
For B3, you could write a generalized anti-pedophile article that doesn't mention the student or his activities specifically. Yes, people "on the ground" at the university will likely figure out what's inspiring you here, but this might be enough to keep it "in house", and not get people outside the university involved. This seems less cancel culture to me while still enabling him to fight back against something you strongly dislike.
For B4, I would encourage researching the student's work and maybe doing such research on the effect of the word "bossy" yourself. Come to your own conclusions, and act in accordance to them. If you end up disagreeing with the student, then same as B3, write a generalized anti-calling-women-bossy article without mentioning the student or his activities specifically. If you end up agreeing with the student, great. You can choose to openly agree with him, risking your reputation some, or you can choose to just quietly enjoy the student's writings. Maybe send him an anonymous letter of support.
For B5, same as B4, though riskier than B4 so somewhat more understandable if you choose to not get involved personally.
I largely agree with your feelings towards the Atlantic. Making decisions on what you alone are going to read/not read, talk about/avoid is not cancel culture. That's just being a normal human being, honestly. If you started a general boycott against The Atlantic, in the sense of encouraging all of your friends and readers to not read it, I think that's also fine. Similar to how A10 is crossing the line, I'd say crossing the line here would be going after The Atlantic's advertisers, or places that advertise The Atlantic.
I think there's two areas where cancel culture gets truly nasty and detrimental:
1. Getting average everyday people fired from their jobs for something they said/wrote outside of work.
2. Getting platforms/advertisers/business partners involved. It contributes to a cultural trend that strengthens cancel culture considerably. (this is distinct from getting your friends/loved ones/readers involved)
An analogy I'd use is this - a standard boycott is like standard warfare, getting platforms/advertisers/business partners involved is like dropping nukes or using biological warfare. It's a severe escalation and it raises the likelihood of severe "collateral damage".
To me, the single important distinction is separating the obnoxiousness of the idea/thought/utterance from the individual uttering/agreeing/allowing it. Cancellation is about retaliation against human beings for things they are deemed to have countenanced. There are all sorts of degrees of countenancing, from actually writing to agreeing with to not actively opposing, but none of them matter. Oppose the sin, not the sinner.
That leaves open the question of institutions, which, since they are composed of individuals, but represent ideas, lie partway in between ideas and people. All the hard cases are at that level. But you can (at least in theory) punish the Atlantic or MIT or the Ford Foundation without punishing its employees, including those that lead the organization. One should try to do so, recognizing that there will inevitably be edge cases here.
To me, the simplest case is the work of art by an obnoxious person. I don't care if Tolstoy was a rapist or if Woody Allen is/was a pedophile. I can enjoy the art as if I am ignorant of the person or persons who created it. I don't care if a corporation (or its owners/managers) uses the profits from its useful product to carry out activities I find repugnant. The law exists to punish the behavior if the behavior violates some public interest and that's fine.
Also, I kinda feel like your essay about first making sure you have a sufficently broad coalition before trying to coordinate to punish dissent really addresses what's really going on in these cases.
I'd argue that in practice very little opposition to cancel culture really stems from any conviction that certain kinds of punishment are inappropriate regardless of the view expressed. Those debates do sometimes happen but they are usually framed as either concerns about implicit government censorship, monopoly power accomplishing the same effect or in terms of particular other rights like academic freedom.
In reality, almost all objections to cancel culture are really of the form: our society hasn't sufficiently agreed that view is so far beyond the range of acceptable content as to warrant that level of punishment. And I say that as someone who thinks cancel culture is incredibly harmful and counterproductive.
However, it's harmful exactly because it targets viewpoints that our society hasn't broadly agreed are unacceptable to express. Indeed, when we have that broad agreement there isn't the same epistemic danger because we just aren't as threatened. We don't feel the norm against paedophilia is under threat so there isn't pressure to stop the publication of a study that, say, shows people recover from the abuse better than we previously thought (bc no one sees it as defending the practice just some nice news). And it doesn't result in the same kind of unfortunate backlash -- including expert distrust -- nor ruin lives as much for similar reasons.
So I really think the right move here isn't to try and identify what social punishments aren't ok but rather to try and push for norms about not trying to suppress views via punishment unless you really do have broad agreement across society broadly.
I don't know that this deserves to be reified as the *definition* of "cancel culture", but I think one common and important component that doesn't get enough press is that cancellation tends to involve not just people voluntarily choosing to take their business elsewhere but harassing others who choose not to. e.g. Cloudflare would prefer to be ideologically neutral because their business is not actually based on content at all, and only buckled in some extreme cases like The Daily Stormer and Kiwifarms because of extreme boycott pressure. University speakers are often prevented from speaking because of the threat of riots and the inability or unwillingness of university staff to guarantee the speakers' safety regardless of who wants to hear them speak. Or, to take an example in the past that nearly everyone would agree was wrong, Jim Crow laws were *laws*; a restaurateur who wanted to accept patrons of all races would be prohibited from doing so until such laws were repealed.
It's true that extreme anti-cancellation stances can often be reduced to some weird declaration that someone should be required to actively support something they don't like, don't agree with, or even find abhorrent. But I think it should be easy to say that if *other people* want to patronize something you don't like, don't agree with, or actively find abhorrent, that actively interfering with or even forcibly preventing their own decision to associate is another matter. Along those lines A8 might bother me a little bit but not enough to say it's wrong, while I consider A9 importantly on the wrong side of the line. Meanwhile for the other examples I tend to go with your P3. Even though that fails to condemn a lot of stuff I find actually bad, this bad stuff should often be opposed on other grounds such as that the "unpopular" position is often more "unpopular with a handful of way-too-online cranks who are good at being loud and consequently get more deference than their economic impact would justify." I'm not convinced you can fully escape the object level here, which is probably the reason Cancel Culture has been hard to pin down.
Jim Crow is an important example but I think you’re incorrect about how the laws worked, at least in most cases. As I understand it, Jim Crow laws governed public spaces (like Rosa Parks’s bus), but individual businesses were legally free to serve to anyone (though in practice they were not free to do so because of how other customers might have reacted). That’s why the Green Book existed, to point Black travelers to the few businesses where they could get served. But if I’ve got that wrong please correct me!
Without looking it up you’re probably right; this was dashed off before my morning coffee.
I think that the sometimes-private nature of Jim Crow helps make the point you're making, about people making the decision for others!
Individual businesses like restaurants were in fact restricted by Jim Crow laws (such as the first example in the following link):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jim_Crow_law_examples_by_state
Thanks, I stand corrected!
I don't think anybody was boycotting Cloudflare. It would be hard too, because there's not much of an alternative!
I don't know enough about the landscape to speak to how good or meaningful the alternatives are, but I distinctly remember the activism having a rough undercurrent of "sure would be a shame if I, an IT professional, tell my employer that you're platforming [whatever KiwiFarms was accused of being at the time] and go to an alternative." The only part I could see doubting is just whether those threats had teeth, something I'd need to do some research to find out.
If it was easy for them to switch to an alternative, then the same should have been true of KiwiFarms. One thing the CEO of CloudFlare despaired over was that he had the power to remove sites from the internet.
A6 is when cancel culture starts.
I think you are spot on. The question is not tolerance, or diversity of opinion, but purity. The idea of eternal damnation for having done one questionable thing once. It's not letting people have a bad hair day and fuck up.
Please consider that it is cancel technology, not cancel culture. Have you read The Blank Slate? In the 1970's Wilson or Herrnstein could not teach courses due to angry student mobs. Then smartphones happened.
Note that back then Herrnstein carefully avoided the topic of race. But in the 70's any talk of inborn traits was seen "fascist", not because of racist connotations but because of appearing to conserve inequality.
My point is I don't like those arguments that are like "here is this bad new thing" and then it turns the same exact thing happened 50 years ago. It was even the same bad terminology "Racist Wilson do not lie, we charge you with genocide." (I mean the weird over-use of "genocide".)
I wish these debates would more often point out where the term comes from - Twitter activists had begun, in the early 2010s, to say of celebrities accused of bad behavior "they're canceled." It's a minor semantic and historical point and yet I think a loaded one.
I recall David Bax of Battleship Pretension snarking "Liberals say 'X is cancelled'. Leftists like me say 'X is a piece of shit'".
Seems to me, this is a critical part of the definition:
<i>Cancel Culture is the uptick, beginning around 2014 and accelerating in 2017... </i>
Along with the other aspects of the definition which require specificity, that condition requires verification. How is that "uptick" measured? How is this trend differentiated the baseline of similar events which took place prior?
The reason I point to that is that I think that "cancel culture" has existed for a long time. Perhaps what's largely different is who is getting "cancelled." Groups of people who previously had the power to "cancel" are now seeing that they can be targeted. Groups of people who previously were targeted by "cancelling" and had no power to "cancel," now have attained such a power.
So it's not an advent of a cancel culture, but a different form of the same thing. That isn't a justification either way.
Cancel culture seems like it's part of free speech. And since I think almost all kinds of speech should be allowed, I just have to accept that cancel culture is part of it.
It is part of free speech. But some uses of free speech are discouraged by the culture (being rude, say), and some of us are arguing that our culture should discourage canceling in a similar way.
I think you're over-complicating things.
Cancel culture is when you try to deny "neutral platforms" to people you disagree with. Neutral platforms are places that would otherwise be agnostic to the opinions you hold/express: your job, your website hosting provider, your payment gateways, your restaurants, your landlords.
By that measure, A6-A9 are gray areas (depending on, among other things, how much social power you wield and the nature of the objectionable content), and A10+ are definitely cancel culture.
Approximately nobody would deny your personal right to associate/disassociate with any particular individual, or to your right to express value judgements about them. It's just statements of the form "because someone hold a particular opinion, they should not be allowed on this <neutral platform> or <neutral platform> should disassociate with them" that goes into cancel culture territory.
Of course there is bound to be some gray areas about what neutral platforms are, edge cases and a poorly defined boundary as to when you go from "small business/podcast/forum" to "neutral platform" (c.f. social media bias/censorship). But the vast majority of cancel culture cases are far more clear cut.
I think this is a big part of it. However, I also think it was a clear and unambiguous example of cancel culture when people were demanding that Brendan Eich step down as CEO of Mozilla because of his opposition to same-sex marriage, even though Mozilla has no pretensions of being a neutral platform.
I think there is the presumption that your workplace are neutral places that don't normally care what opinions you would hold as long as you can do your job. Platform probably wasn't the best choice of words.
But again, is even that true? Imagine you're a Jewish guy working for a company, and the company hires a guy with a huge swastika tattoo on his bicep, which he proudly displays at every opportunity. I wouldn't expect you to just take that lying down and take the attitude of "hey, as long as you finish your TPS reports on time, what you do on your own time is your own business". And this is speaking as someone who's aggressively opposed to cancellation campaigns of all kinds.
I would take that attitude. That won't stop me from striking up a conversation with that guy. It's one thing if the guy's rude to me or harassing me, but for all you know the guy could be a devout Hindu or Buddhist. Or he could be an Indian who just really liked Hitler. Or he could be a white supremacist who counts Jews as white.
Even if he's an actual honest to God antisemite neo-Nazi...if he doesn't have a problem with me personally, sees me as a valued coworker and doesn't want to get me fired or anything, why should I defect here and wish the same upon him? There's a symmetry here.
Many of your examples seem to be explicitly covered by Lukianoff's definition. For example, A1-7, there's no campaign, so no cancel culture. 8 and 9 bring in other people, but still no "people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished". A10 you start asking for deplatforming, whether a campaign of 1 counts as a campaign I could concede is a matter of debate, but by A11 it's a clear campaign for deplatforming, and so meets the definition.
Or take C1, people petitioned the NYT, not to fire the author, but to withhold certain information. Without the request of "fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished," it doesn't meet the definition.
Is it necessary to precisely draw the line if we can all agree on the direction we need to push it? Even if we did draw a line (and I think it's somewhere around A8/A9 for what it's worth) are we going to solve the coordination problem of getting everyone on board?
I think the premise of this relies on some bad assumptions about the cohesiveness and steer-ability of social movements. To be fair, you did say "I’m not demanding that anyone solve these questions before opposing cancel culture", so maybe we aren't so far apart.
Social pressure to enforce norms has been around as long as society itself and is probably required to have a functional civilization. I think the real issue is social media, which ends up amplifying and twisting this normal social function into something out of control.
I made a video about this a while ago:
https://youtu.be/dzdT5FXIY8I?si=Jo_pqKRSSQfD15Q5
I think the key principle that’s missing is that we need a norm against secondary boycotts. That is when you boycott someone for engaging in business with someone else and is already illegal in a labor context. This would ban the behaviors listed in A9 and above, and really hit at the most damaging parts of cancel culture.
> and is already illegal in a labor context.
Huh. I learned something today. Thanks! That definitely seems like it's a sensible line to draw.
It seems like a big part of what people mean when they talk about "cancel culture" is that the social penalties for the view being expressed are out of proportion to the objective number of people who actually disagree with that view.
That is, pretty much everyone loves to hate pedophiles, so you'd expect a comedian who says something supportive of pedophilia to lose most of his audience as a consequence. But the population is roughly evenly split on whether "Men can become women" is a correct statement, so you'd expect the public reaction to a comedian who denies the validity of trans identities to be similarly split, and to generally balance out. But that's not the pattern that people observed during the "cancel culture" era.
So, maybe part of the definition should be something like "A cultural climate where people feel unsafe expressing beliefs which are known to be widely-held by the population."
But that just leads inevitably to the tyranny of the majority. I wouldn't want to live in a society in which a peaceful religious minority don't feel safe practising their religion or prosleytising for it.
And as rationalists are so keen to point out, many opinions which are currently widely-held (e.g. "women should have the right to vote", "black people are entitled to the same human rights as everyone else and should not be kept as slaves") were once extremely unpopular and could land you in huge trouble for expressing them in public. The whole point of the First Amendment is to protect the expression of unpopular opinions, because popular opinions (for the most part) require no protection.
I do agree that something has gone badly wrong when people feel uncomfortable expressing an opinion that probably 90%+ of people in their immediate vicinity would agree with, although I don't think this has much bearing on the cancel culture debate.
Unfortunately I think you have to abandon the dream of being content neutral here. It’s good that we have content neutral *legal* protections on speech, and there should be a high bar for imposing social sanction on speech, but I think it’s ok to say, “I am in favor of certain tactics when used against (sufficiently) bad things but not against good (or in sufficiently bad) things”. I think your Atlantic-fires-the-editor example is one of those.
The most offensive/insidious cancel culture is going after someone's employment because of a position they held elsewhere. This seems to me categorically different from opposing the issuing of an argument from a particular publication, even seeking to see it hurt financially, but *stopping there*. Which doesn't make that good, necessarily, I'm just saying I see a natural division there and think we should be able to have a consensus that trying to make it so no one who ever expresses a non-approved opinion can earn a living is wrong.
While this post asks good questions, I think it underestimates how widespread cancelling is in human society – “you said/people report you said something I don’t like, so we’re not friends any more” is a day-to-day part of any human society.
It’s worth recalling that, in slightly less recent history (and in suitable places in the US), one might lose their social circle or their livelihoods for sentences such as “Das Kapital, by Karl Marx, has been influential in economic thinking”, “I enjoy Dungeons and Dragons”, or…
I’m certain that, since their creation, every newspaper has been subject of hate mail campaigns and that in over a century, they’ve been good at handling them.
Thus I believe the article misses the actual specificities of what it defines as “cancel culture” – which I believe (from afar) are less about principle than implementation.
Specifically, I think that the main instrument of “cancel culture” as defined here is the Twitter mob (or an equivalent) which has the following specificities:
1) it removes all Trivial Inconveniences to expressing one’s discontent at the source,
2) it makes it easier to form, spot, and join echo chambers (and to spot people who didn’t join it).
3) the Internet mob is non-local and can hunt from any corner of the world (and can include bots rather than real people!),
4) everything on Twitter is public speech (which used to be de facto restrained), so that performativeness is incentivized (for worse in this case, in a race to callousness).
5) it’s easier to find dirt on people online,
6) pretty much all of the above mean that it’s easier to dehumanize the victim and thus be harsher on them.
In other words, my thesis is that “cancel culture” (as defined here) exists because canceling is how human communities work, and that technology makes it trivially easy to do this on a disproportionate scale.
"As anti-McCarthy critic, Leo Cherne, puts it
"There was a real feeling that one risked one's livelihood, one's reputation, one's job...This was an exaggerated notion.""
https://x.com/gcochran99/status/1822663748269560235
For cancel culture to work, two things are required.
1. Speech is used to call for a punitive non-speech action.
2. The punitive non-speech action is taken.
The critical step is the transition beyond speech to tangible action (boycotting Walmart, or firing Fred).
'Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.' Cancel culture is moving from name calling to using sticks and stones.
Cancel culture arose from the accidental but inevitable discovery of how new technology allowed calls for action to go viral. Through the obvious-in-hindsight errors, society is figuring out what the new limits are. This blog being part of that process.
It's like the first theatre goers leaping in panic from the seats when watching the black and white 18 frame per second film of an onrushing locomotive [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Arriv%C3%A9e_d%27un_train_en_gare_de_La_Ciotat], or how the 44% click through rate (!!) on the first web site banner ad [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click-through_rate]. First usage of a new capability can be at unsustainable extreme levels before more normal usage is discovered.
With cancel culture, whats emerging is an instinctive response to be skeptical of actual punitive calls to action. We are already skeptical of non-punitive calls to action ('buy Ivory soap because we support #CurrentThing!'), so this is a simple extension of an already evolved skeptical behaviour. Similarly, for banner ads eye tracking shows that we go out of our way to not look at them, let alone click on them. The mere fact of the ad is itself cause for irritation.
That is the emerging response. Tolerate the speech, be highly skeptical of, and irritated with, the call to action. At any rate, that is my approach.
If it's illegal, the police should decide whether or not to handle it. Otherwise, you be you and I have no obligation to play along.
This is particularly important for the people in actual positions of power. The police, for instance, or the ones who decide whether or not someone should be fired. These people need to evaluate calls to action in much like the manner described by Tom B upstream [https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/lukianoff-and-defining-cancel-culture?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=66204522].
" the first theatre goers leaping in panic from the seats when watching the black and white 18 frame per second film of an onrushing locomotive"
As the Wikipedia article you linked says (in the section "contemporary reaction"), there is considerable doubt about the veracity of this story.
I agree this is a tricky area. I don't have good answers to these questions, but in the interest of making a small contribution, I would stress that I think some reference to the Overton Window is important. Opinions outside the OW (like the pedophilia advocacy example) already don't enjoy the kind of liberal, free speech principles of tolerance, best-response-is-more-speech, turn-the-other-cheek reactions that attitudes inside the OW get. I think what irks people about cancellation is when it seems like a deliberate attempt to use some type of pressure campaign to shrink the OW by claiming to be offended/endangered by someone expressing opinions that were perfectly mainstream and milquetoast up until five minutes ago.
"I think what irks people about cancellation is when it seems like a deliberate attempt to use some type of pressure campaign to shrink the OW by claiming to be offended/endangered by someone expressing opinions that were perfectly mainstream and milquetoast up until five minutes ago."
Exactly this. Even if some people are genuinely offended, what makes it cancel culture is punishing people for expressing mainstream opinions.
I think the proper way to frame this is to ask, what are people "allowed" to do within a given context? Here we have three situations which could each have their own rules. (1) a podcast where people may dislike or be offended by the content (2) an employer who has an employee with controversial side interests, and (3) a journalism outlet publishing articles that offend some readers.
How do each of these work? I think it comes down to the relevant decision makers following their incentives. In the first example, whatever medium hosts the podcast can decide whether to keep having them. Of course, if they get rid of the podcast the hosts could keep recording it and try to find another platform. In the second example, there could be legal or company/university policy issues, but I think the employer should be allowed to fire or not fire the employee based on his own cost/benefit analysis. In the third case, media outlets are basically businesses, although they may care about their intellectual credibility as well, and they can decide what to do about this article and writer based on what suits their purposes.
This answer may not seem satisfying, but there's no perfect way to resolve these situations. Like everything, they involve flawed human beings following their own incentives, and while we can declare that things "should" go a certain way, that's just not how the world works.
None of the hypotheticals seem to be particularly germane, because they all seem to focus on the question, "should I actively support speech I don't like." But most "cancelations" are people being fired for expressing their views, or businesses being boycotted for their owners expressing their views. My refusal to eat at a diner whose owner wears a MAGA hat is a far cry from me canceling my subscription to a publication that is in the business of advocating views I don't like.
A better hypothetical is this: I own a dry cleaner in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1957. It comes to the attention of local residents that I donate to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Is it ethical for local residents who oppose civil rights to boycott my business?
looks like the "outside of work free speech" coalition has a lot of space for strenghtening
> A coalition works best when people believe that if they support other members’ pet causes, those other members will support theirs
I don't think a coalition in this sense is what we need, then.
The ideal situation is one in which people shut up forever about this entire category of thing so that people don't have to worry about it anymore, don't have to keep track of people's opinions, don't have to censor themselves out of fear and so on.
If we actively support the pet causes of people who are hurt by cancel culture, the people who support cancel culture will actively oppose us, and some people in the "please everybody shut the fuck up already" will passively walk away from us.
To me a lot hinges on whether the cancellers have a stake in who or what they are canceling. Are they an Atlantic subscriber or an X constituent or a Y attendee or a Z shareholder or employee? In my mind, the more stake someone has, the more reasonable it is for them to protest and take action about something they disagree with at an institution, and the more we should take their opinion seriously. It's when people who have no stake successfully exercise power, e.g. X mobs who had never even heard of the institution in question, that it becomes most problematic. Those people don't care if they are advocating to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I dunno. Even if I didn't attend University of Wherever as an undergrad or postgrad, or wasn't a staff member of University of Wherever, or wasn't an alumnus, or otherwise any kind of stakeholder - I wouldn't think it would be completely unreasonable of me to feel somewhat concerned if University of Wherever hired an outspoken pro-paedophilia activist as a tenured professor. Maybe that makes me a snippy busybody, I dunno.
Notably, many of the most high-profile cancellation campaigns of the past decade *don't* fit your pattern e.g. Mozilla staffers calling for Brendan Eich to be forced out because of his opinions, NYT staffers calling for the head of whoever okayed the Tom Cotton editorial etc.
Would Moms for Liberty be strengthened as a coalition if their members spent a lot of time and energy trying to rigidly define exactly what woke/pornography was?
My assumption is no. So much so, I would assume that someone within the organization who started to push for these ideas was an enemy agent.
I don't have an answer here. But after seeing cancellations happen in my private live, and also firing people for acting poorly, Some guiding principles for me:
1. A campaign against an elite that has beliefs shared but a large percentage of the general population. This should be resisted. Example the firing of the head of Firefox. This was wrong.
2. A campaign against someone saying something likely to be true or partially true but inconvienent. We can't survive as a culture if this happens. Examples girls hounded off the Leah Thompsons swim team. Liz Chaney being cancelled as a republican.
3. A campaign clearly based on lies should be resisted vigerously. Example JK Rowling, Jessie Signal, Everytime I google what they said, clearly their critics are dishonest.
4. Campaigns clearly motivated by self interest and power seeking.
Liz Cheney is a bad example. She was "cancelled" not for expressing "inconvenient" opinions but for working with the enemy against the Republican party.
Sometimes I think of CC this way:
Everyone can order all actions from least to most reprehensible to them, and (to simplify) cancel the top N actions.
Most people are willing to accept that people order actions differently from them, but if they think others are cancelling for "trivial" (i.e. low down on the list) actions, they get worked up about that
Individually, it is in your interest to cancel any action you view as even somewhat "bad"
But as a society we want to limit the total cancellations. So when we see someone cancelling for something trivial - we get mad (classic tragedy of the commons problem)
So the way to "fix" CC is not to align values with everyone else, but to promote constraint and trust in others
>I agree that this is a good first step, but I’m worried about more detailed edge cases. For example, what do we think of the following situations?..
Come on.
-- It looks as though you didn't even read the definition you're supposedly responding to. The definition requires a campaign. *Most* of your examples don't describe a campaign even arguably, and are not edge cases by that definition.
-- Any definition is subject to this sort of "can you really define it" problem. We all know the meme about defining a sandwich. But when it matters, we generally know what sandwiches are, and the edge cases don't actually come up very much. The examples of cancel culture that people *actually talk about* almost never include the ambiguity in your edge case examples.
-- Rationalists have a habit of talking themselves into being quokkas, and a habit of taking things overly literally. Creating a petition to not get you doxxed isn't cancel culture for the same reason that getting a plumber fired because he keeps installing pipes made of cheese isn't cancel culture--Metz isn't doing his job properly, and is harming people (and specific identifiable people, not "children" or "women"). It's true that Lukianoff didn't include a clause saying "not if someone is hurting specific identifiable people", but common sense says that it's implied. Common sense is useful, and you may need to get some more.
-- The edge cases aren't going to affect your ability to create a coalition one bit. Everyone short of the lizardman constant knows what cancel culture is (You may be in the lizardman constant.) The people who complain about not knowing what it means are being *dishonest*--they know what it means, but are nitpicking the definition so that they have an excuse to deny it. You will not be able to convince them by getting a better definition, because they're dishonest, and you know, dishonesty works that way. Not understanding dishonesty is being a quokka.
You seem to be making a pretty good point, but your repeated use of "quokka" probably detracts from that. I don't know what that means. I doubt most people know what it means. A quick search shows it's an animal of some sort, and there's no mention of it being anything like how you're using the word. So the internet at large doesn't even acknowledge this is a word that might be used in any sense except this animal that isn't anything like a human.
It's a reference to a Twitter thread by Zero HP Lovecraft about "rationalists'" vulnerability to bad-faith actors (archived here: https://archive.ph/Vzsnp), well-known enough in this community to be alluded to without explicit citation.
Relevant extracts:
"The quokka is a meme animal that lives on Bald Island on the SW coast of Australia, where it has no natural predators. If you visit this island, it will fearlessly walk up and try to hug you. …
"The quokka, like the rationalist, is a creature marked by profound innocence. The quokka can't imagine you might eat it, and the rationalist can't imagine you might deceive him. …
"And rationalists, bless their hearts, are REALLY easy to lie to. It's not like taking candy from a baby; babies actually try to hang onto their candy. The rationalists just limply let go and mutter, 'I notice I am confused'. …
"The main way that you stop being a quokka is that that you realize there are people in the world who really want to hurt you. There are people who will always defect, people whose good will is fake, whose behavior will not change if they hear the good news of reciprocity."
I think a lot of it hinges on liberty. People should be free to do what they want, as long as doing that thing doesn't prevent others from doing that they want.
For example, unsubscribing from a newsletter is fine, that's your choice. Trying to get the newsletter taken down is questionable - it prevents others from having the freedom to subscribe.
However, if that newsletter is too heinous (e.g. calling for the murder of a group of people), then it's okay because the newsletter itself is trying to remove people's freedom to live.
Of course there's still plenty of grey area for adjudication in this definition, but I think it's a good heuristic.
People are free to do what they want. But freedom of action is not freedom from social consequences for action, and never has been. This is not a new phenomenon. People got cancelled for being communists, for being anti-war activists, for hating the police, and for ordering Swiss on a cheesesteak.
The shift has been in average people’s platforms becoming larger, so that more people are exposed to whatever socially unacceptable view you feel you must express. Also, equally, that some of the kinds of ideas that were broadly socially acceptable have rapidly shifted to very not at around the same time as the first thing.
I think what you say is broadly right about how things currently are, but also there's an increased desire to shut people down. In my original comment though, I was making an argument about how things ought to be.
There's no world in which I should not be morally justified in cancelling a subscription because I don't like their font choices. I should be allowed to say "hey this font choice hurts my eyes and it bugs me and I think this magazine should stop using it." I should be allowed to say "I think people should stop buying this magazine until they change their font."
What I can "morally" say isn't at issue. That's just me creating my own speech. What's at issue is 1) people are completely unwilling to make the distinction between advocating for something and learning about it, and it's a cultural sickness, and 2) we've all embraced a totalizing harm-reduction culture where the second I say "I have a disadvantage and you should listen to me due to that disadvantage" all counter-argument is seen as brutal, non-empathetic suppression of a victimized person.
What should happen is I say "Everyone stop subscribing to this newspaper until they change their font because it hurts my eyes" and people say "that stinks and maybe I'm going to like this newspaper 0.02% less but that doesn't rise to the threshold of impacting my actions in any way." Instead of "oh if I decide to care about this fringe issue that most people won't care about it'll make me look way more caring and empathetic than others."
My impression is that people often think in terms of typical examples rather than definitions -- "I know it when I see it". It makes it harder to set policy because the boundaries are fuzzy, but then the question becomes how much of the coalition will go along with each example.
Here's a true anecdote. I have a friend who had a summer job at a think tank after the Pentagon Papers were stolen. At the end of the summer he packed up his stuff in a cardboard box to take out to his car. The guard told him he wasn't allowed to take cardboard boxes out, so he set up an empty cardboard box on the other side of the guard's station, carried his stuff by hand from one box to the other, and left with full approval. It turns out that this was the policy implementation of "never let that -- the Pentagon Papers -- happen here."
"Is a cardboard box" *is* a definition. The guard is disallowing the box based on a definition, not based on the guard's judgment of "I know what a Pentagon Papers incident looks like".
In fairness, that probably did give the guard a much better opportunity to observe exactly what else was being taken than if it had all stayed in the box.
Relevant considerations:
- Is the motivation to punish the speaker, or something else, like that you're genuinely uninterested in their product? Only the former is cancel culture-y.
- Is the opinion of the speaker relevant to the product? Is publishing opinions (in particular, curated opinions along some editorial line) the core business of the company? If so, it's not cancel culture. This closely parallels the bona fide business requirement exception to anti-discrimination laws, e.g. a movie production may seek an actor of a particular race and gender.
----
Further options re: The Atlantic and stay-at-home fathers:
P4: The thousands of stay-at-home fathers, who are personally affected, and were likely genuinely emotionally disturbed, were morally fine. However, the millions of people and other journalists and sources, who aren't personally affected but also put pressure on The Atlantic, are in the wrong; their actions are more of a calculated attempt to punish The Atlantic than an inevitable emotional reaction.
P5: The objection to cancel culture isn't a moral condemnation but a descriptive assertion that it's bad for society overall on the net. It can be an attempt to convince would-be cancellers that it's a bad idea. (Either because it may cause people to miss potential good arguments that stay-at-home fathers should change their lifestyle—even if the article in question was bad, firing the author may make others afraid to write on the topic—or because it normalizes cancel culture with negative effects on the discussion of other topics.) It can be an attempt to convince others to put an opposite incentive on The Atlantic, i.e. to unsubscribe *if* they fire the journalist involved, or to subscribe if the journal resists the pressure.
(Since The Atlantic is an opinion magazine, my view is closest to P3, with a side of P5.)
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"Cancellation" for sexual harassment isn't necessarily a separate issue from cancellation for speech, some instances of (supposed) sexual harassment only involve speech.
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If you support a Republican’s right to criticize transgender people, unfortunately realistically you can't rely on his support your right to say you wish the Trump assassin hadn’t missed. However, you have a common cause with him against getting cancelled by people further left than either of you. (Likewise, if right-wing cancel culture became prevalent, people of different stripes would have a common cause against getting cancelled by people further right than either of them.)
A take I've found useful is that the actual question is defining what speech should be considered acceptably within the bounds of public discourse and what should be considered "beyond the pale" and not an acceptable idea to even be discussed in public without an understanding that there may severe personal consequences if you don't appropriately hedge.
This isn't something you solve once. This is a constant negotiation argued out in the public sphere. In the 1970s there was a period when making the pro-pedophilia argument was at least possible for some people as part of the general "we're questioning all our traditional understandings of sexuality". This discussion was had and the public decided, "Okay that's enough pro-pedophilia talk, back in the "we're going to shun you if you talk about this stuff" cage with that, and that's where it stands. (And it's a mark of how firmly it was shoved that even just saying this as an example I gotta clear my throat and say I agree with that decision.)
So I think it's more helpful to think about it as a series of circles with "totally harmless topic" in the center and each circle out you get increasing levels of scrutiny for wanting to have a debate or discuss the topic. Cancel culture is when it seems like the circles are being squeezed tighter around the center in a way that leaves people constantly blundering out over circle boundaries they didn't actually mean to cross.
Here's my solution: no argument is beyond the pale.
This approach has an obvious failure point that any group trying to gain power and influence decides views they disagree with are "beyond the pale" and acts accordingly. It also doesn't provide a framework for deciding what is or isn't acceptable, other than what most people think at the time. Which is not very useful.
I think the problem becomes simpler when, instead of just observing cases in the wild and trying to classify them one-by-one, you talk to individuals participating in cancel culture and ask them why they're doing it.
I've done this, and I've found most people in cancel culture have a radically different worldview from liberals. They are explicitly anti-democracy, class essentialist, and pro-conflict-theory. They know their views are in the minority, and don't care. They believe that letting the majority decide what our society will be like is immoral. They believe it is impossible to persuade the majority to their point of view, because people are unable to think outside their class (whether that class is economic or racial). Therefore, they believe there is no such thing as honest debate, and that all disagreements are settled not by persuasion or compromise, but by propaganda, intimidation, and violence. They believe that this is how all civil rights advances in the past have been made--that, for instance, the destruction of institutional racism in the south was accomplished not by exposing its unfairness and brutality to the public, but by using the media to silence the majority which did, and still does, hate blacks. They believe society advances only by the oppression or destruction of the common people.
Furthermore, they don't believe legal systems are just. They believe that laws are tools of the powerful, and that the principle of "innocent until proven guilty" just protects the obviously guilty from the justice of the righteous. They aren't worried that innocent individuals might be punished unjustly, because they think of classes, not individuals, as having rights.
Cancel culture is not the sum of individual choices, but is a political bloc of individuals whose underlying Marxist/Nazi belief framework enables them to all coordinate at a point so far outside the liberal Overton window that liberals can't even see they're there.
The summed free choices of individuals is democratic, and can enforce only norms that the majority holds, like those against pedophilia. "Cancel culture" is when a minority cancels the majority. The main requirement for a minority to do this is tribal unity, created by expelling people who think for themselves. Look not at whether someone protests against a speaker, but at whether someone is cancelled for not protesting. Cancel culture reaches escape velocity when the cost of not participating is always greater than the cost of participating.
The idea that cancel culture started in 2014 is so stupid and revealing that it’s laughable. Very clearly, people have been getting “cancelled” or fired by public outcry forever. All that changed (and it was a gradual change that your boy only started noticing in 2014) was the kinds of speech that are considered polite or socially acceptable.
I don’t think you’re going to build a broad anti-cancel-culture coalition because I don’t think there really is a broad coalition against cancel culture. The majority of people don’t really believe it is bad to cancel. They believe that their ideas, or ideas somewhat adjacent to theirs, should not be subject to social consequences.
Very few are truly free speech absolutists. And those that claim to be are usually just liars who will happily explain why specific speech coming with social consequences doesn’t count as cancel culture.
>All that changed (and it was a gradual change that your boy only started noticing in 2014) was the kinds of speech that are considered polite or socially acceptable.
Well, that and the market penetration of smartphones. It was a lot harder to call for someone to lose their job when you had to go around on foot collecting signatures for your petition by hand, and most people would only say potentially-offensive things verbally to their friends rather than in writing on social media platforms.
It does refer to an "uptick" in 2014, which implies it existed before at lower levels.
This strikes me as something that is better to address incrementally, as different tactics are more or less dangerous. The norms around each should probably be different. Not affirmatively personally paying for a podcast or attending a lecture is not particularly dangerous. It can still be bad and worthy of moral opprobrium, for example if the only reason you didn't attend a lecture is because you don't want to be around someone of the speaker's race.
Secondary boycotts, on the other hand, are especially dangerous. They can easily lead people to self-censor on views that they believe are correct, even when nearly everyone shares those beliefs, and this completely shut down free inquiry. A good example would be the current debate over medical treatment for minors with gender dysphoria. But it's probably too much to say they are never appropriate, if we are talking about something sufficiently extreme and violent. It's just that they are a very dangerous tool and the bar for using them should be extremely high.
A number of others have highlighted the 0 to 100 nature of punishment, which again seems like something to push back on. Our first reaction should generally be to persuade, rather than attack, and when an interlocutor doesn't share that view, we should be suspicious. When punishment doesn't come in gradations, but is instead binary, we should be suspicious.
Finally it seems like there is an element of jumping to assumptions of bad faith. Returning to the treatment of gender dysphoria, it seems crazy that medical professionals can't have a discussion in which people agree that it is both bad to allow people to keep suffering who will eventually transition and to transition people who would eventually change their minds. And have disagreements about how to best manage those risks. I don't really know how to fit this with your pedo grad student example, but at some point the reveling in attention from a subculture seems to attach something new, and less consistent with good faith.
There is also something of a "you shouldn't get fired for holding what is currently a majority view or has been in the last ten years." True, this leads you at various points on history to have to have a dialog with people who, for example, support slavery. But it also seems wrong to believe that if you lived in the 1700s the best approach for human flourishing would be to mercilessly attack literally everyone around you because they didn't hold 2020 beliefs?
But it would seem easier to get consensus in steps rather than try to handle all edge cases at once.
> But it's probably too much to say [secondary boycotts] are never appropriate, if we are talking about something sufficiently extreme and violent. It's just that they are a very dangerous tool and the bar for using them should be extremely high.
For something extreme and violent, wouldn't other tools also become available? We banned use of poison gas in warfare because there's simply no plausible situation which would create a legitimate tactical need for it, that couldn't be done cheaper and better by something else. https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/
I haven't seen anyone else write this, so I will.
For me, the defining characteristics of cancel culture are threefold:
1. The transgression has a level of damage that is X
2. The punishment for the transgression has a level of damage that is 10X-1000X.
3. The punishment for falsely accusing someone of a transgression is often 0, but rarely anything more than X.
Let's point these out in an example.
Joe supports a family of his own and gives substantial aid to his brothers/sisters/aunts/uncles etc. He says something like "There are IQ differences between races" during a video. The video is posted online and goes viral. He is piled on and sent death threats. His family and friends are piled on and get death threats. He is fired, and cannot support his extended family anymore. He's debanked and is unable to pay bills. I doubt I need to go on. You've seen thousands of cases like this.
The transgression will hurt a couple people's feelings. The punishment is no-where even close to proportionate to the crime.
Furthermore, let us assume that if someone had just watched more of the video, they would have realised that he was literally quoting someone else, and that was obvious from watching more context.
What is the punishment now for everyone who sent death threats? What is the punishment for the person who originally posted the viral clip edited to remove the context? What is the punishment for the bankers who debanked him? No-one pays for any of it.
I think if everyone could agree that punishments should be proportionate to the crime, and false accusations should be punished more harshly than actual transgressions, that a lot of the edge would be taken off the cancel culture we currently find ourselves in.
EDIT: I think actually punishments for transgressions are often even more than 10x-1,000x. They feel to me more like they go from 1,000x-1,000,000x, but that seems so weird I can't make myself say it without putting more thought into it. No matter what, if a microaggression can be met with anything more than a micropunishment, then things have gone off the rails.
Sometimes people increase punishments so that they have greater deterrent value, and I think that's exactly what's going on here. Make an example of one or two, and the rest will fall in line.
There is no viable "anti-cancel-culture" coalition, but not because defining cancel culture is particularly difficult. I have seen broadly speaking two types of "anti-cancel-culture" persons.
The first type are the Political Bourgeois. They are mostly OK with the current (social, economic, political...) status quo and feel that they have some access to policy-making via the "proper channels". As a result, they genuinely oppose brigading, boycotts, etc. because they find it in poor taste when the "proper channels" are there.
A typical example is the established academic whose papers have been found to show evidence of academic misconduct by some anonymous pubpeer commenters - this is an outrageous witch hunt! Misconduct accusations should be made via university channels, scientific disagreements should be published via the journals! Never mind that the university has every incentive to not find their top shot f'd up, and is slow to investigate; never mind that publicly accusing a top-shot of being wrong (let alone sloppy or guilty of fraud) is a career-killer for junior faculty no matter how right they are.
The second type, more numerous, are the Cynical Reactionaries. They disapprove the enforcement of social norms they do not like via social pressure, boycott campaigns etc. but does not bat an eye about using similar (or worse) tactics to enforce their preferred social norms.
The cynical reactionary might not follow intentionally a Machiavellian strategy, they often just have an incoherent worldview. They think movie studios making casting decisions based on an actor's public comments (or public reaction to them) is cancel culture, but also think churches being allowed to refuse hiring staff unaffiliated with the church is freedom of association.
Cynical Reactionaries were never against cancel culture, they just think harping about it is a useful weapon of culture war. Political Bourgeois are against any culture war because their objective is (more or less) the status quo. Neither are honest in their commitment to disarmament, and their target endpoints are too far apart.
(Maybe the esteemed commentariat of this blog is different but it is not a politically-relevant bloc.)
I think the fact that the comments show a "clear line" at anywhere between A5 and A11 shows that there is no clear line - people draw different boundaries depending what extra details they add and how they interpret things.
I find the legal and economic distinction between a boycott and a secondary boycott helpful here. If a union and its supporters boycott the employer in support of their strike, that is perfectly legal. But if the union and its supporters boycott another company (e.g., a supplier or customer) because they choose not to join your boycott against the employer, that is an illegal secondary boycott.
Likewise, you and your friends are free to not support things you disagree with, publicize your views, and try to convince others to join you, and there is nothing wrong with that. But it is "cancel culture" and destructive (although not illegal) for you and your friends to cut off and demonize everyone who chooses not to join your boycott/shaming. It is an attempt to isolate the victim and cut them off from support. Also, it is an attempt to "win" the debate by ending conversation rather than by getting to the truth.
Yes. I think this is a good and important distinction you're making.
I think it also ties into a point that other commenters here have made - which is that it seems wrong for people to face serious penalties for voicing an opinion that a very large minority (or even a majority) of people agree with.
Well, the thing with a primary boycott (without a secondary boycott) is that it's failure or success will likely come down to how people in general feel about what is being boycotted or whatever instigated the boycott.
Let's say you have a boycott against a particular brand because they had a commercial that many viewed as pro-pedophile or very racist against minorities. Well, anti-pedophile and anti-racist sentiment is strong enough that these boycotts stand a good chance of succeeding even without a secondary boycott.
Now, let's say you have a boycott against a particular brand because they used the word "bossy" in a commercial. Well here, I suspect the vast majority of people don't care. This boycott will likely only work through doing a secondary boycott. And if it does work, we have a boycott that feels wildly incongruent with the wider culture, with where most people are.
If we as a society were to choose to reject secondary boycotts, to consider them excessive, that alone would alleviate much of the harm caused by cancel culture.
Full disclosure, I am a consistent donor to and enthusiastic fanboy of FIRE and all that they do.
That said, Lukianoff's definition doesn't strike me as fully baked. If anything it muddies the waters by mixing together what are for me two different things: the legal standing of free speech, and a society's broader culture regarding free speech.
It is of course accurate, and in some contexts directly on point, to note that the 1st Amendment was and is aimed at suppression of speech by government specifically. In other contexts though it is simply a pedantic response which evades the actual issue. The very term "cancel _culture_" implies -- correctly I think -- that the new level of concern we're talking about is more about where our general societal expectations/actions sit regarding free expression, than it is about the legal specifics.
I don't think most of the examples in this article are cancel culture. Cancel culture is the hijacking of social relations and institutions to coerce third parties into the suppression of political enemies. That would be example A10 and similar, not unsubscribing from the Atlantic because of their foolish ideas and unpleasant grammar.
> things that are bad and that we should oppose, but which are hard to define or circumscribe in all edge cases (the most famous example is pornography
This seems surprising as written. Did you maybe mean to write "_child_ pornography"?
It's referring to justice Potter's famous dodge in Jacobellis v. Ohio. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it)
I suspected as much, but that was about "hard-core pornography" (or what is commonly called "obscenity") , not about all pornography? And even so, not about saying it's "bad and we should oppose" it, just that it's not protected by the first amendment?
I read it as Scott suggesting we inhabit Potter's point of view, not because he agrees with it, but because it's a common cultural reference point for the circumstance of "wanting to prohibit something that's hard to define precisely".
Pornography is actually a remarkably difficult concept to define. "Representations featuring human nudity" doesn't work: there are thousands of works of art (paintings, sculptures, films) featuring nude or semi-nude people which are considered to have artistic merit and not considered pornographic. "Representations featuring penetrative sex" doesn't work: there are many art films featuring unsimulated coitus which are considered to have artistic merit. On the flipside, there are many kinds of content which are considered unambiguously pornographic but which feature neither penetrative sex nor nudity e.g. a JOI video featuring a fully clothed woman. The best stab at a definition can only really appeal to authorial intent: it's a representation which is intended to arouse or titillate. But of course, it's impossible to read a director's mind: he might SAY that he intended his film as a thoughtful exploration of sexual intimacy between step-siblings, and how can you prove him wrong? The fact that people are masturbating to said film isn't dispositive (lots of people masturbate to content which everyone agrees wasn't intended to arouse or titillate, and lots of pornography attempts to arouse or titillate but fails).
As to whether porn is bad: I mean, probably, but maybe you disagree.
I don't think the US had such a difficult time defining it in the first half of the 20th century. It was later on that a greater amount of work was deemed to have artistic merit despite appealing to the prurient interest.
What definition of pornography was the US working off of in the first half of the twentieth century?
I think different localities had different standards, but there would have been some federal standard for what could be distributed over the mail.
Any idea what that might have been?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_Act_of_1873
“We know it when we see it”.
This also had me go WTF.
As it is written, the statement indicates that porn is a generally recognized bad thing on the level of police brutality, which would be consensus building. From what I know, neither presidential candidate proposes to ban pornography for adult viewers.
There are likely some evangelicals and woke groups who would like to ban porn, but I would expect voter support for that to be somewhere between support for a total alcohol prohibition and a total ban on cars, i.e. very low.
Until Scott confirms that this is indeed him coming out firmly against porn, I will assume that what he meant to imply was
> things that were generally judged bad and worthy of opposition, but which are hard to define or circumscribe in all edge cases (the most famous example is pornography
"I’m still so mad I’m not sure I’ll ever link an Atlantic article on ACX again, and I have trouble staying civil when I encounter people who work for the Atlantic. This isn’t out of some well-thought-out political strategy, just that it would personally warm my heart if the Atlantic failed as a business and everyone associated with it died of starvation."
This kind of comment makes me want to pull Scott aside and ask him, "Scott, buddy, are you ok?"
"Probably this is dysfunctional and I should get over it eventually."
Yes!
Scott, I totally get the visceral anger at someone who seems out to make your life unlivable, but still holding onto that feeling *years later* seems very uncharacteristic of you. You are the Rightful Caliph of Mistake Theory, the high king of "in praise of niceness and civilization," the prophet of "Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite Rules of True, Necessary, and Kind." FWIW, I've read the piece in question and thought it was both patronizing and stupid. But surely you see how unjust it is to condemn a whole publication for publishing one stupid piece? I subscribe to The Atlantic and I find much there that is worthwhile. Does this make me a bad person in your eyes now, an accomplice to evil? I hope you can make some peace with this instead of wishing DEATH BY STARVATION on people are guilty of nothing but association with a writer you hate. Gazing into the abyss, etc. etc.
The "Death by Starvation" bit did seem excessive to me as well, but overall, I get and respect Scott's anger here. Personally, I'm more disgusted/nauseated by "liking/wanting peace and quiet makes you a racist!" than angry but the type of thinking that goes into this sort of article is truly one of the most loathsome and harmful aspects of the modern western world.
Making EVERYTHING about race - even someone as commonplace and unrelated to race as liking peace and quiet! - causes severe cultural rot. There's a certain subset of modern culture commentators and journalists that won't let people have simple basic preferences, totally apart from any racial or even political considerations. And in some extreme cases, like this one, it could even negatively impact people with legit medical conditions and sensitivities, like Scott here.
I didn't like the Atlantic article either; what I'm mostly struck by here is a) holding on to that anger for so long and b) the guilt by association - wishing death upon the whole Atlantic staff, not just the one author. Both seem very uncharacteristic of Scott, the rational effective altruist who gave away his kidney to a stranger!
Well, that's fair. I do think Scott maybe took this article too personally. I'm pretty sure the article-writer simply didn't think of people with Scott's hearing sensitivities. That's not good, and in a way it's ironic, but it's not as bad as intentionally targeting someone imo.
Scott's been through some stuff, which he got into a bit back in the 2013-2014 era. I'll ... just say that my PTSD finds his attitude very familiar. Sometimes I think that everyone goes through life with stuff like this, and only when it rises to the level where it interferes with day-to-day life, do we call it a "disorder" and start medicalizing it.
[Three paragraphs redacted at @Moon Moth's request; anyone reading this please know I was trying to explain in a semi-humorous but polite way why I was about to say the below]
I understand the sufferer's perspective of, "I have PTSD, I don't want to talk about it," but without details, the listener is often going to wonder (even if they're too polite not to say out loud), "Okay, but if you didn't want to talk about it, why did you bring your trauma up? Is this a ritual where I'm supposed to express my sincere care by proactively gently inviting you to share details? Do you need an accommodation? What kind of accommodation? What am I supposed to *do* with this information?"
I suppose most people will either be blissfully disinterested or simply invent an explanation that satisfies their curiosity, but I can't manage to do either.
FWIW, I'm pretty reasonable in real life, too. :-) [And thanks for the edit! It's probably irrational of me, but that doesn't seem to change these feelings.]
I'm slightly confused about why you think me being a generally reasonable person means that it's unlikely for me to be traumatized. The short answer is that someone did it. It's a bit like the analogy of how, if we find a watch on the beach, it implies the existence of a watchmaker? If we find an arrangement of shit in a perfect pentagram with burning shit candles at all the intersections and containing a lot of ungrammatical Latin written in shit, ...
> I understand the sufferer's perspective of, "I have PTSD, I don't want to talk about it," but without details, the listener is often going to wonder (even if they're too polite not to say out loud), "Okay, but if you didn't want to talk about it, why did you bring your trauma up? Is this a ritual where I'm supposed to express my sincere care by proactively gently inviting you to share details? Do you need an accommodation? What kind of accommodation? What am I supposed to do with this information?"
Mostly it's just what pops into my head? Like, literally, if my initial reaction is blinding rage and a desire to implement Vlad the Impaler's solution to social problems, and I have to spend 10 minutes talking myself down from that before writing a coherent response, then I'm more likely to say something like "My PTSD thinks X but perhaps Y would be better". (In this particular case, people were saying "that sort of rage doesn't sound like Scott, he's so reasonable", but I have personal experience with those two things being very compatible, so I figured it was worth a comment.)
I'm not looking for ritual care, or accommodations, or expecting any particular kind of response. ACX is the first and pretty much only place where I discuss it openly, and I'm still feeling my way around the whole mess. I censor myself for anonymity, and sometimes for standard conversational stuff like "I'm not interested" or "I don't have a good argument here" or "it needs saying but it would be better from someone else", etc. But I try not to censor my feelings or my perspective on the world. I'm trying to get used to being myself again, if that makes any sense? Part of why and what I write here is a purely selfish, inward-focused process of getting used to interacting with people again, and figuring out how to do it while dealing with this "new" mess in my head. And in that respect, I'm just tossing stuff out there and seeing how people react. So here's a new reaction, great! Your feedback has given me new data to think about. :-)
> "I'm slightly confused about why you think me being a generally reasonable person means that it's unlikely for me to be traumatized."
To be really blunt, I have a strong intuition that there are some experiences it is indeed unreasonable to be traumatized by!
While it is true that "the worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you," we all live with media that is constantly showing almost all of us someone's comparatively much greater trauma (and many of these are traumas that *could* happen to ourselves). A "reasonable," rationally-compassionate person would ideally look at certain kinds of negative experiences in their own life and say, "I don't like X thing, but it's so much better than Y or Z, I'll self-soothe by rationalizing why this is actually no big deal and/or being grateful that this isn't much worse."
A hypothetical:
Would most of the planet consider it reasonable for the deeply loved child of a billionaire to claim they're "traumatized" when they're gifted a new Honda Civic on their sweet sixteen rather than a high-end Audi, or a Lamborghini, because their parent doesn't want them to be harmed in a sports car they aren't skilled enough to handle yet? That kid might indeed *feel* traumatized; they might believe their parents don't love them enough to maintain their social status via lifestyle displays amongst their peers, but is that a *reasonable* "trauma" for them to fixate on? Is that something they should still feel wounded by, years later? *Should* they call their heart rate increase every time they see a Honda Civic on the road when they're 36 "PTSD?"
Probably no.
Does our sympathy for their "trauma" and our sign off on "PTSD" change when we learn they were riding in an identical Honda Civic during the crash that killed their best friend the year before?
Probably yes!
In this case though it's not even clear that the phenomenon in question *isn't* fairly inherently about race. The main empirical (as opposed to normative) claim of the offending article was that upper-middle class whites have different noise standards from lower-class people of color, especially New York Puerto Ricans, and that when neighborhoods gentrify, the result of this is a significant increase in noise complaints, mostly from whites who are new to the neighborhoods. Insofar as that claim is true, the subject matter really is naturally "about race", *regardless of whether the author is right to regard this phenomenon as a bad thing*.
I think this is Scott being remarkably honest about his feelings.
Rationally, Scott would probably be willing to donate spare organs to the writer of that article instead.
I can understand that he recognizes the view that 'liking quiet is racist' as a more plausible threat to his social existence than neo-Nazi ideology.
After some introspection, I don't think that I would rejoice over an especially painful death of anyone. I mean, there are certainly people who could benefit the world by dropping dead, and over whose death I would feel joy (mostly the generic international supervillains, no personal acquaintances come to mind), but I don't think I would be saddened if their deaths were especially quick and painless. But perhaps I am simply less in touch with my subconscious emotions.
I suspect that Scott’s statement here was intentionally hyperbolic.
I remember reading the original article when it first came out, and I had a very similar reaction to Scott's—it was infuriating. The article is not just wrong, but devious, cowardly, and manipulative because it uses identity politics to justify obnoxious behavior. The author, Xochitl Gonzalez, doesn't openly say, "I don't care if my neighbors are annoyed by my inappropriately loud conversations and music"; instead, she cloaks her ideas in the rhetoric of social justice. (I guess it never occurs to Gonzalez that non-white people might actually enjoy peace and quiet as well.) Gonzalez knows that a lot of upper-middle class white people are terrified of being labeled as racist and she exploits this weakness to the fullest extant.
Plus, the blatant double-standard of the whole thing really sent me over the edge. If a white journalist wrote an article titled "Why Do [Members of Ethnic Group X] Feel the Need to Shout at the Top of Their Lungs and Play Loud Abrasive Rap Music in Public Spaces?" they would be denounced on Twitter and hounded out of the industry. And yet Gonzalez is free to criticize and stereotype an entire group of people, implying that liking peace and quiet is a "white" characteristic.
I would absolutely love to find out Gonzalez's address so my friends and I can camp out in front of her place all day and have loud conversations, play music that she hates (maybe opera or heavy metal), and possibly set off a car alarm for her benefit. We'll see how long her "only white people like peace and quiet shtick" lasts.
I didn't like the article either, I think it is quite annoying, even if I also think Scott's reaction is way, way over the top, but I think it is steel-manned a bit more easily than that. How about: "there is a genuine trade-off between the preferences of people who want peace and quiet, and people who like loud parties, music etc. Neither of these preferences is inherently bad/unreasonable: it is sad when people are hurt by noise, but it's also sad when people who want to can't party. When gentrification happens, there is a shift in favor of the preference for quiet, that happens because the newcomers have much greater social and economic power than the old residents. This is unfair, because a) having greater power shouldn't allow you to move the norms like this and/or b) it is unfair, and a result of racism, that the newcomers have greater social and economic power. I think if it was a right-coded disempowered group having their norms changed by upper-middle class women or people of color entering their community and flexing their muscles, Scott and other commentators here would see the article's take as a bit less unreasonable, even if still fairly weak.
Haha, the commenters above have already given you the most important response, that this is Scott being honest (and probably exaggerating a little for comic effect), which is a good thing. Everyone's a little messed up, and it's OK to admit that sometimes.
But I also wanted to pull out this quote...
"...holding onto that feeling *years later* seems very uncharacteristic of you"
Like, if there's one thing we know about Scott, it's that he's just a teensy bit obsessive, right? This is the man who on an irregular basis produces current event analyses at the length and depth of at least a university course, and feeds them to us despite it being more than we want to know. In addition to the commitment of becoming a doctor, he wrote a full novel. I agree that his obsessiveness is 99.9% directed in healthy directions, but I don't think it should surprise anyone that just occasionally it spills out a bit randomly.
It’s clearly hyperbole. Also what I am about to say might seem a bit patronising, but given other people are taking this seriously it seems necessary.
I just smiled at that and thought “That article really pissed him off, huh”. For hyperbole to work you have to go overboard - no point exaggerating slightly as that can be taken literally.
You have to say “I worked a million hours yesterday” not “I worked 20 hours yesterday” to when you worked 12, and wanted to exaggerate a bit for effect. Otherwise people might assume you worked the 20.
Only one part of the sentence needs to be an obvious exaggeration for the entire sentence to be figurative and untrustworthy:
saying “I worked a million hours yesterday, and must have had 20 coffees” puts both the hours worked and the coffees imbibed under suspicion, even though 20 coffees is doable.
The obvious hint of Scott not actually wanting the Atlantic to fail as a business, or that he probably does stay civil when he meets journalists from the Atlantic is the last part of the sentence - Scott doesn’t want everybody associated with the Atlantic to starve.
What if you add "speech over topics that, when Americans are _privately_ polled, have at least 35% positive support"? For example:
- Pedophilia is nearly universally reviled so I doubt it would poll >35%, even privately
- I think >35% of Americans would think it's okay to say that calling a woman "bossy" is fine (privately)
- I think >35% of Americans would think it's okay to say that sometimes noise in public places is annoying (privately)
My understanding is that cancel culture really revolves around suppressing ideas that have strong minority support.
These polls would have the problem of selecting for people stupid enough to tell the truth to a journalist when told it's a "private poll."
> - I think >35% of Americans would think it's okay to say that sometimes noise in public places is annoying (privately)
I think it would be much higher than that in a public poll. One or two weirdos in the Atlantic probably aren’t moving the dial on this.
fwiw, I think A1 - A6 are clearly fine (private, personal consumption decisions are not "cancel culture"); A7 is unclear, and A8+ qualify as attempts at "cancellation" (though maybe justified if the target is sufficiently transparently bad), with the social threats in A9 being especially egregious.
It does seem really tricky to pin down a general account of when cancellation attempts are or aren't justified. I kind of suspect the only plausible answer will be unhelpfully opaque, e.g. appealing to which views are sufficiently *substantively prima facie reasonable* that a *genuinely decent person* could reasonably affirm them. Of course, people will dispute what views do or don't meet this criteria. But I think the problem of "cancel culture" precisely stems from people being unreasonably dogmatic in failing to appreciate how decent and reasonable people could have views that differ from theirs.
It’s going to depend on your philosophical and social bedfellows, always. True free speech absolutists are unicorns. Nothing is actually “transparently bad” from every perspective.
Yeah, that's why I called it "unhelpfully opaque" -- my answer appeals to objective normative facts about what is actually reasonable, self-evident, etc., and people can always disagree about what those facts are.
(Of course, on pain of self-defeat, you can't take the mere existence of such disagreement to show that there is no such fact of the matter. Otherwise your denial of objective truth would not itself be factually correct.)
I don't think this is as hard as it's made out to be in the post.
Let's first recognize that we're talking about "culture". It's a concept without many bright lines to begin with, but whatever else they are, cultures aren't just any random individual's opinions or actions. An action or opinion can be an example or manifestation of a culture, but no single example can really capture the whole culture. (This is why some people can still deny that cancel culture is even a thing.) Cultures emerge, and social context is everything. I feel like this is obvious, but I mention it because the whole framing of the post, then, feels a bit like asking "how much cream in your food makes it French cuisine?" That's not quite how it works.
Having said that, however, cancel culture is pretty narrow as cultures go, and so it's one of the easier ones to recognize. It's not "disagreement culture." "Cancel" implies some degree of enforcement and action (or at least threat of action), rather than just voicing one's discontent.
It is appropriate that Lukianoff's definition contains the word "campaign" – which hints at both the collective aspect and the goal of affecting change. And, also in his definition, the campaigns are typically targeted and intended to have direct consequences for people – individuals.
But almost none of the scenarios above mention anything like a campaign. Somewhere between A9 and A11, something like a campaign emerges, but it skirts the important parts. (1) It's only implied that shuttering the podcast means that the podcaster is out of a job, and (2) as long as it's just a single person complaining, and no pick-up is mentioned, it's not a great example of a culture (see point above). So, not a very clear example.
(However, I respect people's rights to opine and complain, and Spotify's right to have T&C that ban this podcaster, and the first amendment's limitations. Without all that, we'd be having a different and much larger conversation. But opinions, corporate boundaries and national laws aren't cancel culture.)
The same problem goes for scenarios B1 through B5. There's not much campaigning going on, and not much cancel culture. The obvious exception is: "But you know if you write it, thousands of people will get really angry and pressure the university to fire this grad student." But that doesn't get to any participation in cancel culture on the part of "you". The cancel culture is whatever dynamic goes on internally in the mob when they more or less formally organize to pressure the university – and even then, only inasmuch as it is an example of something that happens more frequently in their society. But as long as "you" act and write responsibly, you are not responsible for the mob.
If we want an example of an individual contributing to / embodying cancel culture, we can imagine you, the blogger in question, writing an opinion piece echoing the mob's sentiment, calling for someone to be fired – but even then, it's only an example of cancel culture in the context of a lot of other people voicing that opinion, and writing similar pieces. Reporting on the mob is not an example of cancel culture; joining it is.
C1 is the most interesting example, IMO, though I don't think Agnes Callard was right. I think she could have signed on, as long as the letter/petition didn't threaten any consequences for non-compliance, and no calls for anyone to lose their job. I could be persuaded otherwise, however, if I knew more about the other signatories or the wording of the petition. Something might be implied, that I didn't get from the description. But in general: Voicing one's opinion, even alongside others, is not cancel culture. Again, it's the action, and the threatened consequences, not having or stating the opinion, that makes the cancellation.
"Thousands of stay-at-home fathers get angry and write in saying they’re cancelling their subscriptions." As long as they're not explicitly calling for the writer or editor to be fired, maybe even making their continued subscription contingent on it, it's really the wrong kind of cancellation. But we can still use it for disambiguation: Yes, I guess even just cancelling your subscription is a sort of "cancellation". Yes, it reflects something in the culture (a subculture of stay-at-home dads). The thing that makes it cancel culture, however, is that they are connected – it has to be understood by the angry fathers and the institution both, that people are acting in a concerted effort (not necessarily formally coordinated) to assert pressure. And that they are not just unsubscribing from a magazine they no longer enjoy reading; not just people voting with their feet and wallets. And, again, that understanding comes from seeing it in the context of the culture at large.
So, I am quite squarely in P3 territory ("everyone acted in a morally acceptable way"), but need to expand on that. First the follow-up questions:
"Would you still feel this way if it were an article criticizing transgender people? What about an indisputably correct article, criticizing some bad pro-transgender science?" Yes and yes.
"Isn’t this option basically saying that cancel culture is fine, and that it’s okay to get a journalist fired if they express an opinion you don’t like?" No. What? It's just supply and demand. If people don't want to buy your writing, no one is obligated to publish it. That's not the part that is cancel culture or morally questionable.
The parts that are not mentioned, but that would be more in line with cancel culture, and more morally dubious or indefensible, include:
- If angry fathers demand that someone is fired (targeting individuals). Especially is it is for a single story or mistake, and they don't forgive, don't accept apologies, and in effect demand highly disproportionate punishment for the sin.
- If angry fathers threaten other people and manipulate them to also cancel their subscriptions. (Campaign.) If they publically call out and confront subscribers, employees and advertisers, and paint anyone who doesn't cancel their subscription (or call out their employer/colleagues, or pull their ads) as anti-father; and tie them up in time- and energy-draining, lose-lose sophistry if they don't bend to the fathers' will.
- If the CEO fires the editor and journalist not because of any significant threat to the bottom line, or real business concern, but to avoid awkward questions at dinner parties.
- If the CEO undermines audience trust and shareholder value in the medium to long term to get out of short-term discomfort.
- Possibly, if the editor published something they knew the publisher wouldn't defend and the writer wouldn't apologize for.
(Sorry. That comment was too long. I guess I had to work through it myself, too.)
I found this an especially unconvincing one, none of the lines were difficult to draw for me using the definition, this is just nitpicking
Facts
There's an axis here that feels sideways to most of the “professional vs personal” talk: consider the case of audience members objecting to content tangentially referencing the Hogwarts setting on the grounds of J. K. Rowling's views on gender being offensive to them. Assume here the surrounding content doesn't actively promote those views on gender and doesn't talk about the issue at all, nor does it even directly advocate for the Harry Potter books being good as such; in all ways explicit it stays neutral but draws Hogwarts from the pool of common culture. That gets interpreted as indirect support, with something akin to strict-liability social rules regardless of the author's intentions. Especially consider something like objectors pushing “that you consider it acceptable not to bother with the elephant in the room is a sign that transgender people will be unsafe here” in a way where other parts of the audience will see. This doesn't fall into the “personal communication” exemption if the author is a professional entertainer, but it definitely feels like part of the “cancel culture” trend to me, in a way that objecting to an entertainer who actively made fun of transgender people would not.
It seems like broadening the scope of *transitivity* in a way that aggressively extends tribal lines in all sorts of indirect ways has a lot of relation to how “cancel culture” works in practice, and I think there's something along the lines of the game-theoretic objections to “Offense versus harm minimization” (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9thqSN8HDLM3LTxK5/offense-versus-harm-minimization) going on, plus some kind of frenzy around “cut out The Enemy as completely as possible” that enlivens purity spirals around making sure you won't be seen anywhere near the next Enemy and also enforcement of extreme low-decoupling. That last part unpredictably makes high-decoupling communication either collateral damage or intentional damage depending on how you interpret it, which seems to be a primary way “cancel culture” is destructive toward some spheres-around-here and maybe toward Enlightenment-ish open discussion of ideas in general. A9 above shows off a narrower example of transitivity and drawing tribal lines, but this still feels skew to how the A-axis is presented in the post. Where does this fit? *Does* it fit?
There's a moral if not legal case to be made against "cancelling" in certain cases, even for private actors. Lukianoff and Haidt get more specific about this in The Coddling of the American Mind. They contend modern cancellers are motivated by 3 bad ideas: "What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. " Even Mill supported "cancellation" in the right situations. Lukianoff and Haidt's thesis holds if there is something factually or morally wrong with an act of cancellation even operating independently of government.
In On Liberty, a work praised and often cited by Haidt and Lukianoff, John Stuart Mill argues that it's worse when non-government entities restrict speech. I may be putting words in his mouth, it's been a while, but he argued that when the people restrict speech, they tend to do so by feeling or whim without much thoughtful debate. While a legislature transgresses in restricting speech (usually), there is typically some level of informed deliberation. Neither transgresses against Freedom of Speech if that speech doesn't pass the test of Mill's Harm Principle. To be fair, I don't think he gave a solid definition himself. Further, Haidt and Lukianoff lament the concept creep associated with the word 'harm'.
In their The Coddling of the American Mind, the authors refer to the Three Bad Ideas as being the opposite of the principles one learns from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. They are the opposite of principles in Buddhism and Stoicism. More generally, they conflict with what passes for wisdom the world over, ideas Haidt encountered in his research for The Happiness Hypothesis. People are Anti-Fragile, citing the concept popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. So the Three Bad Ideas are actually harmful, but must be discussed.
So I think a possible retort from Luikianoff and Haidt might specifically address a narrow definition of harm to address the concerns mentioned in this article. Further, cancellation is often a consequence of as objective a definition of foolishness as we can muster. Harms are exaggerated or even non-existent.
I didn't see it in this article, but people who won't tolerate anything they disagree with tend to engage in bad faith arguments and logical fallacies, in particular strawman tactics and guilt by association. Just because protestors prevented a lecture, the lecturer wasn't cancelled because after all, he still has his podcast and his book was a bestseller, or he's still a millionaire, or he can still get a job somewhere else. Consequently, the label "cancellation" doesn't make sense and their is nothing to be concerned about here. There's also "tu quoque". People on the right engage in some ridiculous acts of cancellation themselves, so it can't ever be wrong when the left does it either.
Cancellations and opposition to cancellation are often a consequence of an uncharitable treatment of the cases at hand. Perhaps a definition of cancellation should include a reference to The Principle of Charity or Critical Thinking more generally.
IMHO cancel culture is when consequences for 'personal' actions then bridge the gap to professional/business. In your first example - the university (and all involved) would be justified in taking action to stop the grad student from publishing things that they don't believe in, assuming he was doing it using university resources. If he chooses to publish those same papers, under his own name, without using university resources, time, or reputation, then he shouldn't face any sort of pressure at work.
In the 'stay at home dads example' a bunch of dads getting the onboard with putting some hurt on the company that published an article they disagree with is a-ok - that is called public opinion and is A-ok, the company then has to decide how strongly they believe in what their employees said, and if it was even reasonable to say in the first place.
it is sort of the difference between cracking a sexist joke with your buddies at the bar vs the same joke in a meeting with your coworkers. In one case the people involved know your beliefs and that you're speaking for yourself, in the other you are acting and representing the company you work for, and you have an obligation to express their belief and culture or face the consequences for failure to do so.
This process, diferentiating between 'private life' and 'public life', and also between 'my speech' and 'speech endorsed or on behalf of my employer' is how life has always worked, it is how cultural norms are defined and how a society decides what is acceptable and what isn't.
From reading Lukianoff I think he really wants a content-neutral definition of "cancel culture" but it doesn't work for what seems to me to be an obvious reason. "Campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech" are themselves protected by the first amendment, so any concerted attempt to act against this will have to involve some form of social punishment for first amendment activities.
Relatedly a lot of comments are saying that going from criticism to boycotts are what crosses the line to cancel culture. But if you aren't willing to enact financial consequences on companies how are you going to persuade them to listen to you on "cancel culture" instead of the people who are willing to do that?
I've never seen an attempt at a content neutral definition that doesn't fall to a similar problem--I think opponents of cancel culture will just need to accept that content neutrality is unworkable and focus on protecting a fairly narrow range of viewpoints that are controversial but have value.
"if you aren't willing to enact financial consequences on companies how are you going to persuade them to listen to you on "cancel culture" instead of the people who are willing to do that?"
I agree strongly with this and in fact I believe it exposes one of Scott's biggest flaws: his eagerness to have the "moral high ground" and behave in a more principled manner than his opponents. This is nothing more than Scott virtue signalling and he should be strongly criticized for this narcissistic behavior. I believe that while we should demonstrate elevated morality towards those who have done nothing to harm us, our enemies should suffer in exactly the same ways that they force others to. Cancelling people who participate in cancellation campaigns is both moral and justified even if you disagree with cancel culture, just like it is possible to oppose murder but also be in favor of capital punishment for murderers.
15% of the population has no morals or ethics and only bases their behavior on what other people will think of them. These people have no more morality than animals and attempting to impact their behavior by setting a positive example for them is not only useless; it is counterproductive. When they hurt people or commit crimes, they are not sorry for their ACTIONS, they are only sorry that they got CAUGHT. The only way to adjust the behavior of such people is to make it clear that every time they inflict suffering on other people, it will be meted out to THEM in turn. Scott's unwillingness to acknowledge this and plan strategy around this facet of human nature means that he will never be an effective leader, since he expects his followers to sacrifice their own well-being to benefit their enemies. This is slave morality and nobody with dignity should follow it.
Um what?
That's not a very helpful comment
One thing that can be done is to form companies (like Substack) that don't bow to cancellation campaigns, and then consumers can decide which ones to support. Let the pro-cancellation consumers patronize the old companies.
For Substack specifically it's more complicated because its core purpose is to host speech. But suppose that Lowe's responded to Home Depot firing a worker for supporting Trump's assassination by declaring its commitment to not police the speech of its workers. Then to shop at Lowe's in support of this move would be to punish Home Depot for its first amendment freedom of association activity and thus, I think, fall under Lukianoff's definition of cancel culture.
No, individual consumer decisions wouldn't. Campaigning against the company would.
That distinction seems very arbitrary to me. It's ok to use your own reasoning in private to decide you're not going to support Home Depot anymore because you think their actions are wrong, but it's not ok to persuade others that this is the correct decision? Why?
Recall the idea that arguments get arguments instead of bullets. Make an argument against what the company has done (not the company itself), and people may or may not be persuaded.
The idea that there's a sharp distinction between condemning what the company has done and the company itself seems implausible to me. Both are forms of social punishment for speech/association acts. This whole line of argument puts a lot of weight on what seem to be pretty minor distinctions.
Personally I'd endorse A1..A6, and likely A7. I think there's a clear dividing line between personally unsubscribing, and instructing others to unsubscribe -- and that line separates your personal opinion from cancel culture. For that reason, I'd also endorse either P2 or P3, depending on the CEO's motivations and the historical performance of the writers and editors. I don't think that people should be fired for first offenses (everyone deserves a second chance); on the other hand, the newspaper is a business and it is the CEO's duty to ensure it prospers (or at least to maximize value to shareholders). For a similar reason, I would be more strongly opposed to firing scientists (as opposed to newspaper writers), since they are tasked with discovering the truth (however unpleasant), not with generating content that makes money.
I get the desire for a content-neutral definition of cancel culture, and I see the practical advantages, but I don't think cancel culture is in fact content-neutral (though it may be non-partisan)
The moral failing in cancel culture happens when people get incredibly upset about things which aren't actually that bad. It's caused by a general societal push encouraging us to exaggerate how upset we are, so even if an individual is just experiencing a "natural" emotional response we should still encourage them to calm down to counteract the other voices saying that debilitating anger is pro-social. One major social ill is that we can't equilibriate our behavior to match what society will punish us for, because the bar for what constitutes a punishable offense keeps moving. Another social ill is that a society full of easily-offended people is much more constrained (for example, some useful science becomes impossible to publish)
Inconveniently, this means "no but that thing I'm upset about really is bad" is a valid defense. Maybe it's better to say "the offender had every opportunity to know how bad this was"?
I think the "Scott hates the Atlantic" issue is illustrative. The real issue is over whether, as a society, we should remind Scott that forgiveness is a virtue, or should we instead tell him that his pain is valid and must be heard. The latter is what causes cancel culture. The former is directionally right and morally ideal in theory. The instinct to say "your pain is indefensible, shut up" is an attempt to more rapidly course-correct, but risks pushing the pendulum the other way
Here's a trend that's come up more recently that feels interestingly ambiguous. Is “we oppose AI art, and displaying it is offensive” an expression of cancel culture? What about “linking to posts that include any is offensive”? What about “failing to promise *never* to use AI art means I won't support you even if your current works don't use it”? I feel like there's something interestingly different about that domain related to the concrete premises involved, and I also feel like there's related social patterns in there, but I'm not sure at all about how to parse it out. Just saying “tribalism” or “memetic conflict” feels too glib.
In the example you gave, P3 seems fine to me.
I think I'm more interested in a case like this:
> A newspaper publishes a not-particularly-spicy take about a mostly-not-politicized issue, like "it's fine to eat a small meal before swimming". Someone on Twitter writes a hot take about how this is awful because maybe some young children might eat a *big* meal before swimming, and then they'd drown, so this article is endangering children. Fifty other people on Twitter are part of the anti-endangering-children activist community, and they amplify this message, because of some mix of (A) overreacting to very mild offenses helps to shape culture by making people terrified to commit any offense at all, and (B) getting outraged and complaining about things is fun. The CEO, who is also on Twitter, gets fifty furious hateful messages in his twitter-inbox, and he says "oh no everyone hates me I must react immediately" and he fires the person who wrote the article.
In this case, I would argue both:
(P1): The people on twitter who are trying to effect cultural change by wildly overreacting to tiny offenses are doing bad things and are making the world worse.
(P2): The CEO who assumed that fifty people on twitter were a representative sample of real-world opinion has made an error.
I would add that unfortunately I think it's hard to coordinate very well around my objection to (P1), because you'd have to find the people claiming to be outraged and ask them questions: "are you *really* outraged by this? or are you doing some combination of engagement-farming and personal-expression and Overton-window-pushing? and if you *are* genuinely outraged, are you the sort of person who gets outraged by things all the time, or is this an outrage outlier for you?" and they'd just say no.
I think it should be easier to coordinate around my objection to (P2), but also my objection might not be true? Budweiser is one example of a company that got cancelled and lost a lot of sales as a result. I do feel sort of confused about this because it's hard for me to imagine that a social-media kerfluffle got that much real-world traction, but I guess it must have done so.
Hi Scott! I'm a longtime enemy of Cancel Culture and have been actively fighting it for many years, using innovative tactics like encouraging my followers to create Deepfakes of people who support Cancel Culture (in order to get the Cancel Culture supporters themselves cancelled and fired) as well as encouraging stochastic violence against Cancel Culture participants while teaching my followers how to build weaponized quadcopter drones that can potentially be used to assassinate the billionaires who typically support Cancel Culture, thus giving them "Skin in the Game" as Taleb would say. You can read about my endeavors in the links below, if you're interested. Needless to say, I'm very passionate about the Free Speech cause, and that's why I feel I'm best qualified to answer your questions.
(Links for those interested)
https://questioner.substack.com/p/the-post-truth-era
https://questioner.substack.com/p/the-infohazard-economy-part-2
Personally, I believe that anything people say or post outside of the workplace should be considered a Protected Class, similar to gender, sexuality, religion, or other protected characteristics. In other words, if you make your pro-pedophile comments (to continue your worst-case example) outside of normal business hours and your company fires you from it, they can be sued for discrimination against you on the basis of your beliefs. I feel that this would be half of the battle to enshrine free speech as a protected right. To be clear, I don't support pedophilia and in fact I have been very active at encouraging the government to expose the Jeffrey Epstein client list, but free speech is not just about protecting speech that I like, but also speech that I hate.
"But wait!" I hear you say. "What about people like podcasters? They don't directly work for Spotify or Facebook, but they have the potential to lose a lot of revenue if people start a Cancel Culture campaign to get them fired! Are you saying that Facebook HAS to air pro-pedophilia content?!? You MONSTER!"
My opinion about this is that social media companies who wish to be protected by Section 230 do not have the luxury of deciding what speech they will or will not platform. This is the other half of what will ultimately destroy Cancel Culture. The moment Facebook decides to censor or deplatform even a single person on the basis of their offensive opinions, they have changed from being a platform to a publisher and Facebook is now liable for ALL opinions on their platform, because they are no longer protected by Section 230. If Mark Zuckerberg wants to remove a podcaster from Facebook because he finds one of their opinions offensive or objectionable, that's totally fine. But now he's legally liable for EVERY single user's Facebook post that advocates terrorism, criminal behavior, or anything else. In other words, if a social media platform thinks that it is their "duty" to police what their users say, then we should also hold them firmly to that position and make them legally liable for all user content. They don't get to selectively enforce censorship on their userbase: it is either an All or Nothing proposition. They don't get to say "Well, we're a publisher in THIS instance, but a platform in THAT instance." The second you censor one of your users, you've made the decision to be a publisher by exercising editorial powers over them.
I think that this covers every one of the examples you mentioned, but if you need more clarification on what AntiCancellation advocates like myself demand, feel free to ask.
You are mistaken as a matter of fact about how Section 230 ACTUALLY works. (I agree that's how it OUGHT to work.)
I was talking purely about how it OUGHT to work.
You citing Section 230 is then an egregious error when it explicitly says the opposite. In general, I hold that referring to laws when making moral arguments is a mistake (unless your moral system consists entirely of "following the letter of the law, whatever it says", in which case, sure).
I find that when explaining the way laws OUGHT to work it is helpful to relate my explanation to how they CURRENTLY work so that people realize it is not a huge jump between those two different states
>My opinion about this is that social media companies who wish to be protected by Section 230 do not have the luxury of deciding what speech they will or will not platform. This is the other half of what will ultimately destroy Cancel Culture. The moment Facebook decides to censor or deplatform even a single person on the basis of their offensive opinions, they have changed from being a platform to a publisher and Facebook is now liable for ALL opinions on their platform, because they are no longer protected by Section 230.
Lots of people spread this "publishers, not platforms" idea, but would be incredibly bad policy, because it's impossible to run a website without selectively censoring content - in particular, spam. If a website chooses to delete a spam comment, they've made an editorial decision based on the content of a post, and that makes them a publisher and now they're legally liable for every bit of porn, warez, and death threat that gets posted on their website. If they choose not to delete spam, their website becomes unusable because 99% of all comments are spam. So this policy would be a de facto ban on websites with user-generated content. (And before you get all excited about legislating social media into nonexistence, this same problem applies to smaller websites too - even a tiny blog with a comments section is a site with user-generated content that has to make moderation decisions.)
"But I would still allow *neutral* content moderation, like removing spam and warez!" you say.
And what happens when the spam comes from a political campaign? What happens when it's not spam, but you want users to keep the politics comments in the politics subforum instead of posting it everywhere in the cat pictures subforum? And who gets to decide what "neutral" means, anyway?
If a site has downvotes, then as long as you stop the bots from stacking the votes, spam will just get downvoted into nonexistence
And if a site doesn't have downvotes, that's a shitty design decision
In order for a piece of spam to be downvoted into nonexistence, it has to be seen by the people who will cast the downvotes. In which case, mission accomplished, deploy more spam for further effect.
As long as it's not bot generated spam, that's fine
One man's spam is another man's political discourse
Cached answer: there's bright line at punishing non-punishers.
Cancel culture was created when millennials who spent their formative years in the environment of extreme, enforced patriotism of the first half of the 00s began to apply that understanding of how disfavored speech should be treated to their own values
"was created"? LOL....cancel culture is far older than that and used to be far more pervasive in this country than it is today. My own mother, before she passed away at 91, used to say that when she was growing up in the Midwest what we now call "cancel culture" was simply how life worked. To pick just one example my parents had childhood friends who during the 1950s abruptly and permanently lost their careers when it was revealed that they had attended a 1940s college party at which somebody with the Communist Party USA had been present.
None of this crap is _new_ either conceptually or in practice. What makes it appalling today is seeing things that we now call "cancellation" coming _back_ into normal for a lot of Americans, and also new tools (social media in particular) helping to enable that mentality.
Sure, it just depends on the scope of the definition. I do think there is a sort of dialectic here with Bush-era patriotism in "cancel culture" as it existed during the era it has that name
I could be guilty here of romanticizing the time of my childhood (many such cases) but I wonder if you could argue that the real anomaly at hand is that we had a decade or three of abnormally low cancellation, at least between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 (perhaps a sort of ideological peace dividend?)? Or maybe also including the 70s and 80s?
It does feel that way sometimes, yea. On the plus side the pushback to it now is both broader and deeper than seen in previous eras. The strikingly-rapid growth and success of FIRE is just one tangible example of that.
What careers were those?
In the two specific instances that I heard the sad stories of, one was a young architect; the other was a young husband and wife each new to academia. (He a rookie junior professor in one of the sciences, while she'd taken a staff job in that university's administrative offices.)
Also when I was a kid we had a longtime neighbor who, I learned only after his passing, had lost his white-collar career during the late 50s/early 60s when it came out that in college he actually joined the American Communist Party for a short time. He'd then managed to become a unionized railroad worker which is what I knew him as, which during the 1960s/70s paid well enough to keep a middle-class household afloat if not thriving.
Let us not forget that FIRE's work consists in documenting and engaging the manifold actual manifestations of inappropriate use of power to crush viewpoint diversity. For them this is a real life issue, and a life and death issue for the culture. They offer (I think) the best database of such manifestations with a commitment to not being partisan. As much as some definition of anything that considered all theoretical edge cases would be amazing, it is also important to acknowledge that behavior tends to cluster in certain patterns that makes a less perfect definition perfectly useful.
I'm confused. This isn't hard. A cancellation attempt is where person A, who doesn't like what person B is doing, directly pressures person C into cutting ties or otherwise altering their relationship with B.
Person A simply being vocal about their dislike for B is a form of public pressure as well, but it's not cancellation. Mob behavior being involved or not doesn't matter for this definition; it can make the action worse, but it can't make it more cancelly. A single person can get you cancelled, though it's rare.
“Bob is planning on shooting up a school next week, so you, Charlie, should not sell him weapons”
Is this a cancellation attempt?
Yes. If you had actual evidence, you'd call the police rather than Charlie.
I appreciate the simplicity of your definition, but under it, the Montgomery Bus boycott, the 1963 Birmingham Campaign and many of the civil rights’ era boycotts would be considered cancel culture. I don’t see how any organized boycott wouldn’t meet your A-B-C criteria.
I don’t think the original civil rights movement boycotts are what most people mean by cancel culture.
I don't know a lot about those boycotts, but they certainly seem to be cancellation. I have not claimed that all acts of cancellation are bad.
It's also important to distinguish between canceling someone and "cancel culture", which I haven't defined at all!
The whole conversation seems to be structured as "how can we define cancel culture, which we know to be bad, in such a way as to only have it refer to bad things?" Maybe...it's not always bad?
>The whole conversation seems to be structured as "how can we define cancel culture, which we know to be bad, in such a way as to only have it refer to bad things?"
I think that’s because cancel culture was originally intended as a derogatory. If you want to turn it into a neutral or positive descriptor, that’s up to you, but you’re working against a primary component of its original definition at that point and you’re swimming against the current of shared understanding.
To me, cancel culture has 2-3 components.
1) It involves punishment disproportionate to the offense relative to the norms of our broader society. In the general case, this involves speech, but in the academic case, the "broader norms" are the commitment to the free and open search for truth.
2) The judgment and punishment is carried out or heavily influenced by a mob rather than by any legal process.
3) It often (but not always) involves judgment for conduct or speech that is outside the specific domain of the person's employment or official duties.
It's the "disproportionate" step that makes it very difficult to define, which is why our legal code has so much guidance on levels felony and misdemeanor.
"I think of myself as, at the very least, in a strong coalition with everyone who believes that people shouldn’t be fired from their job for speech that they made outside of their job. But this is too limited!"
I find this both too limited AND too restrictive. It doesn't cover some of the things I want it to cover, but it's also not especially hard to think of cases where it probably shouldn't apply. They're not the most common cases, they're not usually the sort of cases anti cancel culture people are most apt to bring up. But neither are they totally outlandish or impossible.
An simple example is to suppose that the podcast host from A1 has a day job. It's not a public-facing day job, so his podcast activities don't directly impact his job performance. But if he becomes well-known enough that most of his coworkers are aware of his podcast, it could DEFINITELY have indirect effects. A rational (i.e. amoral) company is almost certainly going to find it more expedient to fire one employee than to deal with a spate of others quitting because they don't want to work with pedophilia podcast guy. If you stand on "nobody should ever be fired for speech activities outside their job" you have to either concede that a. the company should be willing to fold rather than fire this one person or b. everybody else is morally barred from quitting, even if they find working with the guy extremely distressing[1]. Both of those are very tough bullets to bite, and I'm not willing to bite them.
Incidentally, I think this sort of problem already has a well-explored solution (at least a partial one). The key is that I don't think framing this type of thing as a "free speech issue" is really helpful at all. "Under what circumstances an employer should be able to fire you" is clearly a labour-rights question, of which this is a sub-question. I'd posit that any society in which people are routinely getting fired for expressing outside-of-work opinions is a likely society in which people are also routinely getting fired for a lot of other bad reasons, like wanting to make room to promote the manager's best friend, or asking too many awkward questions about workplace safety or any number of other things.
The solution is unions. Unions exist precisely to stand up for the interests of employees where they differ from the interests of employers. "Not getting fired" is pretty high on the list of employee interests. The crucial insight here is that unions represent the interests of ALL the employees, collectively, so protections are much stronger for behaviours that don't adversely impact your coworkers than for behaviours that do. If a large but widely-distributed campaign tries to get one of the employees fired, a rational manager will fire them as soon as they seem like a net liability, which doesn't take very much in industries where workers are easily replaceable. But the union won't have nearly as low a barrier: firing one of their members is bad for their reputation, so they'll be incentivized to stand up for the employee unless and until the manager can make the case that the PR situation is bad enough to put the whole company at risk[2]. Meanwhile, if the employee does something that significantly upsets their coworkers--as in the case of pedophilia podcast guy--suddenly the union has every bit as much incentive to get the guy fired as the management does. I expect this last part won't sit well with many people here, and certainly personal popularity and office politics are real factors in how unions operate. But "keep from badly pissing off your coworkers" is ultimately a much easier and much more fundamentally necessary part of navigating a job than "keep from pissing off random strangers you'll never meet."
[1] In fact, we have to go even further: we have to concede that nobody should be allowed to let the prospect of working with pedophilia podcast guy dissuade them from applying to the company. A lack of qualified applicants for new jobs won't sink a company quite as fast as everyone quitting, but it will certainly do it eventually.
[2] Which I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, is very much not typical of cancelling campaigns. My impression is that while they can get fairly intense, they tend to blow over pretty quickly and cause just enough worry or disruption that replacing the employee seems safer and easier than riding the storm out.
Unions are only an answer to cancel culture problems in that firing employees is harder. There are lots of ways in which unionized labor is actually worse. The extraction of fees and overhead for the union administration must be at least equal to the added benefits for the employees, and regardless the extra costs are going to be passed on to the consumer. Making it harder for employers to manage personnel is hardly always a good thing either; just ask the 22,000 union employees of Yellow Corp. who lost their jobs when the company went bankrupt because they couldn't negotiate employment contracts to the degree needed to keep the business running. Unions should be viewed in a zero sum manner; they privilege the employee at the expense of both the employer and customer. There are a lot of tradeoffs involved beyond just protecting employees from termination.
> The extraction of fees and overhead for the union administration must be at least equal to the added benefits for the employees
Why would that “must” be true.
The sentence I wrote before that, "There are lots of ways in which unionized labor is actually worse." The second part must be true to avoid unionized labor being worse for the employees as well. It isn't a statement about the efficiency of actual unions.
I don't think unions in media have worked like that in practice. Don McNeil was an active union guy at the NYT, and still got canned because some rich kids vacationing on some NYT-sponsored trip complained that he asked them to clarify which offensive words were used by a student that got expelled.
I don't think cancel culture can be so rigorously defined because culture can't be rigorously defined. There are two dimensions to cultural boundaries of acceptability: 1) Is something wrong? 2) If so, what social sanction should be applied?
Cancel culture interacts with both dimensions, and neither can be rigorously defined so of course cancel culture can't either. By interacting with both dimensions I mean cancel culture involves a minority trying to tailor society's boundary of acceptability to their own preferences and/or increase the social sanctions for crossing them.
The cultural norms and their associated sanctions that are easy to define are codified into laws.
The problem that you’re running into here is that you can’t escape the object-level debate of what actions are good/bad/morally neutral. It’s incoherent to say “this set of actions is morally bad but I oppose this person receiving social consequences for it” unless you would also extend that to the pedophilia examples.
The reason most people oppose pedophilia is because we have a social consensus against it. But the social consensus doesn’t just pop into existence, it’s established by social consequences. And in order to expand social consensus in your desired direction, you have to try to enforce social consequences on (“Cancel”) people on the edges of what’s acceptable. If you win the fight to do that, you move the Overton Window.
Most people are okay with all of this when it comes to things they think are bad, but on the meta level there’s no difference between this and whatever forms of Cancel Culture you disagree with. You can’t avoid the object level.
It seems clear to me that cancel culture happens at the point of coordination with others who aren't directly impacted by the actual thing. If podcast listeners get together to push for no more pedophiles on the podcast they used to enjoy, that is perfectly reasonable. Trying to push others who don't care about the pedophiles, or who don't listen to the podcast at at all, into your coalition... that's cancel culture. So I'd say that's somewhere around A8/A9 is the line, although I think A10 is actually fine. There's a reason cancel culture came after social media. Spotify is welcome to ignore my angry e-mail if they don't agree, but it's harder to ignore thousands of them, with accompanying social media outrage and news stories drawing in a bunch of people who have no reason to care except for viral outrage.
I wouldn't say any of the people doing the actual firings are participating in cancel culture any more than I would say someone paying a ransom is part of a kidnapping gang. Maybe they're ultimately part of the problem, but that's not the thing itself.
The First Amendment addresses the power relationship between the Government and Citizens. Private businesses are not constrained by it except as subsequently legislated or specified through judicial interpretation. This leaves businesses where those of us who trade labor for income spend most of our time as petty tyrannies to the extent they choose to be, mostly.
As the privatization of once Public Goods, things like education, transportation, housing has advanced, along with the financialization of Public Goods that were never treated as such like health care and nutrition, the space beyond the remit of the First Amendment has expanded.
As "The Market" has, post Buckley vs Valeo, post Citizens United, metabolized Politics, Abba Lerner's assertion, "economics has made herself the queen of the social sciences by selecting as her domain the set of "solved political problems" has become increasingly false. He said that while Marriner Eccles was running the Fed at the height of The New Deal. Economics is now visibly bifurcated into what classical economists called Political Economy (Marx was one of the last classicals, he didn't invent the term) and what we think of as Cancel Culture is a perfect example of one such unsolved political problem: economics wielded as naked power.
Has privatization actually advanced? Public school expenditures keep going up and privately owned roads seem to be less common than in the colonial era. I guess section 8 vouchers have displaced public housing projects though, as their concentration of poor people in one big place is now regarded as a bad thing.
> it would personally warm my heart if the Atlantic failed as a business and everyone associated with it died of starvation.
That warmth you feel is from burning hatred. Embrace it!
I would define cancel culture in terms of the Overton Window. Assume there is a range of human beliefs that form a bell curve on any given issue. I think most people are comfortable imposing progressively stronger sanctions the further out on the curve you go. The legal definition of free speech means the government shouldn't be able to punish you for unpopular speech but in a free society, I think most of us feel you can be justly ostracized and fired for speech that is at the far tail end of the curve. A normal Overton window should line up with this bell curve so that the middle standard deviations are clearly in and then it gets more dicey towards the ends. I would define can culture as when a social group with minority views imposes their own narrower Overton window on society as a whole and imposes the sanctions reserved for those at the extreme ends of the distribution on those actually residing well within the normal distribution for society as a whole but outside the new narrower Overton window.
I don't think it's possible to work towards a definition of "cancel culture" or what is acceptable to "cancel" in the first place. At the same time, I agree with the fundamental premise that some things get "canceled" that are obviously ridiculous to cancel. I would describe myself as "a leftist" but I still have strong negative feelings towards a lot of other leftists (and vice versa - no one hates leftists more than leftists).
Yet when you ask...
> "If I support a Republican’s right to criticize transgender people, will he support my right to say I wish the Trump assassin hadn’t missed?"
...to me the obvious answer is "no". And it would be "no" if the parties and positions here were flipped as well. A Republican isn't interested in defending the generalized concept of free speech against cancellation, they're interested in their political aims. From the perspective of a Republican pundit (I'm going to specify "pundit" here because to avoid arguing about the minutiae of the median GOP voter) trans people are a social negative and Trump is a social positive. The idea that they wouldn't want you to say Trump should've been shot isn't incoherent, it's to be expected. Under what circumstance would a Republican *want* people to go around encouraging people to shoot the de facto leader of their party? And if not "want" specifically, still why should they expected to grit their teeth and bear with it?
Put it a different way, rhetoric influences behavior. If it didn't, then the whole purpose of speech and argument is moot (including both this blog and this comment). We don't want people to go around saying "Let's round up everyone with a skin tone darker than my own and lynch them". We don't want this so badly that it's actually illegal to do this. Most people agree this is fairly reasonable. But what if it wasn't illegal? In that situation, would we just throw up our arms and go "Well, it's not a definition based on law, so we can't really cancel the guy"? No, of course not lol.
Let's move to something slightly more ambiguous. To my knowledge, Zelenskyy has banned pro-Russian parties from operating in Ukraine. This is, very obviously, a huge step over what we would recognize as free speech. This would more or less be the equivalent to signing a bill saying that you can't have positive words about China and work in politics. At the same time though... it's kind of hard for me to care. I recognize - abstractly - that this could set bad precedent and lead to authoritarian crackdowns if or when the war ends. At the same time, though, obviously they're going to take this measure? If you're in a war against an invading nation, it serves no good to have people go around arguing that maybe you should just give up. It's also plausible (likely, even) that these actors aren't good faith to begin with.
When Germany decided after World War 2 to ban Nazi language and symbology, were they wrong for this? Would the world be better if Germany still allowed Nazis to roam about? Would *other nations* accept that, much less us as people?
And, to be clear, I don't think "post-2014" works as well. If anything this definition makes me think "cancel culture" as a term is like... faddish and kind of ridiculous. Socrates was poisoned for the crime of being kind of obnoxious. Witch trials would burn people at the stake for being a bit weird. The Bill of Rights didn't guarantee the freedom to practice religion out of reflexive practice, it did this because the prior standard was to persecute people over these matters. If anything, the effects of "cancellation" have significantly decreased over time. The only difference now is that whereas before you only had one village to worry about, the internet allows contact with any village in the world.
Of course, when we look back at those examples (Socrates, witch trials, religious persecution) we basically all agree "that was bad". These are examples of "cancellation" that most people would say shouldn't happen, so you're probably thinking it seems kind of weird to present these in the context of an argument that "cancellation kind of isn't solvable, and you might not want to solve it anyways". I think the most obvious difference between those examples and what we see with the Nazis, or Zelenskyy, or your examples involving pedophilia, is that witches weren't real and obviously weren't actually doing anything wrong.
In a world where witches did actually exist and were consorting with the devil to spread evil, it would be entirely rational to "have witch hunts". Much less "get them fired by Tweeting a lot". The pedophilia podcaster is probably less evil than the actual devil, but their words still contain meaning and are being purposed towards ends you and I would both define as "pretty bad, actually". Should we then go burn down their house and slaughter their family? Well, no. But petitioning Spotify to take down "the pedophile podcast" seems fair?
Let's move this to an actual example. How many people do you think refused the COVID-19 vaccine due to vaccine misinformation? Of these people, how many do you think contracted COVID-19 and died? Of that proportion, how many do you think had their views on this strongly influenced by Joe Rogan, or Ron DeSantis?
I'm sure if you had a supercomputer with all the information in the universe crunching those numbers the answer would be "at least one". I'm also sure that you would probably agree that this is removed *enough* that it's kind of hard to draw a line from "Joe Rogan spreads vaccine misinformation" to "Joe Rogan is responsible for deaths, and this becomes a simple trolley problem". If you butterfly effect things out far enough you could probably argue any given action no matter how innocuous is going to be responsible for gazillions of deaths (or lives saved!) down the line.
But at the same time, pretending like "vaccine misinformation" and "deaths due to COVID" are totally unrelated is obviously foolish. Same with "anti-trans hatred" and "crimes against the trans community". The Christchurch shooting was factually influenced by specific people (they left a manifesto!). Some of these people are a bit confusing and some of these people aren't. If someone shot up a church and named *me* in their manifesto I'd be a bit confused. But I'd be confused because I haven't been using my millions large political platform to fearmonger about immigrants or the LGBT community or government oppression for several years.
If someone bombs an abortion clinic and says "I did this because Mike Johnson convinced me abortion is murder and compared it to the Holocaust, and so it was entirely rational to destroy the mass-baby-murder-building", Mike Johnson kind of doesn't get to go "Huh? What? Woah, that's crazy. There's like, no cultural impetus at all to take violent action against the Holocaust. Actually in my truest hearts of hearts I solely support peaceful protest against the Holocaust". He might just be stupid, or might genuinely simultaneously hold the beliefs that "abortion = genocide" and "abortion should only be spoken against, not acted against". But it should be fairly obvious to anyone that a movement that regularly compares abortion to *the worst crime imaginable* is going to spark random terrorism against abortion.
**For that matter, if you're speaking often about how you wished the Trump shooter hadn't missed, then you kinda gotta own up to it if it happens again and they don't!**
Is the solution here "No one should ever encourage or imply violence against anyone or anything"? Well, no. Again, we imprison people for encouraging violence too enthusiastically. That in itself is a form of violence.
I'm sure to you the difference between the abortion terrorist and your comments about Trump is something like "Well, abortion isn't murder, I consider that position ridiculous, and I think Trump is evil and that his life is a large negative, such that my axiomatic priors against murder don't weigh so heavily against his life". This is also something people would say about, like, Hitler or Osama Bin Laden or Margaret Thatcher (I'm sure people posting "Ding dong the witch is dead" would not have cared if she'd been killed by an assassin instead). I think the difficulty is that you seem to frame this as an issue to be resolved, but I don't think it is.
You are correct that abortion isn't murder. You are also correct that Trump is, broadly, "evil". It's bad to call for stochastic terrorism against abortion clinics because abortion clinics are good. It's not so bad against Trump because Trump is not good. It's bad for a company to hire someone who regularly Tweets drawings of trans wojaks being hanged because this is disgusting and negative behavior.*
Essentially, I think what you want is less a definition of "cancellation" and more a definition of "what is appropriate to punish". The answer to this (unhelpfully) is "bad things" and the answer to "what level of punishment" is "a proportional one". A guy who casually says a female manager is bossy (which she may well be) doesn't really deserve to be fired and blacklisted, no. At the same time, I also don't really have a lot of sympathy for Candace Owens or Milo Yiannopoulos. At a certain level of badditude you start to fall into the "I love the Dark Lord" camp.
* Even from a purely merit based point of view, I would doubt the credentials of someone who counts themselves as a big Matt Walsh fan for basically the same reason I'd doubt the credentials of a biologist who's a YEC. Many conservative positions (as you've lined out in your alt-right FAQ) aren't just incidentally bad, they're often abysmally stupid and indicative of the person holding them either being equally stupid or proportionally bad faith. Being "left" or "a liberal" doesn't inoculate you against the same levels of stupid (see: the Atlantic article you discuss), but it also doesn't require it as a prerequisite.
"If you're in a war against an invading nation, it serves no good to have people go around arguing that maybe you should just give up."
We WERE the invading nation, but exactly this happened in the US during Vietnam.
Uhhh, I'm not sure if we're disagreeing. I feel like most or at least many people agree the US' crackdowns against Vietnam protestors were bad (I don't see anyone defending the Kent State shooting, at least). I'm not sure if we'd feel the same if the Kent State shooting was instead against KKK members burning crosses on the courtyard. We see the government opposition to the Vietnam protests as shameful because the protestors were right - it is bad to invade other countries.
I'm only pointing out it was NOT against the law to speak out for or against the Vietnam war in the US. But Jane Fonda was ostracized for it. Some people come down on Fonda's side, and others against. But you're saying that if your country is at war, "it serves no good" if people oppose the war and say you should stop it.
We kind of have something similar going on now, with people protesting the war in Gaza. Whether you think the war is justified or not isn't the question here. The question is whether anyone has the right to SAY whether the war is justified.
For both Gaza and Vietnam, one can say whatever one wants, except for cancel culture consequences.
Not being familiar with the Kent State shootings, I read up on it a bit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings). I conclude this wasn't actually a free speech issue. Those opposed to the war were not demonstrating peacefully, but were looting and rioting, and so the National Guard was brought in in addition to the full police force. I'm not saying the killings were morally correct, but I do understand the decision to use deadly force, under the circumstances, and the demonstrators should have recognized what response their actions may provoke.
"But you're saying that if your country is at war, "it serves no good" if people oppose the war and say you should stop it."
No, I'm not.
The key difference between Ukraine and Vietnam is one you've already pointed out - we were invading Vietnam, Ukraine is not invading Russia (well, they kinda are now I guess? I'm not keeping up).
If Ukraine "gives up", they don't just abstractly lose a war and some national prestige. Their country gets annexed, lol. Their government will cease to exist and their people will become Russian. They're fighting a defensive war against an aggressor. The US was fighting an offensive war against people who were no threat to us.
If someone in Nazi Germany was protesting against Hitler, I would consider this good. It would be in Hitler's best interests to oppose this protestor, but I would consider him doing so bad. Conversely, if Churchill cracked down on pro-Nazi protestors who were saying the blitzkriegs are fake and it's totally safe to go outside when the weird airplanes are overhead I would consider this both in his best interests and also a moral good (it may be grey long term but obviously saves lives in the moment).
I don't care that the Kent State protestors were rioting and I think that's tangential. My point there is that most people agree "It was bad for them to be shot" and they think this because "They were correct in opposing the Vietnam war". If they were instead protesting in favor of segregation I don't think people would care as much because segregation is wrong and "war is bad" is good.
Yes, Ukraine is in an existential war. What if some Ukrainian thinks being taken over by Russia is just what the doctor ordered? He isn't allowed to voice that opinion.
Free speech means being allowed to voice your OPINION, whether that it is good for your country to be taken over by another country, that the Nazis are doing evil, or that supporting the war in Vietnam is bad. It does NOT mean that telling lies like it's totally safe to go outside and get bombed, or that the Sandy Hook murders never happened (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting_conspiracy_theories#Alex_Jones_claims).
Ukraine doesn't have free speech like they do in the US. But if they did, it is wrong to forbid pro-Russian parties.
"It does NOT mean that telling lies like it's totally safe to go outside and get bombed, or that the Sandy Hook murders never happened"
Why not? What if they happened to sincerely believe it was safe to go outside during a bombing run? Or what if they knew they'd die, but thought this was preferable?
Suppose you could prove, objectively, that pro-Russian parties existing in Ukraine would lead to a 100% chance of them losing the war. Is the right for these parties to exist really so valuable that Ukraine should cede its existence for it? (The answer is "no")
Even from a position of maximizing free speech, there is a limit. It's not like Russia is *more free* than Ukraine is. If they win the war, there will be *less* free speech in the world. Germany very much not wanting a Fourth Reich isn't just because they happen to not like Nazis now, it's also because a Fourth Reich will be drastically less free than "a society that tolerates everything except the Reich".
Again, the only common thread between all these examples (real or hypothetical) is just that we support free speech when it's in service of good outcomes and don't when it isn't. The "appropriate punishment" for expressing an unsupported opinion varies depending on context.
The Germans didn't want Londoners to think it was safe. They wanted them terrified of German vengeance, clamoring for their leaders to seek peace.
I wasn't aware anything bad happened to Jane Fonda. I looked up that period on wikipedia, in a section on the 70s titled "Widespread success and acclaim", and found this quote from her:
"The suggestion is that because of my actions against the war my career had been destroyed ... But the truth is that my career, far from being destroyed after the war, flourished with a vigor it had not previously enjoyed."
I've seen people defend the Kent State shootings based on the fact that student had been rioting for days beforehand. But you have a point that more people supported those shootings back then while the war was going on, and nowadays few remember the rioting at all, just that the war was bad.
This is kind of more tangential (and I couldn't fit it in the main comment anyways), but I also feel like there's a level of tacticality that has to be accounted for here as well.
In the 2000s and 2010s, I feel like "born this way" was a common argument in favor of gay rights. The analogy being something like "If you wouldn't judge a black guy for the circumstances of his birth, then you shouldn't judge me either". It also counters the idea of conversion therapy at the same time. Win/win on both fronts.
I also don't think this is true. I think most humans have the potential to be attracted to most anything, and are socialized early on to only be attracted to the opposite gender. Per-generation, the proportion of gay people has increased dramatically over the last 100 years. I can't see genetics explaining this more convincingly than just... "Gen Z was raised in a particularly queer environment, and Millenials similarly but less so by half, Boomers the same, extending into the past".
Of course, a natural extension of this is that conversion therapy probably works. It's called "heteronormativity". Don't want your kid to be gay? Raise them in an environment where only the opposite gender is attractive. Works 95% of the time.
At the same time, being queer myself, I could empathize with someone who'd get mad at someone else publishing studies about this in the 90s or 2000s. Does that mean they shouldn't be allowed to do so? Uhhh, ehhhh... I value truth too much to say "yes, these studies should be retracted". But I would also understand if the person producing the studies decided to not share the results until a more appropriate time for basically the same reason nuclear schematics were classified but on a smaller scale. The Prime Directive but, like, for gay people.
Extending this, if someone was putting out these studies with the express purpose of promoting bigotry against the queer community I would think they should be "cancelled" for *that* if not their work (though I'd also like to think I'm principled enough that I would feel annoyed if this cancellation extended to assuming their work must be incorrect - I feel this a lot when I see articles discussing old scientists who addend all their statements with "by the way, they supported eugenics").
Bryan Caplan discussed that big change here:
https://www.betonit.ai/p/lgbt-explosion
It seems worth noting that the largest change has been among women, and more in identification than behavior.
I don't know.
I'm a male. At no point in my life has the thought of having sex with another human male been appealing to me. I have seen MtF transgendered people that look feminine and attractive to me... but would that sense of attractiveness disappear the moment I saw their penis, assuming they still have one? It's definitely possible.
Basically, I feel that I'm inherently sexually attracted to at least feminine appearance and probably to female-bodied people in general. So I could imagine a gay man being the same as me here, just in the opposite direction - being sexually attracted to at least masculine appearance and male-bodied people in general.
Also, if socialization is key, I wonder why someone like Oscar Wilde was gay. If sexuality is perfectly fluid, I don't get why someone like Wilde would 100% choose to be gay in a time and place when that would make things much worse for him.
Now, don't get me wrong. I do think human sexuality is somewhat fluid, but more in degree than direction. In other words, I think that the intensity of a person's sexual desires and the intricacies of a person's fetishes are influenced by the surrounding culture. In a society with no porn, people probably do think much less about sex than they do in a society with loads of easily available porn. And what's popular in porn can influence people's fetishes.
But the basic direction of human sexuality - the type of person you're sexually attracted to - that seems more inherent to me.
I mean, the very idea of having a preferred type, in the "he's my type/she's my type" sense, strongly suggests that, going above and beyond even sexual orientation itself.
I don't think sexual attraction can be forced. I know I couldn't force it. The most I can easily imagine is the following - It might be possible to deeply love someone that you're NOT sexually attracted to, but out of a desire to make that person happy (and/or have children with them) you can manage to have non-traumatic sex with them. My suspicion is that gay men who manage to have successful marriages with straight women are likely like this.
I think "types" are even more obviously social than "sexuality" itself. People express racial types, for example, but it's hard to imagine a gene coding for "I have an unusual fetish for stereotypical Japanese housewives". JohnofE has a very strong (exclusive?) preference for the characters from the Angry Beavers TV show. It's basically impossible for this to be a genetic result, unless he's a mutant in a very specific way.
I, personally, remember being definitely straight. There was quite a long period where I would've registered as "biologically straight" if I took one of those penile arousal tests that Scott brings up in the article on accusing people of not "really" being bisexual. I also distinctly remember deciding to become bisexual and just doing so. Maybe you can explain this by saying I'm just particularly unique, or that genetically I was always bisexual and heteronormative behaviors strongly repressed this, or that Pavlov conditioning can be strong enough in some people to overcome "genetic straightness". The particular reasoning doesn't really matter, there's at least sample size 1 here lol.
Personally I feel like I'm probably just more introspective and directed than other people. I also try to adjust my "type" to be more inclusive, to varying success. I assume others can do the same if they were particularly driven. I distinctly remember gaining new desires after my first few sexual encounters, at least. To give evidence for the Pavlov hypothesis, this probably at least indicates that "whereas before I thought X was gross I now think X is really hot" can be explained by "X was paired with sex despite initial apprehension". What would make gender different?
Anyways, I don't think genes mean nothing with regards to sexuality, to answer your question about Oscar (though, at the same time... did this appear in any other family member?). I just think that most humans are "genetically"
1) Instinctually driven towards sex (I remember finding sex unexplainably interesting even as a young child and I know my peers felt the same, to a degree that personally went beyond "looking at stuff my parents told me not to")
2) Driven towards the opposite gender, but this system is very easily hijacked (you can probably easily imagine a culture where "masturbation" is described as a "self-sexuality" and is stigmatized. Some people will be aroused just by the miming of masturbation, so clearly this goes beyond rote mechanical stimulation, "masturbation" is in-itself an action that can be "made attractive")
"I also try to adjust my "type" to be more inclusive, to varying success."
I suppose I just don't understand this type of thinking. I mean, it's YOUR life, it's YOUR preferences. Why do they have to be "inclusive"? I guess I don't get the moral imperative here.
I guess at a practical level there is such a thing as being overly picky for one's own good... but limiting yourself to 50% of all adults doesn't strike me as such a case of being overly picky for one's own good.
Perhaps I have a personal bias here since having no sexual preferences at all feels boring to me. Having personal preferences, of any sort, makes life more interesting in my view. Personally, I also think it can be a good way to achieve greater self-discovery.
There's no moral imperative, I suppose. I guess there's kind of a vague moral imperative in that like... if a guy said "I will only date blonde haired, blue eyed women" I'd raise a few eyebrows at him (to be consistent I would and have done the same towards Black Hebrew Israelites making the same claim about black women). But like, that's kind of far from my current (or ever) situation.
I do it for my own benefit and as a kind of challenge, I guess. I will say - I think you're being optimistic in your estimation of your potential dating pool. I don't think you'd date 50% of people just because you're straight. I doubt I'd date 50% of people and on-paper my dating pool is "everyone".
Assuming you're like, ~25ish and would only date people downwards 5 years of yourself and upwards 10 years then that alone restricts you to ~11% of the population. From there, how many personal preferences do you have? Say you prefer women who aren't obese (not a rare preference). That knocks off another ~20%, so now you're at about 9% of people. Say you're also "a gamer" and that, while it's not a dealbreaker, you're a lot more likely to date a woman who is also "a gamer" (which we'll arbitrarily define as "owns a console"). Okay, well, that's only ~42% of women, so now that 9% is slightly less than 4%. Let's also say you want a woman who shares your political party. That divides that number in half again. So on so forth.
Of course there's issues with all these numbers. Primarily I'm just Googling them and assuming even distributions (in reality I imagine more than 42% of women aged 20-35 "own consoles", probably?). But you get my point, lol.
That said, no, I'm not doing this out of practicality either. I can date just fine without being more inclusive. I just like the ability to control my feelings.
A desire to control my feelings...
Ok, I can understand that anyway.
Thanks for the interesting discussion.
42% of women own a console? That's Wild and at least 5x more than I'd expect
C. S. Lewis made that point about witch hunts. Willmoore Kendall argued that modern fans of Socrates fail to understand his actual philosophy and why he willingly drank the hemlock rather than going into exile after he was sentenced to death:
https://mlm2.listserve.net/pipermail/salon/2022-November/pdf6r5J0mzmEH.pdf
> We don't want people to go around saying "Let's round up everyone with a skin tone darker than my own and lynch them". We don't want this so badly that it's actually illegal to do this.
Wrong, this is exactly the sort of speech protected by the 1st Amendment. There are exceptions if it incites or proposes imminent violence. But the general concept of advocating violence against certain groups IS free speech.
Re: Zelenskyy, his administration also banned Russian language use/teaching in various spaces and Russian Orthodox religious groups. This isn't so much a speech issue as a crackdown on a minority outgroup. Which began as a result of the Crimea invasion, years before he was even elected. This is a great example of why free speech should be protected, because of course whoever controls the levers of power will use it to crush those they see as the outgroup.
Your argument on protesting war is quite bad. Just change the "public good" of the state at wartime to something right-coded that a leftist like you would disagree with. "It serves no good for these gays to go around saying they should be able to have marriage. Marriage is a social technology for men and women to coordinate resources towards stable child rearing, which homosexuals obviously aren't doing. People arguing otherwise are just acting in bad faith anyway." Who gets to decide what the public good is? There's a conflict between individual rights (like having access to official state sanction for marriage) and nebulous concepts like public good (customs for successfully raising children). Ukrainian individuals have as much right to protest their government conscripting them into a meat grinder as gays did to say they should have access to marriage. Again, free speech is the better ideal because it preserves the rights of individuals over the power of the state.
> ...is that witches weren't real and obviously weren't actually doing anything wrong.
This is just a post-facto excuse; the people at the time might have actually believed the people they burned were witches. Or Nazis might have believed the Jews were actually conspiring to sabotage the Fatherland for their own greedy ends. I hope the segue about why persecuting people is ok if they are believed to be evil enough is not a good idea is sufficiently obvious that I don't have to spell it out.
Re: Covid misinformation, yet again who decides what is misinformation? The same people who said masks were useless then flipped and started advocating for their mandated use? The NIH, which receives royalties on patents they approve and doesn't reveal this information publicly, creating a huge conflict of interest? If a doctor looks at certain studies of Ivermectin and determines it's useful for treating covid, is that misinformation? Any deliberate censoring requires people to agree on what is not true, which a) is inevitably abused by whoever ends up being the censor, and b) no one agrees on. The best way out of this is a free exchange of information by everyone. Tyrannizing people for what *you* perceive as their own good is not doing anyone a favor. People are autonomous and have the absolute right to determine what is or isn't in their own interest.
Re: Abortion, this... is actually completely consistent? If you genuinely believe a fetus has the same rights as a person, or a soul or what have you, abortion is undeniably murder. The abortion body count in the US is far worse than the Holocaust and bombing abortion clinics would be on the same moral level as fighting Nazis or killing Hitler. We might not share that belief, but that doesn't mean people who do should be estopped from trying to convince us otherwise. I also think it's stupid to conflate rhetoric calling something evil with people directing violence against that thing. People are individuals responsible for their own actions. The guy who firebombs the abortion clinic is responsible, not the podcaster who says abortion is murder. Just like the guy who tried to shoot Trump is responsible, not the journalists who compared him to Hitler. I don't think it's unreasonable to simultaneously have strong public disagreements about right and wrong while also condemning violence against those we think are wrong.
> It's bad to call for stochastic terrorism against abortion clinics because abortion clinics are good. It's not so bad against Trump because Trump is not good.
This is really the crux of your argument; things you think are bad are fine to cancel and things you think are good should not be cancelled. If everyone agreed with you, this would be a great system and you would win an honorary Philosopher's Barrel from Diogenes. Back in reality, people disagree about important facets of good and evil all the time. Sadly there aren't evil people doing evil deeds somewhere that we can all agree to go cancel. Rather, the line dividing good and evil pierces through the heart of every man, to paraphrase Solzhenitsyn.
That is why free speech and protecting individual rights are so important and intertwined. Any attempt to centrally determine what is or is not acceptable speech is going to infringe on the rights of whoever is the outgroup. That is why protecting the speech of hateful, disgusting people is most important of all; the more outgroup they are, the more protection from the masses they need. If you think "evil" people shouldn't have the same rights, you are a useful idiot who is propping up tyranny. You're doing the same thing as the mob burning witches or the Nazis shooting Jews, but you think it's fine because you defined evil as your outgroup.
> Many conservative positions (as you've lined out in your alt-right FAQ) aren't just incidentally bad, they're often abysmally stupid and indicative of the person holding them either being equally stupid or proportionally bad faith. Being "left" or "a liberal" doesn't inoculate you against the same levels of stupid (see: the Atlantic article you discuss), but it also doesn't require it as a prerequisite.
And the proof is in the pudding. Surely conservatives don't disagree with leftists because they have a different perspective. No, it's because they are stupid and evil! You can stand everything except the outgroup, indeed.
> Wrong, this is exactly the sort of speech protected by the 1st Amendment. There are exceptions if it incites or proposes imminent violence.
...You basically say "violent speech is protected" and then say "unless it incites violence", which seems kind of contradictory. Obviously the point of violent speech is to incite violence. Maybe this is enforced as much as it should be, but that is what it is.
Fact is, speech is legally bounded. You can't go around saying "I want to kill the President" without getting a visit from the Secret Service. If you assault a black person, and then scream the n-word several times, this will be charged as a hate crime and you'll receive harsher punishment. The content of your speech *made the crime worse* even if materially it changed not at all.
> Re: Zelenskyy, his administration also banned Russian language use/teaching in various spaces
Like I said in the post and other comments - I don't keep up with Ukraine. The nuances of Ukraine's policies aren't really relevant to me. It wasn't even relevant to me whether or not it was factually true that Zelenskyy banned pro-Russian parties. It's just an example leading to some Thoughtful Questions™ that happens to be (as far as I know) "real". You can replace it with any other equivalent. In fact, I'll do so right now.
Trump has said that he would be "a dictator" if elected, and that you'd "never need to vote again". Assume some super duper powerful AI crunched the math on this, and determined that Trump meant this is the worst possible way (he will dismantle democracy) and that he'll actually succeed in this goal if elected. Should Trump be allowed to run, legally?
If you value democracy, which you should, then the answer is "no". Trump's right to free speech does not override the democratic process nation wide. His freedom would impose on the freedom of others, and thus has to be curtailed.
> It serves no good for these gays to go around saying they should be able to have marriage. Marriage is a social technology for men and women to coordinate resources towards stable child rearing
I think this is kind of a ridiculous counter-example and I don't think it makes any sense or has any grounding beyond "in both situations a guy doesn't like what another guy is doing".
From a "freedom maximizing" perspective it makes complete sense to prevent people from running on the promise that they'll ban gay marriage and doesn't make sense to do the opposite. There's no contradiction here. And before you say "what about their freedom to be homophobic" - they're totally free to *think* that. They're also free to get over themselves.
> This is just a post-facto excuse; the people at the time might have actually believed the people they burned were witches. [...] I hope the segue about why persecuting people is ok if they are believed to be evil enough is not a good idea is sufficiently obvious that I don't have to spell it out.
Yes, and witch hunters and Nazis were stupid, irrational, and bad faith. If you took my or your current mental state (I.E., how smart we are and how we process evidence) and transported us back to the Salem Witch Trials, we'd just say "Yeah, I don't think the devil is real. There's no evidence for it". And we'd be correct!*
I don't think this "progressive for the time but not by today" kind of mythology is like... real? Someone who has a consistent moral framework would have the same framework in any context. Sure, we don't see people from 500 BC gunning for trans rights, but they also didn't have the concept of "being transgender". I'm completely confident that someone like the Buddha would be "pro-trans rights" if they were alive today and would've been "anti-Salem" if they were alive then, and I similarly believe that in 500 years my terminology might seem out of date or quaint but that my opinions will "age well".
> Re: Covid misinformation, yet again who decides what is misinformation?
Okay, nevermind, you are also bad faith lol. Everything from here down is just like, exercise and sunk cost fallacy.
> Re: Abortion, this... is actually completely consistent?
Yes, I didn't say the abortion terrorist had inconsistent views. I said they're dumb, irrational, and I'm now also clarifying that they oppose freedom in the form of bodily liberty. Ergo, they shouldn't be allowed to do those things. I would, conversely, support someone who's very pro-abortion because they are pro-liberty and pro-freedom and yadda yadda.
> This is really the crux of your argument; things you think are bad are fine to cancel and things you think are good should not be cancelled.
Yes, I also think this is what you believe as well. Again, this is just one of those meaningless arguments people make to look like they're saying something. You obviously have ideas that you think should be "cancelled". You're definitely fine if murderers are arrested, or if people causing property damage are fined, or if pedophiles are fired from their jobs at the preschool. Literally no person alive believes literally all opinions and actions are fair game. Everyone has boundaries, some people are just more or less honest and clear about them.
* Just to stick with this, if Salem actually happened to have very convincing evidence of witchcraft and devilry that would pass the eye of even an ardent skeptic, then the extent to which we can morally judge the Salem trials is significantly diminished. The only reason we see it as obviously ridiculous *now* is because we understand the idea of the supernatural as a whole to be obviously ridiculous. This isn't just because we have more "world knowledge" though (I don't understand why 9/11 conspiracy arguments are wrong, I just know they are), it's because we just have different values and are better at collating experiences.
it's not "cancel culture." the issue is more the idea you cannot compromise with an ideological opponent and must destroy them in general. this leads to things like cancelling but also the trend to demonize others as subhuman or to always holding extreme positions.
essentially its culture war, emphasis on war, but no geneva conventions.
the answer is to get people to live and let live in general, and that you cannot win at the cost of another; you have to both give up things to live in peace. there needs to be de-escalation of things and more walls honestly.
What on Earth was the part about ‘shocking rats’? Are these rats alive or dead when the shocks are administered? If they’re alive, why the hell would that be considered uneventful and to be ignored until the paedophilia part is mentioned!?
They're alive, and suddenly shown pictures of things like cats.
If that’s true then it’s a lot less bad than electric shocks, to be sure. But casting fear into creatures that we’ve captured (and are naturally helpless/at our mercy and never consented to such experiments of course) is still a very dark and twisted thing to do.
If the difference capturing humans and casting fear into them for experiments is considered a horror of autocratic regimes in WWII and then doing the same to a different (admittedly less complex, but still emotional) mammal is considered so uncontroversial that it can be listed in a hypothetical like the above article as something that no one would find morally repugnant, then our culture is a disturbingly dark and twisted one indeed!
I'll take a moment to plug James Tiptree, Jr.'s 1976 novelette, "The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats", based somewhat on personal experience.
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?44124
https://zoboko.com/text/d54q3q8p/the-weird-a-compendium-of-strange-and-dark-stories/59
Thank you for linking me that. That was not an easy read, but I read it all. I will also take a further look at the author who seems to be a highly notable individual based on the bits I’ve learned so far.
Tiptree is almost never an easy read, but IMO worth it. Here another one, a favorite of mine, that's among the most difficult for me to sell people on:
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/love-is-the-plan-the-plan-is-death/
And they have a couple more stories there, too.
There's also a biography, which is fascinating in its own right:
http://jamestiptreejr.com/
I’m only addressing one very limited type of American canceling: contacting the employer of someone who isn’t a public figure in an effort to get them fired for saying something outside of work that isn’t work-related. That’s it.
1. Is this ever defensible?
2. Should this be legislated against?
If, for example, Bob recognizes his Amazon delivery guy from a profile pic on a post about how said delivery guy thinks pedophilia is god’s will, is it wrong for Bob to email Amazon to let them know? Is it wrong for Bob to let his neighbors know what he discovered and suggest they take action, too?
And if you think the post in question falls under speech that directly incites unlawful actions or poses a real threat to public safety, then shouldn’t Bob be contacting law enforcement instead of the guy’s employer?
My intuition is that most people would answer:
1. No
2. No
But I could be wrong.
Man, maybe I'm naive, but every one of these seemed extremely obvious. Cancelling a subscription because your don't like the content, or firing someone who is causing you problems is always fine. _Calling_ for someone to be fired purely for something they have said, when you are not required to interact with them in any way, _that_ is the bad kind of cancelling.
I think your A series of hypotheticals is wrong. You present it as a linear scale, but it seems to be that you are making changes on two axes: offensiveness and response. So if you picture this as a four quadrant diagram, your hypotheticals make a rough line from the corner of "very offensive, mild response" to "pretty offensive, extreme response". The perpendicular diagonal is one where the response is proportional to the offensiveness. Trying to divide your diagonal means drawing a bright line through the middle of proportional responses, which isn't going to work. If a podcast is platforming pedophiles and one person cancels their subscription and another cancels AND emails the podcast host, the distinction is quibbling.
Instead, the bad areas are the disproportionate responses: extreme responses to mild behavior (the most common cancel culture situation) and mild responses to extreme behavior (which is people trying to raise awareness of an issue the public is apathetic about.) I think you understate people's response to A1, and many would be okay with a much stronger response. Regardless, this clarifies why it's hard to find a line through the middle, because that's exactly the place where most people will agree.
I don't think this helps on the overall question, but it may help you find a better way to ask it.
Cancelling your own personal subscription never counts. You aren't obligated to be a subscriber (or even non-paying reader) of any media outlet. But the "does not get bullet" principle applies to seeking to punish an outlet for publishing content you object to in other ways (with arguing against it not constituting a punishment).
You're right, but I do think the "tell people what they want to hear, or you won't collect a salary" factor has contributed to media bias.
I think I would go a little different direction from Lukianoff. To my mind, when people talk about "cancel culture", they are usually talking about:
1.) A coordinated campaign of social pressure
2.) ...that is designed to coerce or influence institutions which are popularly perceived as non-ideological
3.) ...to sanction, ostracize or punish someone for speech or perceived viewpoint
4.) ...on a topic for which there is not overwhelming social agreement in support of the position of the cancellers
More than anything else, I think it's the "minority with disproportionate institutional power declares a controversial debate ended in their favor by fiat" that raises people's hackles. That's why questions around pedophilia don't set off people's intuitive alarms about "cancel culture", but questions about trans women in sports do. People broadly (and correctly) perceive questions around pedophilia to be settled and done, while the latter is still a live controversy in the Overton window.
There's a general "chill out about speech" and "let's not be afraid to crack down on speech" knob but deep down almost no one cares about that knob. The natural coalitions are "let's chill about [X kinds of speech I'm cool with] and crack down on [Y kinds of speech I oppose]." Those coalitions hold 95% of people.
I am strongly pro cancel culture until such a definition is arrived at, because:
I observe the people that are strongly anti cancel culture were the tradition canceling as hard as they could up until mass social media allowed anyone outside their clique to wield the axe.
I observe that they selectively reserve their anger for certain violations of the norm. Blue haired SJW fired for Blue haired opinions? Silence. Race Realist fired for Race Realist opinions? Society is collapsing.
I observe that the prescribed solution to the problem is to reestablish the pre-social media norm, where the people that get to choose who is cancelled and who is not get to vote with their money instead of voting with their shitposts.
Thus: I think anyone who says they are against cancel culture but can't provide a definition ala The above post is actually just against getting cancelled themselves.
Once a definition arrives that actually sets lines that aren't "Give me back the stick I was beating you with!" I will switch to being the biggest freeze peach advocate you have ever seen.
If you make up assumptions about people you can get them to say whatever you want!
Is there, say, a signer of the Harper's Letter who you think has only been upset when "one side" got canceled?
Seeing as the third name I saw when I googled it was JK Rowling, there is at least one!
"I observe the people that are strongly anti cancel culture were the tradition canceling as hard as they could up until mass social media allowed anyone outside their clique to wield the axe."
Wrong.
I used to be a liberal back when Christian Fundamentalists were the ones doing the cancelling, and I switched to become a conservative when progressives became the one who took up the Cancel Culture mantle.
I will always oppose authoritarian control over speech and work to get those people eliminated no matter which political "side" is doing the cancelling
Two things: the idea of switching your entire package of beliefs, including on personal liberty because one side's mass movement (not even the institutions, just the proles!) became more cencorious to be kinda silly, such that I don't believe you.
And two: both sides have picked up the axe and are swinging like crazy. The right canceles everyone they can for any reason, it's only the most libertarian fringe on both sides that even pretends to think it's a bad idea.
Different people have different priorities. My priority is free speech, to the point that I am willing to radicalize people and engage in stochastic violence in support of this ideal. I've even written a Substack post about it.
https://questioner.substack.com/p/the-censored-of-censored
You may find my priorities silly, but that's OK: it just means that we're political enemies. I don't subscribe to your "BOTH SIDES" ideology either and I find it equally silly. One side is always worse when it comes to censorship and they need to be punished until they repent and change their behavior.
Fair enough. I think pegging your entire system of values to free speech is silly, but that's me.
To inject more hypos...I'm always curious how outright lies should be treated in the cancel culture framework.
You *probably* have a constitutionally protected right to tell lies, under the first amendment, provided you don't use those lies to rip anyone off, obstruct justice, and a few other things. This case is an example:
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2011/11-210
So what about an employee that (at home, after work) posts online under their own name about how they're a distinguished medal of honor winner. When someone calls them out, the employee claims that they were awarded the medal *in secret*, so there's no record of it, and declines to speak further.
To me, this claim seems completely inseparable from a lot of "weird unpopular" beliefs, such as a belief that the 2020 election was stolen, a belief that lizards secretly control the world, and a belief that christ is coming back next weekend to punish divorcees and sexual degenerates. Indeed, many people accuse weird-unpopular-beliefs-holders of holding those beliefs for pretexual reasons. Should the pretextual nature of the belief factor in?
it seems true as a general proposition that an employer wouldn't want to hire or retain a dishonest employee...I can think of few qualities more material to the job...also an outright lie, plainly admitted, contributes little to the marketplace of ideas or the freedom of conscience...but it's hard to separate unpopular beliefs from outright lies!
It's tough for me.
"Stolen valour" is a thing, going back decades, happened in Britain as well as the USA, and can be proven or disproven by "did this person serve in the armed forces during a conflict, and were they awarded medals for service?"
The pope may declare cardinals 'in pectore', but I've yet to hear about "I got a medal but it was all hush-hush". Indeed, we can look it up to see that such a claim would be false:
https://www.cmohs.org/medal/faqs
"Are there classified or "secret" Medal of Honor awards?
No. There are no classified or “secret” Medal of Honor awards.
Presentations of the Medal of Honor follow President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1905 Executive Order stating that “the presentation of a Medal of Honor … will always be made with formal and impressive ceremonial.” They are always presented publicly.
In addition, all citations for the Medal, describing to whom and why it is being awarded, are officially published in the General Orders of the associated service branch. These General Orders are freely available to the public and all service members."
That's something that can be, more or less, decided on a "it's right or it's wrong", clear basis.
Stolen elections are murkier, but should be amenable to the same kind of investigation to find out the truth.
Lizard people and the Second Coming are not the same kind of claims.
You can lie your little heart out, but if you lie about factual matters that are amenable to investigation, you can be called on that, and I don't think there's a First Amendment right about lying per se.
It *might* not do any harm to falsely claim you were a Marine and were awarded the Medal of Honor. But suppose he falsely claimed to be a doctor and performed medical procedures? Would we say that was okay, even if none of the patients suffered harm (the procedures were minor and they recovered)? I don't think so. And claiming to be what you are not was intended, in some way, to gain an advantage for this man, be it to claim a good reputation he was not entitled to, or to advance his career on the Board of Directors by making him sound more impressive and capable than he was.
if someone sincerely believed they were awarded a secret medal of honor, wouldn't that be an unpopular belief, rather than a lie?
> "What if it was something really horrible, like publishing the names and addresses of right-wingers during a murderous left-wing riot?"
My inner troll wishes you had rigged the page to randomly switch left and right in this sentence, as an A-B test of reactions.
My take is that canceling is not good or bad as a rule, but as a function of quantity. In small quantities, it can pro-socially bound the most offensive content away from polite discourse. In high quantities, it creates a chilling effect that prevents the exploration of unpopular but potentially valuable ideas.
The central challenge is that it is very difficult to draw the boundary between what is allowable and what is too offensive. IMO, it would be better to draw a relative rather than absolute boundary.
I've always appreciated this about the Athenian process of ostracism. In this process, there was an annual vote held about whether or not to hold an ostracism. If the vote passed, there would be an ostracism two months later, where citizens could vote to ostracize anyone, and then whoever received the most votes would be exiled (or nobody, if a quorum isn't reached). This has a few nice properties. First, as a formalized process, it channels the desire for cancellation into a more deliberative route than mob action, which allows a chance to think more carefully and less reactively about a potential cancellation. Second, it sets a relative rather than absolute boundary on acceptability. In order to be ostracized, it's not sufficient to just be offensive, one has to be the most offensive person that year. This naturally keeps the process constrained to just the most egregious cases, without having to define exactly what is too offensive and what isn't.
Imagine, for example, the reduction in toxicity in going from "I demand that X is fired from their job immediately, and while we're at it let's get A,B,C, and D too!" to "I'm going to vote for X to get fired at the next ostracism!". Of course, the exact process of Athenian ostracism doesn't scale well to our society. But I think that the underlying principles of deliberation and relative rather than absolute boundaries are worth revisiting.
> all the side papers they write are trying to establish that pedophilia is good for children, and that victims who say they’re unhappy about it are just lying.
Pedophilia doesn't have victims; child sexual assault has victims. When a gay man rapes another gay man, do you blame this on homosexuality?
I assumed his reference to pedophile-ophiles was a hypothetical. I didn’t know he was talking about you!
And here we go! Leonard may be trying his best to get a conversation started, but this is precisely the kind of response here that prejudiced, stick-in-the-mud types like me react badly to, and that the pro-Minor Attracted Persons lobby has to overcome.
Not gonna happen with me, I'm stating from the start.
"When a gay man rapes a gay man..." and what about if a gay man rapes a boy? That gay man only likes boys, the younger the better? I may not blame the homosexuality, I damn well am going to blame the paedophilia, because if you can have sex with adults (and many paedophiles do just that to get access to the children of their sexual partners) but you choose to have sex with children, or you prefer sex with children, that has damn-all to do with "I'm gay or I'm straight" and all to do with "I'm a paedophile".
Paedophilia *does* have victims, and the hair-splitting about child sexual assault is only because they haven't had the opportunity to do it yet, or lack the courage to do so.
There you go, bigoted enough for you?
But why worry about all these arbitrary principles and edge cases? Coming to a consensus for what "cancel culture" is isn't going to magically stop things like the whole NYT incident from happening again. You admitted it yourself: what you truly want is revenge. Revenge against the people who willingly try to degrade, rot, corrupt our society for their own selfish ends. Revenge against the people who tried to ruin your life. And when justice is finally served, you will have earned the ultimate prize: peace of mind.
Only one side, one candidate, can offer this justice. Remember that.
> A1 ...
This reminds me of my old (non-serious) argument that rape is OK, because we wouldn't kill a 25-year-old, or a 24.75-year-old, all the way back to a -0.75-year-old, and to preventing sperm from coming into contact with eggs. We draw lines, they may be arbitrary, but part of what makes a culture is people agreeing on what the lines should be, or at least agreeing on meta-lines for figuring out lines. If we can't agree, are we really a culture, a community, anything that can co-exist without violence?
On a tangent, the common law process was pretty good at resolving to something reasonable after a few hundred years. Maybe AI can help us speed it up to a point where someone with ADHD, or our news cycle, doesn't mind waiting.
> I got angrier than I’ve ever gotten at anything in the media. I’m still so mad I’m not sure I’ll ever link an Atlantic article on ACX again, and I have trouble staying civil when I encounter people who work for the Atlantic.
Oof. That sounds familiar. :-(
> I think of myself as, at the very least, in a strong coalition with everyone who believes that people shouldn’t be fired from their job for speech that they made outside of their job.
Really, *everyone*? ;-) Surely there's some moral monster, perhaps with pro-pedophilic views, or even an *Atlantic* subscriber, whom you'd kick out of the coalition because they're so utterly repugnant that the mere non-act of "not killing them on sight" is enough to cause all right-minded people to shun both you and your nascent coalition? Some sort of woke fascist mega-Hitler who wants to genocide all other humans and clone himself a billion times to create a perfect society without inequity?
I have a mild intuition that the root of a lot of this is a failure to decouple, plus the increasing salience of ideological strife. Everything is political, everything is harm, nothing can be put aside, nothing can be allowed to pass without judgement.
Similar problems arise around what counts as reasonable firings. If a truck driver gets criticized for thinking the earth is flat and is fired for this, is that cancel culture and/or unethical? Seems like it. What if it were an astronomer? Then this is directly impacting their job performance. If we can't fire them for that, we'd going to get a lot of incompetent astronomers. What if they're someone who needs to exhibit good general-purpose judgement about what's true, like a judge, politician, or journalist? Is it ok to interpret someone having one egregiously false belief as evidence that they can't be trusted on other topics too? What if they work in HR for the astronomy department, and their belief that the Earth is flat means no one else there likes or trusts them, so they're unable to do their job?
Does it matter whether the person making the firing decision discovered this fact about their employee on their own with no public involvement, vs. them only making the decision because a mob pressured them into it? What if they only found out because of a mob, but they legitimately believe this is bad enough that they would have fired that person no matter how they found out, meaning that the mob was causally involved but didn't pressure the company into it?
A personal decision to unsubscribe (i.e., not pay for) a thing is never, in itself, cancellation, so A1-A6 definitely don't count. A7 merely adds the simple expression of an opinion, so not cancellation. A8-A9 add public shaming, which may or may not be bad behavior, but isn't cancellation when the action urged is merely personal unsubscription. A11-A12 are, literally, attempts to get the podcast deplatformed. That's precisely the meaning of cancellation.
I don't see the B examples as worth wading through, as they badly conflate the question "Is this bad behavior?" with the question "Is this cancellation?" These are not the same question! I can imagine examples of all four combinations of answers!
The very extremely dumb thing about the back and forth of right/left cancel culture and justifying it by "they did it to us" is THERE IS NO "THEY". The people you are cancelling are almost assuredly not the same people who did the cancelling in the past.
Take the home depot example. People justifying that with how the "left" cancelled people in the past are stupid, because unless you can find a direct example of that same person supporting or doing the same thing to someone else, the overwhelming odds are that they DONT support "cancelling" people.
When you start talking about "the other side" or "left" or "right" or "they" you've already lost the plot. These are just vague labels applied to millions of people with the same brush. Matt Yglesias has a great article about how the parties (DNC/RND) are "empty" and that there is no "Democrats" to call up on the phone and get a unified answer. There is a general sense of direction, but that is driven by a collection of unique opinions that blend together in a way that vaguely groups together in a cluster that is somewhat distinct from the same cluster on the "republican" side. The "left" or "right" is that issue multiplied by 1000x.
"Oh you voted democrat once and share some of their opinions? Okay then you're guilty of the worst infractions of the most radical people that ALSO voted for the same democrat" is how people act and it's ridiculous. People need to step back and recognize that these vague labels for groups are made up of individual people, and often don't have strong ties or might not even associate themselves with that group.
/Rant Over
The Home Depot thing was definitely wrong. Complaining on the social media site that 'hey, wishing for an assassination attempt to succeed is violating the terms of use here" is one thing. Looking the person up, going to their place of employment, hassling them over their online views which have nothing to do with their job, and trying to get them fired is not acceptable.
If she was at work wearing an "I wish the shooter hadn't missed" T-shirt and was engaging customers and colleagues in "isn't it a shame Trump survived?", sure, complain about that. But when she's doing her job and expressing her private opinions outside of work, don't be that kind of dickhead to go and hunt her down and harass her.
Cancel Culture is female shunning writ-large. The proof is that men don't do it to other men.
Shunning can work for a time, before the shunned person realizes that living well is the best revenge. And that living well attracts the people you'd want to be around anyway.
When enough people go through that process, the screamers will be relegated to their back-bench position as a vocal and ignored minority.
Easy.
A1, A2: These are obviously ok.
A3, A4: I guess unsubscribing or even advocating for other people to unsubscribe is OK? They are actively promoting a view you consider strongly unethical and this is a majority of their activity. Your action is just a direct stopping of supporting them in this effort. It's not like you are refusing to sell them a bread or something.
A5, A6: You are bigot. Seriously, "platforming an abhorrent viewpoint I disagree with" is a good thing and we need a more of it.
A7, A8: As long as these are followups to A3, A4, I consider them ok. In the case of A5, A6, you are still a bigot.
A9: You are just evil person. Crime of association or wrong-think is simply abhorrent. No matter how abhorrent the wrong ideas are.
A10: Depends. If Spotify aims to be an un-opinionated neutral platform, then this is clearly wrong. If Spotify is a small niche platform carefully selecting views they promote and this is contrary to them, then this is completely ok.
A11: You are just an evil bigot, see A9.
A12: Doesn't change much in principle.
Surprised no one has mentioned Popehat / Ken White yet. A few years ago, he approached the question of how to define cancel culture. As he said in a follow-up post (https://popehat.substack.com/p/hamline-university-and-cancel-culture):
> My thesis was this: (1) any productive discussion of cancel culture needs a workable definition of it, (2) any principled discussion of cancel culture must consider the free speech interests of everyone involved, not just the “first speaker,” and (3) any useful discussion of cancel culture needs specific action items — articulable things to do or not to do in order to advance “free speech culture.”
In the earlier piece (https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-shame-and), his definition was this:
> “cancel culture” is when speech is met with a response that, in my opinion, is very disproportionate. Perhaps that sounds cynical, and I could certainly give you a Justice-Breyer-seven-factor balancing test, but that’s what this discussion boils down to: just as we constantly debate norms of what speech is socially acceptable, we debate norms about what responses to speech are socially acceptable.
and
> I believe that “cancel culture” exists — that is, I believe that some responses to speech are disproportionate and outside norms of decency, and I think the culture sometimes encourages such responses.
It's a subjective definition, sure, but he explores facets of cancel culture that I'd not heard anyone mention before. In particular, he brings up the "first speaker problem," which is
> a focus on the freedom and feelings of whoever started talking to the exclusion of the freedom and feelings of whoever is responding. … The First Speaker Problem is a categorical error. It treats its focus — the First Speaker — as being in a different category than people responding, and ignores the fact that the First Speaker is almost certainly responding to someone else’s speech. It assumes, without evidence, that the First Speaker’s speech somehow promotes open discourse and isn’t itself “disproportionate” — in other words it utterly fails to aim the norms-based analysis at the First Speaker’s speech.
Not saying any of this settles the question, but offers an orthogonal approach.
Is it cancel culture?
A1: No
A2: No
A3: No
A4: No
A5: No
A6: No
A7: No
A8: No
A9: We're finally approaching something that might be an edge case, but no
Warthog: No
A11: Yes
A12: Yes
B1: If you do, it's not cancel culture
B2: If you do, it's not cancel culture
B3: If you do, it's not cancel culture
B4: If you do, it's not cancel culture
B5: If you do, it's not cancel culture
C1: If you do, it's not cancel culture
C2: (There's an entire Screwtape monologue about how Hell is glorious noise) None of that is cancel culture.
C2A: Still not cancel culture
Cancel culture is actually really simple, and has two forms:
1) Boyo works at [FACTORY]. Boyo posts [CONTROVERSIAL THING] on X. Screecher sees boyo's post, and wants to punish him, so Screecher reposts Boyo's comment with the comment "Please let [FACTORY] know that you think boyo is terrible and should be fired." [FACTORY] is then inundated with a co-ordinated harassment campaign and fires boyo not because he deserves it, but to satisfy the mob.
2) [BRAND] advertises everywhere, to reach every audience, including on [WEBCAST]. Smaller, competing [PROGRAM] wants to harm [WEBCAST] for ideological reasons, so [PROGRAM] keeps mentioning that [BRAND] advertises on [WEBCAST] and calling [BRAND] will hurt [WEBCAST]. [BRAND] is then inundated with a co-ordinated harassment campaign and cancels advertising on [WEBCAST] not because they deserve it, but to satisfy the mob.
Note that, with slight variation, #2 can be applied to public speakers, commentators, politicians, etc.
The whole idea of cancel culture is to leverage the target's associations and force them to cut ties with the target through co-ordinated harassment campaigns in indirect retaliation for their speech. Because it's a mob, there's no individual making repeated communications to fall afoul of harassment laws, but the net effect is that the targets feel that the cost of keeping the tie is greater than cutting it. The government uses Operation Chokepoint programs in the same way.
Progressives can't hurt Ben Shapiro directly - he's already built his life around the premise that they will try to hurt him and foreclosed all avenues. But Ben Shapiro buys groceries, eats at restaurants, and has advertisers. The latter are the easiest target, but making the association known is the entire point, but I remember instances where people got banned from things like restaurants expressly because of mob action. So, you attack the people who associate with Ben Shapiro until they shun him. Now you've inflicted harm indirectly, and canceled Shapiro.
Your problem, Scott, is that you failed to include malicious actors into your assessment. You assume everyone is reacting honestly, and the whole point of cancel culture is that they aren't. They're acting maliciously.
The fallacy you are engaging in here is that in order to be either reasonable, or effective, in opposing a disagreeable social or cultural phenomenon, you need to be able to define it in a formal and legalistic way such that any objective observer would and can recognize whether each and every instance is or is not an example of the phenomenon. That is simply not true, nor is it possible in any real world. "Law", at its best, tries to do this, but, inevitably, fails. Again, not because "law" is "bad", or even flawed, but because it is just not possible. Think of a law - any law. If one is honest with oneself, one can come up with a scenario in which applying the law is either ambiguous, or leads to a result the vast majority would think was "wrong", or both. So, amend the law to accommodate for that scenario. Then repeat. And repeat. And repeat. It never ends. Because it CAN never end. A "pretty good" definition of the disagreeable phenomenon, amounts to, in practice, a REALLY good definition of the phenomenon. It can be improved upon, and it likely will be, and will be again. But it will never be perfect, and failing to act because any iteration remains flawed amounts to classic "paralysis by analysis", and is not helpful. That's what your "I agree that this is a good first step, but I’m worried about more detailed edge cases" does, in practical effect. Lukianoff's definition is good enough to serve as a jumping off point for an opposition to Cancel Culture, and I would suspect anyone who wanted to stand on doing nothing, until the definition was somehow "perfected", of not really agreeing in the first place with the premise of Cancel Culture being worth opposing. That would be a defensible position (though not one I share), but it should be stated forthrightly, rather than hiding behind the quibble that the definition is not "good enough" - if it is acknowledged that the definition is at least "pretty good."
I could go on at some length on a second line of response, but this is already too long. So, for brevity sake, just this: Since we would not be doing "law" in simply stating opposition to "cancel culture" and discouraging it - since we would not be finding anyone guilty/not guilty in a binary - ambiguity or insufficiency of definition is not even, really, a flaw. It allows nuance in discussion, and I think you've actually illustrated THAT quite well here, even if it was not precisely what you meant to demonstrate.
Good post. I agree that Lukianoff's definition is good enough for now.
That being said, I also think Scott's mental exercises can be somewhat helpful in people knowing what their own personal lines are when it comes to cancel culture.
Agreed. That is at least a part of what I was trying to say in my last sentence!
It doesn't make sense to have a definition of cancel culture that leaves out that it was and still is a radically left-wing phenomenon. People were not getting cancelled because they said "I like pedophilia." They were getting fired because they expressed sentiments that, until two minutes ago, were widely shared beliefs! They were getting fired because they said things like "I believe there are only two genders" and "we shouldn't chemically castrate children." That meaningfully separates the phenomenon of cancel culture from other things which resemble punishing people for what they say.
People are getting arrested, in some countries, for pro Palestinian chants.
Not for "stop the genocide" or even "free Palestine" chants. Just for those pro Palestinian chants that suggest ethnic cleansing or terrorism against civilians. I personally think that the line should be somewhere around "inciting to violence on the land that does the arresting, or against its civilians" or at least at more explicit incitement, but let's also not pretend "globalizing the intifada" is an innocent pro Palestinian chant
"I’m still so mad I’m not sure I’ll ever link an Atlantic article on ACX again, and I have trouble staying civil when I encounter people who work for the Atlantic. This isn’t out of some well-thought-out political strategy, just that it would personally warm my heart if the Atlantic failed as a business and everyone associated with it died of starvation. Probably this is dysfunctional and I should get over it eventually."
I'm more interested in this emotional response than I am in the cancel culture question.
Are there other people out there who have this reaction to newspapers publishing stupid articles, people leaving dodgy comments on internet forums, etc? Like, you read one thing that seems so offensively stupid to you as to be dangerous and everyone associated with it becomes permanently poisoned in your mind, to the degree that you vaguely want the people who published the journal appeared in to die, even years later? This is radically alien to my experience of the world, but a lot of things would make more sense if it were a common response.
In some ways, this is more mild than what Scott says. But in other ways, it's more far-reaching.
During the Bush and Obama administrations, I used to watch a lot of political shows on the cable networks. I watched a good bit of CNN. I also would read a decent number of newspaper articles about politics. I found it good and informative.
But after Trump fully entered the political area in 2015... much of this became very tedious and tiresome to watch for me. What I once found decently diverse in viewpoints and opinions quickly hardened into firm anti-Trump and pro-Trump camps. Political commentary became very predictable and very polarized, at least from my perspective. So I turned away from it as much as possible.
Not too long after I started reading various people on Substack. This blog, Matthew Yglesias, Jesse Singal, Freddie DeBoer, a few others. It was very refreshing to once again encounter truly diverse political commentary.
If someone I'm friends with wants my take on a NY Times article or a recent clip from a political TV show, I'll try to accommodate them, but I genuinely find it hard to take after enjoying what Substack has to offer.
To a significant degree, I tend to dislike modern non-independent journalists, I have to admit. I think Freddie DeBoer's criticisms of the modern journalism industry are very accurate, and I do resent many modern journalists just being glorified mouthpieces for one of the two major political parties. Sure, journalists always had party preferences but they seemed less overwhelming before; it seemed like they previously where more willing to diverge from their preferred party on an issue or two. And the fact that some modern journalists are simultaneously political activists is borderline abhorrent to me, undermining the very credibility of journalism itself imo. Being perfectly objective is impossible of course, but how can someone possible cover a contentious issue with even a smidgen of even-handedness if they're a political activists for one of the groups mentioned in an article? It would be like trusting a Jeff Bezos-wrote article on Amazon, or an Elon Musk-wrote article on SpaceX.
By "truly diverse political commentary" do you mean two guys with very similar views on everything (Yglesias and Singal, who for the record are also overwhelmingly the kind of politics takes-writer who I read and sympathize with*), and another writer who theoretically has quite radically different views, but mostly just pushes the same sort of upper-middle class, vaguely bohemian pro-science, secular, skeptical anti-mindless attacks on white men, anti-woke, anti-conservative viewpoint, in the writing by them that their fans actually like?
*I'm much woker than Singal on trans issues, but I don't think he deserves anything like the level of grief he has gotten from trans activists. The main issue I have with him on this isn't his *own* views, but that he combines hypersensitivity to woke bad takes on this issues, with a lack of similar repulsion towards gender critical people who, unlike him, clearly are (in my opinon!) bigoted against trans people.
> Are there other people out there who have this reaction to newspapers publishing stupid articles
Yep. I didn't always, but then shit happened and I got PTSD, and now I can't stand certain things.
I’ll go out on a limb here and say that it was probably hyperbole for comic effect, particularly given the minutiae of the complaint.
No doubt he’s annoyed a bit.
Not quite to the same extent, but one left-leaning columnist that I had long respected for presenting alternate views well, lost me when he penned a column denouncing the concept of civility on the grounds that the outgroup was unworthy of civility and would never reform if they weren't regularly subject to punitive uncivil behavior. Now, whenever I see his byline, I just quietly say "Fuck off, [redacted]", and move on. I haven't unsubscribed to his publication yet, but it wouldn't take much I think.
And then there's Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I've discussed before.
The really annoying ones are two others who were just slightly less offensive and much more usefully informative when not being offensive, so that I still find it worthwhile to hold my nose and read them.
I'm no expert on cancel culture but most examples in this post deal with public speaking and (broadly defined) press, which I think is not the right "magisterium" to consider. A podcast or the Atlantic have explicitly decided to make their existence dependent on how people respond to the facts and opinions they publish. It's perfectly normal that if the Atlantic begins publishing something that most people don't like, those people will stop paying the Atlantic and it may even go out of business. Same with a podcast, even if it's not a full-time job for the hosts. Moreover, it's normal for people to exchange opinions on which products to buy, and the Atlantic is just another product; to me, there's little difference between posting "cancel your subscriptions to this podcast because they invited a pedophile" and posting "stop going to this pizza place because they just gave me a bad case of salmonella". But it's a fact of their profession, not an example of cancel culture.
I fully agree with the grad student example -- publishing research papers is not the same kind of public speaking and should not obey the same laws. But I think an even more central example would be somebody with a job totally unrelated to both the press and the subject matter (a math professor, a plumber, a startup CTO) publishing controversial opinions in his personal social media and then facing the unexpected consequences from his employer.
FWIW, I considered this when I sent my own message to nytimes in your defense. I asked myself, am I doing cancel culture?
I threatened boycott, but my proposed remedy was not that they fire the author, it was that they use your alias (or dont run the paper). In this way I was attacking content, but not the person behind it, and I think thats an important distinction when considering edge cases and part of the language in the definition above.
I do understand that attacking enough content or exclusively attacking the content created by one person might add up to the same, but was comfortable in the context I sent my message that I was not doing that.
While I think the problem is intractably messy and leads into political conflict that can't be settled by argument, I must throw in that, whatever the solution, you Americans must do your unmost to protect freedom of speech and restore it's prestige.
In my home Australia there was once a cultural unity where there were few groups the government felt the need to censor. We refused to ban our communist party back in the day. Now with the disappearance of cohesion it's a pure matter of elite consensus in the captial cities, a whole University manufactured class, and there's been virtually no resistance. Any public discourse on freedom of speech is isolated and a larp. We simply don't have legal freedom of speech. Major public officials recently advised parents to report problematic children to our FBI.
So much to say I advise from across the Pacific that you try to retain fundamental freedom of speech. The alternative exists and it's probably going to destroy Australia.
Two things missing from Lukianoff's definition, and I think from your attempt to refine it, is that "cancellation" in the current sense is done by third parties, and that it is done collectively.
If Bob is part of the target audience, fandom, or customer base of whatever Alice is peddling, and Alice offends Bob in some way, Bob deciding not to be a part of this any more is nothing special, that's just the normal sort of voluntary social or economic interaction that free societies have been doing since forever. It's when Eve, who was never going to listen to anything Alice said in the first place, is offended when she notices that Alice is finding an appreciative audience in like-minded Charlie and so decides to have Alice fired/deplatformed/swatted/whatever so Charlie can't listen to her any more, that we get into the realm of cancellation.
There's potentially still an edge case if Bob, who was once an Alice fan but has been sufficiently offended to no longer be a part of her fanbase, tries to bring others into the Campaign to Shut Up Alice. Certainly we don't mean to impose a vow of silence on anyone in that situation. Bob is going to mention it to his friends when they invite him to the next Alice concert, and that's fine. But at some point, it stops being fine.
There are many ways for that to go badly, not all of which would qualify as "cancellation" in the sense we mean. The ones that do cross over into cancellation territory, are the ones that meet the second condition - collective action. It becomes "cancellation" only when many people take part, and especially when their reason for taking part is not their personal distaste for Alice (who they'd maybe never heard of before) but because they can see that in this fifteen-minute infamy window, that's what all the cool people are doing and what they might lose status for not doing.
By this standard, nothing one person does alone can count as "cancellation", which I think is mostly appropriate. But it counts as "attempted cancellation" if they're trying to mobilize a mass movement by e.g. telling all their friends they need to retweet "#MakeAliceShutUp" or be themselves deemed unrighteous. If that works, then it's cancellation by the mob.
So, A1-A8 are not cancellation, A9 and A10 are maybe edge cases of attempted cancellation, and A11 is straight-up cancellation once that movement gets started.
B1 and B2 probably attempted cancellation by the "journalists who have started to take notice", not by the researcher who is not himself a third party nor trying to bring third parties into the mix.
B3 becomes cancellation when the article is written and has the expected effect, but whether it's attempted cancellation by the researcher depends on his motive for writing the article.
B4 and B5, same as 1-3.
+1
I feel like a lot of the practical impact of social media mobbing is about convincing third-parties (your employer, your school, etc.) that there is a huge group of people super mad about some terrible thing you said, and thus that it is urgent that they respond right now or they're just as bad as whatever they accuse you of doing. Inducing a panic reaction is how they get their effect.
And the reality is that this very seldom makes sense. It seems like most social media mobs are like 99% bored people who like being assholes online who will forget the whole thing in a week if nobody panics or responds much. Even when there are a lot of people actually mad at you, that means like a few thousand people spread across the globe, most of whom would not be mad enough at you to, say, write a paper letter of complaint, buy a stamp, and mail it. In almost all cases, if your employer/school/whatever just ignores this, it will blow over. If some too-online people say they're going to organize a boycott, it will probably not be visible to you in your sales numbers.
If the normal response to outraged posts on social media, emails, calls, etc from randos demanding they fire such-and-so for whatever they said on Twitter was "Thank you for your comments, we will look into this matter, though of course any personnel decisions we make will be confidential and taken only after careful deliberation," followed by basically ignoring the randos yelling at them, cancel culture would not be much of a problem.
The most obvious problem with the definition is that "campaigns to get people punished for speech" includes approximately all political attack ads ever.
How so?
And a consistent social norm against political attack ads would be a bad thing... why, exactly?
People choosing to vote for the other candidate in the election that you are a candidate in, falls far short of "punished". There is no individual right to election to political office.
There's no "right" to a job or to be a popular TV star or whatever either. And yet we get mad when people amplify your statements in an attempt to influence that, just like every political attack ad either.
You might not *like* that the definition is overly broad, but that doesn't change the fact that it *is* overly broad.
There's no "right" to a job or to be a popular TV star or whatever either. And yet we get mad when people amplify your statements in an attempt to influence that, just like every political attack ad either.
You might not *like* that the definition is overly broad, but that doesn't change the fact that it *is* overly broad.
There's no "right" to a job or to be a popular TV star or whatever either. And yet we get mad when people amplify your statements in an attempt to influence that, just like every political attack ad either.
You might not *like* that the definition is overly broad, but that doesn't change the fact that it *is* overly broad.
Fair. One difference is though that by running for public office you are inherently deciding to join the fray of public issues/topics/policy choices. The degree of that differs with the office of course, or should anyway -- but it's never zero and for some offices it fully comes with the gig.
So that seems fundamentally different than other jobs, and certainly for me influences my reaction to this sort of dust-up.
I don't think inserting the rights framing is helpful. The difference is that the rules of the game are codified and institutionalized as electoral politics, whereas cancel culture is much fuzzier and outcomes vary greatly. In fact, cancel culture is appealing to cancellers in part because it allows them to skirt around rights.
The difference is that the "cancelling" is institutionalized as democratic politics. The whole point of democracy is to let the mob cancel politicians, ie make them lose their jobs. Note the 'culture' part of 'cancel culture'. Culture explicitly refers to the vague "common sense" norms that everyone just knows. Institutionalized canceling is not culture. Penalties for law breaking are similarly not cancel culture, but different from losing an election in that the sanctions are harsher.
It is now fully bipartisan, sadly. Just as for generations mainstream conservatism practiced what we now call cancellation, and then the Left more recently took it up with energy and enthusiasm, now it is unironically mainstream on both ends of our political/cultural spectrum.
The Left has in recent years been better at it, though that "advantage" is now slipping. Now MAGA folks are equally-enthusiastic, if clumsy, cancellers. That shift at the grass-roots level (I have MAGA relatives) has been striking over the past say five years.
I think discussions on cancel culture focus too much on the cancel part and too little on the culture part - to be expected, since the resulting social sanction is more the spectacle. The culture during the post-WW2 cancelling was heavily influenced by the Cold War (against a left wing ideology), which gave conservatives the ability to overcome the left's dominance in culture (though academia was much less left-skewed than now). As the Cold War ended and communism ceased being the Great Satan, the left gained an advantage in cancelling through its predominance in culture. This coincided with the rise of the internet and social media, which made cancelling much easier. The right clued into this eventually. I don't think there's a "our side is more righteous" dimension of self-restraint; it's more about which side is capable of wielding the weapon at any given time.
On a related note, cancelling those breaching cultural norms has always been around but there are more objections to it now because the bar for being able to invoke it has been lowered greatly owing to far greater ease of mass communication. I'd suspect that the greater difficulty of cancelling in the past made it less outrageous. A contravention of norms would generally have to be more egregious to rally enough people against you. With social media, those amenable to cancelling only need a xitter account to incite the mob.
Elected politicians are exactly the subset of people whose expressed political beliefs and political actions are 100% relevant for their job, and a good basis for judging how they will perform in office. If the mechanic who works on my car is a socialist, who cares? If one of my state's senators is a socialist, that matters for their job.
You're missing the point. I'm not saying that cancelling politicians is bad, I'm saying it's a bad definition because it includes behavior that is generally accepted.
It feels like all the edge cases are about what type of mob rule culture we want to promote. The problem, in my opinion, is companies letting mobs decide whether or not they fire their employees. We have a simple solution for this when it comes to the law: the court system. The public can do all the letter writing campaigns they want about somebody accused of murder, but if their guilt isn’t proven beyond a reasonable doubt, that doesn’t matter.
I argued as early as 2021, on storied journalistic platforms like Facebook, that a norm of due process in company HR departments before firing or suspending people would stop cancel culture in its tracks, and it wouldn’t even have to be particularly good. You could still fire somebody for besmirching the company’s reputation. You’d just deliberate and consider whether the offense was Really bad for the company’s reputation. In the case of the direct pediphile stuff, maybe. For the guy at the college, with the pediphile papers, maybe. But probably not the guy with the “bossy” research.
In the real world what killed cancel culture were a few companies calling “twitter” mobs’ bluff.
I wouldn’t push too hard on creating norms against concerned citizens banding together, as that seems like protected speech. (I’d work on those algorithms feeding the outrage machine first.)
Everything up to A10 is onside to me. You as an individual are entitled to exercise your own discretion as you see fit. A11 crosses the line because you are now hoping to provoke a group response that is injurious to the target beyond anything you could achieve yourself.
B1: it’s your hire, and your call to re-hire/extend. B2 makes no difference on that principle. B3 you’re doing your job. B4 and B5 are again identical on principle…you are choosing to rehire, or not, according to your own moral compass. You are entitled to that.
C1: “she” is wrong. Signing a petition is not the same as cancelling. You’re asking for something that isn’t targeting someone else.
C2: some things set people off. Slow drivers in the fast lane is one such thing for me. You’re allowed. Save your money. Atlantic ain’t what it used to be anyway.
I vote for P3. The target is the publication. It exists to please subscribers. Subscribers can and should be able to exert influence…although this is what also creates silos….and why I try to read widely.
I don’t agree with Lukianoff invoking first amendment. As you said, that is meant to protect individual freedom of speech against government prohibition thereof. It does not extend to anything beyond government. However, the “spirit” of the first amendment (dare I say as I understand it within the auspices of classical liberalism) is to allow the competition of ideas and speech even when one might disagree with it….and I believe this is the principle that “cancel culture” contravenes. A university is allowed to invite or disinvite any speaker it chooses….nothing offside of 1a….but when it does so at the behest of a mob that lacks the intellectual capacity to debate a noxious idea and so chooses instead to merely prohibit it….that to me is the ugliness that cancel culture represents.
"A2: I subscribe to a podcast about 12th-century Siberian stamp collecting. Then it switches to promoting pedophilia full-time, so I cancel my subscription."
12th century Siberia had stamps lol?
And what do you mean "promoting"? Would advocating in favor of legalizing child sex dolls be considered promoting? What about advocating in favor of legalized cartoon/animated child porn?
> 12th century Siberia had stamps lol?
Guess that's why they ran short of on-topic content.
A lot of people in the comments seem to be talking about "proportionate" vs. "disproportionate" punishments. I think part of the challenge here is that the dynamics of the internet and social media can turn proportionate responses into disproportionate ones.
Like, imagine someone says something that you take offense to in person. You'd be somewhat justified in saying "Fuck that, your opinion is bad and you should feel bad," even in front of other people. That's easy enough to shrug off and/or learn from.
But now take that to the internet, with tens of thousands of people saying similar things. Suddenly that weighs a lot heavier on the person receiving it, especially if other, formerly uninvolved people can see the angry crowd forming.
Obviously this doesn't cover all cases—there definitely are people that will go out of their way to harass people disproportionately, call their employers, etc.—but I think it plays a part in the dynamic.
"this felt like denying my right to exist in public"
Slightly off-topic, I've been getting annoyed at the use of "denying my/our right to exist" to describe any sort of inconvenience or being told "no". Even though I agree with your position here, I'm disappointed by your use of hyperbole that I've mainly seen from the far left. Indeed that phrase is often used to trigger a cancel mob against somebody the right to exist-er doesn't agree with. Yes, it's annoying to have people insist on being noisy, and tying any objection to racism is a stupid cheap shot, but nobody is denying your right to exist unless they are literally trying to kill you.
I agree, I didn't even get the impression that Scott's hyperbole was tongue-in-cheek.
There's two meanings here? If I say "Scott is not allowed to go outside", that's denying his right to leave his house. But if I advocate for people to camp outside Scott's house with agonizer rayguns and shoot him if he leaves, that's also "denying his right to leave his house".
Even though I didn't take action myself, even though I didn't say he couldn't (and may in fact have have said the opposite, something like "Come on, Scott, I want you to leave your house"), I'm still affecting him. And that's not even a complete parallel, which would be something like saying "Scott is an evil Nazi for wanting to leave his house, and everyone should treat him like an evil Nazi if he does", while standing right next to the guy advocating for "punching Nazis".
I agree with you and I agree with Scott, my issue is with the phraseology.
Well, this post was pretty wild to read, for a perhaps unusual reason: I am a pedophile. I would never abuse a child, but I am sexually attracted to them. I can't change that fact about myself, and I'm not ashamed of the attraction since I behave morally. Moreover, I literally publish articles about pedophilia (anonymously), including a blog:
https://livingwithpedophilia.wordpress.com/
In fact, I've been censored (on Quora) for my writing.
I would go so far as to say that the taboo on even talking about pedophilia does great harm to society. It prevents research on better therapeutic methods to support non-offending pedophiles. It makes it extremely difficult to seek out support (from friends, from therapists, from anyone), which pushes pedophiles into social isolation - exactly where we do not want them. The taboo makes it impossible to discuss rationally what policies around pedophilia should be. For example, should I be allowed to look at purely fictional artwork that depicts children in sexual situations? Perhaps such victimless artwork makes pedophiles more likely to offend; perhaps it makes them less likely to offend. We don't know, because no one can fund the research to find out.
More open discussion might also, if you will encourage a slight dig, encourage people to distinguish between "pedophiles" (those with the attraction) and "child sexual abusers" (those who molest children).
In any case, if anyone believes that we should offer people who wake up at the age of 13 finding themselves attracted to younger children support as opposed to hatred, then that is a strong argument for free speech. Right now, if a kid in that situation goes to Google, what will they find? Websites talking about how bad they are, and perhaps a blog entry using them as the canonical example of unsupportable views. Nothing to guide them forward, or suggest a way to productively be a part of society.
If we had free speech that let them find something better, they would not be pushed to fringe spaces that encourage the worst behaviors, and we'd have a better approach for people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves attracted to children.
What if pedophilia is culturally transmitted? Then even the existence of people writing blogs about “my struggles with pedophilia” might help to create more pedophiles, kind of like the old meme about toaster fucking on the internet.
Also, thank you for your courageous comment.
That's a fair question, although I don't know of any evidence for cultural transmission. (To me, this is another argument for the importance of real research.)
Thank you for the kind comment at the end! I appreciate it, even though I think my courage is minimal since I post anonymously. (Although I am out to a few friends.)
Okay, you say you are a moral paedophile. You don't feel ashamed about this, because you can't help it (born this way) and you don't act on your impulses (not a child abuser).
That being the case, here's a thought experiment in the same vein as the one about "if you could be changed to the opposite gender" one on here recently.
Supposing there were a way your sexual attraction to children could be removed, or changed to a sexual attraction to adults. Nothing else about you changes, you're the same body, same brain, same mind, same views and tastes on everything else, except you no longer find children sexually arousing.
Would you take that way? Would you make that change?
If not, why not? Once you answer that, then we can get on to your sly little "and besides, I'm one of the *good* ones" attempt to slide under the radar.
Here's a few more questions I'll ask.
(1) Regarding "you wake up at 13 and find you are attracted to younger children", how much younger are you willing to go? Ten? Six? One year old?
(2) Regarding "is it okay to look at art of imaginary child characters being fucked by imaginary adults", how young do you want to go? Ten years old? Six? One year old? After all, these are only imaginary characters, not real children.
(3) If society made it legal for adults to fuck six year olds, would you take the opportunity now that you can remain one of the "good ones" and not a child abuser, by having legal sex with the partner of your choice, just like everyone else? Or would you continue to not fuck children because you feel that, whatever *your* desires and attractions, it is not to the benefit of the child to be in such a relationship?
I'm asking all these because of how you phrased your appeal to the nation - oh, how can you be so cruel and condemnatory and maintain a taboo against people who never chose to feel this way, who are just 13 and like that 11 year old younger girl or boy? Who never did nothing? Who just want to look at porn of their preferred flavour like everyone else has the right to do?
And I'm also going to finish up with one question: now that you're not 13 anymore, how do you think we should deal with those who are not 13 and who still like 11 year olds in that way?
Please enlighten us knuckle draggers who still engage in taboos that persecute and punish innocent non-choosers of their sexuality who woke up at 13 and found themselves attracted to younger children:
https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/man-37-jailed-for-abuse-of-young-child-when-he-was-a-teenager-1490252.html
"A now 37-year-old Tipperary man, who was 13 when he began sexually abusing the then four-year-old victim, was jailed for five years for the offences on Friday.
The accused man, who cannot be identified to protect the identity of the injured party, pleaded guilty to oral rape and sexual assault of the young man by inserting his fingers into his anus at the victim’s home on dates between 1999 and 2002. He has no relevant previous convictions.
The boy was between four and eight when he was abused by the accused in the bathroom of the young boy’s family home. The accused was aged between 13 and 17 during his offending.
In his victim impact statement, the now 28-year-old man told the court that the accused had taken his childhood and groomed him for his own sexual gratification. He outlined the adverse effects the abuse has had and continues to have on his personal life, education, and relationships."
I'm confused as to why you posted this screed?
How to phrase it in language you would understand? Ah, yes, your username is veyr helpful here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOkcvGPHsgk
Well, I apologize for striking a nerve by distinguishing actions and thoughts. I see that really got to you. I'm afraid my own tone is going to be a little caustic in reply, and I apologize because I don't really know if your anger is coming from somewhere else.
That said, I'm going to answer your questions seriously. There's real value in them despite the tone, and I suspect others will be genuinely interested.
> Supposing there were a way your sexual attraction to children could be removed, or changed to a sexual attraction to adults. Nothing else about you changes, you're the same body, same brain, same mind, same views and tastes on everything else, except you no longer find children sexually arousing.
> Would you take that way? Would you make that change?
This question is asked all the time on discussion boards with pedophiles. The answer for me is unambiguously yes: I would love to be attracted to adults instead of children. It would make my life infinitely easier, allow me to experience pleasurable sex, and take away one of the major threats to my life. If I can keep who I am otherwise, I would absolutely swap this attraction.
> (1) Regarding "you wake up at 13 and find you are attracted to younger children", how much younger are you willing to go? Ten? Six? One year old?
Are you asking about what ages I am attracted to? That's been fairly consistent, and I'm going to state it straight out, although I'm sure it will be unpleasant for people to read. I am attracted to boys, largely 8-12 years old (although with flexibility on either end). Something around puberty massively decreases my sexual attraction, and I don't understand exactly why.
> (2) Regarding "is it okay to look at art of imaginary child characters being fucked by imaginary adults", how young do you want to go? Ten years old? Six? One year old? After all, these are only imaginary characters, not real children.
I don't see a moral problem with artwork. I will look at what I find sexually arousing, which is those in the range I shared above. I don't have a problem with others looking at younger ages; it feels irrelevant to me.
> (3) If society made it legal for adults to fuck six year olds, would you take the opportunity now that you can remain one of the "good ones" and not a child abuser, by having legal sex with the partner of your choice, just like everyone else? Or would you continue to not fuck children because you feel that, whatever *your* desires and attractions, it is not to the benefit of the child to be in such a relationship?
This is an extremely complex hypothetical. Why did society change the legal rule? Was there actual research and thoughtfulness, or did it just happen due to some legal loophole? If the latter, I don't think anything would change: the reason I don't offend now is morality, not worries about legal implications. If the former, I'd want to better understand the reasoning for the change and make my own decision about what is in the best interests of the child. Based on my priors right now, I would strongly expect that I would still not have sex with children because it would harm them.
> I'm asking all these because of how you phrased your appeal to the nation - oh, how can you be so cruel and condemnatory and maintain a taboo against people who never chose to feel this way, who are just 13 and like that 11 year old younger girl or boy? Who never did nothing? Who just want to look at porn of their preferred flavour like everyone else has the right to do?
Here is where I want to call you out: it feels like you're asking this because you disagree with me and don't see the value to my points, and because you insist on conflating attraction and abuse. In fact, it's a rather stunning example that feels straight out of Scott's post.
What you represented wasn't my argument at all. I was discussing the value of free speech, and I gave as a reason how there should be therapy offered to people who are attracted to children and that they should feel less isolated and hated. (Not just for their own sake as human beings, but also because creating a group of people who must isolate and "circle the wagons" is a great way to encourage child sexual abuse. In the history of the world, kicking groups of people out of society has not been a great way to develop pro-social behavior.) I also claimed that more research on this topic would be beneficial.
> And I'm also going to finish up with one question: now that you're not 13 anymore, how do you think we should deal with those who are not 13 and who still like 11 year olds in that way?
Well, you actually "finished up" by ignoring my point that abusing and sexual desire are not the same. But putting that aside.
Unfortunately, there has not been much research on how to support 13-year-olds, as I've mentioned repeatedly, so I don't claim to have the answer. What I do think is:
- We should destigmatize so that they can actually talk to their parents about what's going on.
- They should have access to therapy that is supportive of their needs.
- They should be encouraged to keep exploring and work on developing older-age attractions, because for many people that age it really does seem to be transitory, and early sexual experiences may help drive later attractions. (Again, we don't know. This was not the case for me: I had no sexual experiences or thoughts, really, before puberty; it came out of nowhere. However, I have heard this for other people.)
With that, I'm afraid that my own life won't allow logging on here for a couple of weeks at least. Between friends visiting, work commitments, and some travel, I'll have to reply to any other comments when I can get the time and space to engage again. Just in case you decide to pre-emptively claim anything about my silence, since apparently not coming on here within ten hours to reply warrants a "Leonard never answered my question as to that." Although I still feel like you are taking my points in bad faith, I'm happy to reply when I return.
Thank you for answering the questions. I am pleased that you say you would like, if it were possible, to change your attractions.
I am also pleased about your honesty in who and what age you are attracted to.
I mainly agree with you that if this is discovered early on, there should be support and attempts to help overcome it. I fear, though, that all the displeasure about "conversion therapy" will hamper any such efforts to steer young people away from such attraction, as I doubt many therapists will want to run the risk of being smeared by "you're anti-gay! you're anti-trans!" if someone 'outs' them as "they're engaging in conversion therapy!"
I may indeed have come across as hostile, but that's because "the burned hand dreads the fire". Too many "I just want to ask for understanding" posts of a nature similar to yours *do* end up being "and in reality, what I want is it to be both legal and accepted that I can fuck 6 year olds".
Thank you, I do appreciate that! It's possible that we go around in different circles: I encounter many fewer people who actually think they should be allowed to fuck kids.
When I have talked to teenagers wrestling with this, my response has been: "go look at some adult porn, think about people your own age or older whom you find attractive." I've generally tried to encourage them to explore, not convert. I did see a psychologist once who tried to get me to masturbate to adult porn (I was by then an adult) and otherwise engage in something like conversion therapy, and I found it both unpleasant and unlikely to succeed. (Moreover, he recommended visualizing myself getting arrested with my life ruined whenever I thought about my fantasies, which seemed like it might lead to genuine long-term harm.) That's different from teenage exploring, though, and I've talked to teens who definitely realized later that they had more attraction to adults than they realized.
I'd be surprised if there are real fears around conversion therapy with pedophilia, but I'm certainly not an expert.
Thanks again!
The other stupid thing about stigmatizing discussions about pedophilia is the conflating of every kinds of attraction to those under the legal age of consent. As if being sexually attracted to a 17 year old (ephebophilia) is some sort of deviancy or moral or biological failing.
I agree with the distinction, but unhappily it's often used in the same context as "trans people claiming intersex people as examples of biological sex not being simple binary", I see it most often in "Well I'm forty and I think hot 17 year olds are sexy, but why am I lumped in with those perverts who want to diddle 12 year olds?"
Because, dear 40 For Hot Chicks, the guys who want to diddle 12 year olds and 6 year olds use "it's a simple biological fact, men are attracted to young nubile teenage women, yet we treat being attracted to 16 and 17 year olds as equivalent to those being attracted to 12 and 14 year olds" as the fig leaf to cover "and this is why you should understand my orientation".
In which case, *not* conflating the two makes it impossible to use it as a fig leaf.
I'm not sure if you're aggressively agreeing with me or am I missing you point.
My point is that such an exception should be made (a 17 year old is not a 12 year old) but that the unhappy real world experience is that those who want it to be legal for 40 year old men to fuck 12 year old boys or girls will not come out of the blocks stating that, they'll try and soften up opinion with "why are ephebophiles conflated with paedophiles?" first.
And the next step then is "okay, if 17 is not too young, what about 16? After all, [this list of countries] has the age of consent set at 16. What about 15? [Quotes Romeo and Juliet laws]. We all agree that a 17 year old boy should not be branded for life as a dangerous sex offender merely because his girlfriend is 15, yes?"
And then step by step they try to get acceptance of "yes, that's a reasonable point" until they get you to "okay, why shouldn't 12 year olds - who are undergoing puberty after all - be considered capable of deciding if they wish to engage in loving relationships with adults? After all, in ancient Rome, that was the age girls got married!"
(Does anyone else remember our friend with the bee in his bonnet about child slavery, i.e. 15 year olds should be considered adults and given adult rights? He liked to quote the bit about age of Roman marriage for girls, and he had an entire side-fantasy build up around teenage forced sex, pregnancy, etc. when you linked to his personal site).
So yeah, I tend to quash with hobnailed boots any initial "DAE ephebophiles?" attempts, because my experience has been that generally these are not in good faith but are stalking horses.
This is a pretty terrible slippery slope argument. Replace pedophilia here with say homosexuality and you've got a pretty good mirror of the usual moral panics around LGBT ideology. Of the "We should keep gender dysphoria taboo otherwise transgender proponents are going to advocate for preteens undergoing bottom surgery" kind.
Besides, someone advocating to lower the age of consent to 16 - where it is in most of the places around the world - is an eminently sensible position to take. It's not that hard to draw a bright line somewhere and avoid falling off the slippery slope.
Thanks for the offer, but I'm not interested in subscribing to the Paedophile Information Exchange mailing list.
Have fun with the campaign on "all we want is it to be legal to fuck six year olds, what is so outrageous about this simple request to be treated with basic humanity".
I don't know if you're the same Leonard who started this conversation, probably not, but here's the thing: he was talking about prejudice and doing away with the taboo so that access to treatment would be easier to get, without the stigma. A large part of that will rely on persuading ordinary people to change their minds and fixed views.
I'm one of those with fixed views and you, Len, couldn't do it. You couldn't even stick within the parameters of what I said about "these are the exact arguments that *don't* convince me". All you had to do was say "yes, some bad actors abuse these efforts", but no. You had to go "slippery slope fallacy! lowering age of consent good!"
Well, if you or someone uses the *exact* arguments I say are *not* convincing to me, why then should I believe you or anyone else about "I am the very model of a moral kiddie-diddler, I would never even if I got the chance".
There's plenty of people *would* if they got the chance. So keep on keeping on trying to make Tiberius' minnows legal.
It is unfortunate that the term we use for "sexually attracted to minors/children" is also the term we use for "people who sexually assault kids".
The basic attraction probably should be studied more. I mean, what hope is there of reducing pedophilia (i.e. the basic attraction) if it's not carefully studied?
That being said, I get why people are very leery of going down this road. People have seen how much our society has changed over the last 50 years when it comes to our attitudes towards many other sexual matters, and so I think many are understandably fearful that if we start talking about pedophilia in a coolly detached academic way then... who knows? "Consenting adults" IS holding out pretty well so far. But it sometimes feels like the last sexual taboo...
These worries would probably be greatly lessened if we had two different terms - one for the sexual attraction itself, and one for sexually abusing kids. I'd suggest that "pedophile" is a term simply beyond changing, so perhaps a new term should be created JUST for the sexual attraction itself.
Do paedophiles *want* the basic attraction to be reduced? Leonard never answered my question as to that, and I got whale scratching its head with puzzlement over my screed.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and go "no more than the fighters for gay rights wanted to reduce homosexual attraction".
Homosexuality was traditionally seen as something people did, the sin was in the doing not the being, the law opposed the act - “sodomy” in all its forms including amongst heterosexuals.
So it should be for pedophillia - we can only condemn the act, and perhaps depictions if the act.
Cancel culture seems to me about morality. It has two unstated premises:
1) that every opinion or belief or political position has an objective moral value
2) that everyone must agree on these moral values, and hence on which opinions are right or wrong.
Most people hold a collection of opinions, some I agree with and some I don't. For the most part, I don't feel the need to assign them a moral score as a function of their views - and so I hardly ever need to express outrage at the opinions of others. Cancel culture seems to hone in on a particular opinion (sometimes expressed through a single tweet) and infer from that a judgement on the person as a whole. Approximately, a person's moral value equals that of their least moral opinion - possibly this could be a third premise for cancel culture?
It also seems necessary to point out that this is a mostly American phenomenon. Does anyone know why US culture has such a Puritanical obsession with the behaviours and even thoughts of others? (The obvious answer her is a cop-out: the Puritans have been dead for 300 years, and if you blame them you have to explain why no other group influenced US culture so overwhelmingly.)
My impression is that these examples only describe possible symptoms of cancel culture, and people reading them will give very different answers depending on how they imagine the actual situation & their experience with what real-world cancel culture looks like.
If you do A3-A5 and you tell everyone you meet about it and they all agree with you and do the same thing and also themselves spread the message, and this is all considered good and normal, that is nasty cancel culture. On the other hand, if you do A11-A12 but people on social media tell you to chill out, and spotify tosses your mail in the 'weirdo' bin, and your campaign fails, and for some reason people don't talk with you so much anymore, that's probably not cancel culture.
So I think you're looking at the wrong dimension. One individual's action isn't a culture.
Yes, I had this same reaction.
Opposing "cancel culture" as such is mostly an attempt to make a content-neutral argument for something that is inherently a disagreement about content (small caveat to this at the end). There will always be positions you find dumb and damaging enough that you don't wish to participate in conversations or groups where you have to rehash them again.
Society as a whole is not truth-neutral. It is built on a median "consensus" view of the world (and has to be, in order to function). There are then opinions that are steadily further and further from this consensus. Each ring invites a certain level of toleration. Some of these views can be tolerated because they are not particularly damaging to the consensus, e.g. veganism is not the median consensus view but the consensus view is not violated by a few vegans argue that meat is murder. Average people engage in mild avoidance (or "cancellation") of vegan arguments (not reading vegan literature, complaining if vegans are too pushy about their views, not inviting them to barbecues), but they don't condemn them. In certain subsets of society, vegans are closer to the median consensus view and in these subsets of society, more space is made for them: e.g. offering vegan menu options at a potluck or making polite positive comments about how "I should probably be cutting back on the meat myself."
Other opinions are further from the consensus view - so much that they invite even stronger stigma. E.g. pedophilia, because the consensus view is that sexual abuse of children is evil and damaging to children's psyches. Again, like with veganism, there are subsets of society where pedophiles can create slightly more space for themselves, but generally they are given little room to operate or broadcast their views to others.
The position of various views in relation to the social consensus changes over time. E.g. once upon a time, the consensus view in the U.S.A. was that heterosexuality was the only way and that homosexuality was vile. Any attempt to argue that being gay was okay was promptly "canceled." Then people's views shifted to the idea that heterosexuality was normative but that homosexuality wasn't really hurting anybody. Homosexuality was openly tolerated as long as people didn't talk about it too much in mainstream settings. People who continued to condemn homosexuality were considered a little passe. Then the consensus view shifted again to the idea that all forms of sexuality were equally important. People who condemned homosexuality were met with grimaces and avoided.
Groups and people who condemned homosexuality consistently over the course of this transition are distressed. They have experienced something like a gradually increasing social ostracization and consequences to speaking out about their opinions. But the truth is: there was no morally-neutral shift towards "cancel culture." There was "cancel culture" before - they were just closer to the middle of the cultural consensus and now they are finding themselves far from it. The real argument is about the content of the disagreement: whether homosexuality is morally equal and how much it is hurting people to condemn it. Any attempt to appeal to "cancel culture" is really an attempt to create space for oneself without talking about the (unpopular) reason why that space has been lost.
Rather than talking about "cancel culture," it's much more productive to talk about the actual content at hand and participate in the consensus view-building project in good faith. Many people here hold views which a large part of the public finds repulsive. Your best bet is not to whine about cancel culture, but to make strong arguments for your position so that people are gradually convinced that certain opinions have enough evidence that they can't be completely written off. This in turn edges the social consensus back in your direction.
The best version of the anti-cancel culure argument is an argument that hearing bad ideas does not cause significant harm. This is what Lukianoff has been fairly successful at doing. This seems like a content-neutral argument, but it isn't. A big point gaining steam in the social consensus is that people suffer when their identities are derided. I agree with the basic version of this argument (and think people have basically always agreed with this). I think it definitely hurts people to be actively insulted for a trait that they did not choose, e.g. race or sexual orientation. But the argument has been significantly extended - both in terms of the number of ways one can disparage others and the degree of harm caused by very mild offenses. Lukianoff's argument (which has real content to it) has been to say that being exposed to some opposing opinion's about oneself is not as damaging as the social conensus is starting to think. In doing so, he made a good-faith contribution to the discussion and has helped budge the social consensus back in the other direction - so much so that Barack Obama has spoken out in favor of some of his ideas. But this isn't really an argument against any kind of broader "cancel culture" - just an argument about the degree of harm being not as big as previously thought. There is still no fixed definition.
Lukianoff’s definition is absurd. The problem, say, with cancelling JK Rowling isn’t that it’s wrong to cancel someone who “literally put trans lives in danger”. It’s that JK Rowling did not, in fact, put trans lives in danger, or came even remotely close to that.
One thing that gives cancel culture it's particular flavor is that the standards of acceptability change quickly. I believe conservatism has its own system of cancellation, but people could be relatively sure of what the boundaries were.
In my view, there's a very clear line between acting in accordance with your own views (good) and trying to persuade others to agree with them (fine), on the one hand, and trying to pressure those who DON'T agree with your views to support them, actively or tacitly, by suppressing their own (bad).
I think we're allowed to be politic, and by trying too much to be a-political, we're just in danger of being the suckers. It's ok to notice that the current Overton Window is too much towards cancel culture, and use it as a mental shortcut to define our positions: mostly anti-censorship, except for the cases where our defense of free speech would be so far outside the Overton Window as to backfire (like defending a pro-pedophilia radio station.
Late to posting this, but I very literally laughed out loud at Scott's description of an Atlantic article accusing quiet spaces of being racist. I *SPRINTED* to Google and discovered The Atlantic has indeed written about the topic...more than once! LOL again!
I started reading the most recent article - likely the one which so infuriated Scott - and kept laughing. The author utterly beclowned herself throughout with her near-parody levels of entitlement. She's used to noise so she believes she gets to disrupt and inflict it on the people around her, including late at night, and in specific quiet zones, even though she can go make noise elsewhere and they can't necessarily find silence. Oh, man, I sure hope she moves to Tokyo someday and writes scolding essays on Why You Japanese Should Quit Being Too Much Like White Rich People.
The Atlantic piece was almost as funny as a June 2020 Esquire article by a trans woman sincerely complaining her plastic surgery for facial feminization was postponed in late ***March of 2020*** (!!!!!) because....hahahahahaha! It's so funny I can't even finish typing!
Scott.
Please.
If you're going to indulge in emotions, at least indulge in the ones that are strongly protective. Don't get rationally angry, get rationally *contemptuous,* and from that contempt, enjoy the pure pleasure of laughing *AT* the utterly oblivious, narcissistic folly on display in that Atlantic essay and in my favorite Esquire essay.
Then you'll be able to dismiss them with joy in your heart, and maybe even a little bit of affection for the poor, unsuspecting, unwitting clowns amongst us.
Sounds like the Atlantic is engaging in the charitable project of providing sheltered employment for the irredeemably idiotic.
We should all support their philanthropy, though maybe not to the extent of *reading* those articles 😁
I think an important point that hasn't been mentioned relating to the "disproportionate" aspect is that modern society allows small groups to take actions that require significantly more work to counter than they do to take, either in terms of effort or time.
As an example, you have a restaurant with a 4 out of 5 star average review. A group that doesn't like the owner starts spamming 1 star reviews. Mathematically, you would need to spam significantly more 5 star reviews to get the average back to 4. And that's once you know that the review bombing is going on.
You have company with an employee that said something bad about a popular politician. How many negative complaints before the employee gets fired? The internet and social media make it easy to get enough negative complaints to get the employee fired before the other side can respond. Firing is easy. Investigating is hard. Rehiring is almost impossible.
You have a lecture. Someone stands up and begins yelling about how bad the lecturer's beliefs are. Yelling back won't get the lecture back on track. Even if the authorities can get the yeller out, the time is still lost. And all it takes is another person to disrupt the lecture again.
The "the best answer to unwanted speech is more speech" approach doesn't work when the cost for more speech to counter unwanted speech is significantly higher than it is to make the speech in the first place.
+100 on your last sentence
I think this mixes up two things: (a) common action against a company, and (b) action against individuals. I don't think that a definition of cancel culture should include the first, but only the second.
When it comes to review spamming, an nice solution would be to verify that the person visiting the restaurant / buying the thing / watching the movie actually did that. This can be done nowadays and is incorporated in various online marketplaces and apps. There also were some experiments on articles of newspapers, where - before commenting - you had to answer a few questions first, to prevent spamming (I liked those a lot, they increased the level of rational discourse immensely).
As for the firing of employees, the solution is increased employee rights against undue contract cancellation - most european countries have much stricter employee rights, which helps tremendously.
As for the lecture example: In general, no protest form should affect other people in their daily lifes. Hindering people to get into a butcher's shop at a vegan protest. Hindering workers who do not want to participate in a strike to reach their workplace. Gluing yourself to motorways to protest weak climate change politics.
Protest your view outside, but don't disrupt the lecture itself. That's the way to go.
Related and also by Scott Alexander:
"Social Censorship: The First Offender Model" https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/02/social-censorship-the-first-offender-model/
"Not Just a Mere Political Issue" https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/17/not-just-a-mere-political-issue/
"I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
"Fearful Symmetry" https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/14/fearful-symmetry/
There's a case of P4: The CEO would have stopped the publication of the articles because they are stupid, but didn't learn about them until he read the edition. He was on his way to fire the writer/editor for being stupid and ruining the brand but during the elevator ride down the mob rose up and demanded their firing.
In this case you have a writer/editor doing something in their job capacity which they knew (or really, really should have known) would wreck the publication. This is vastly different if instead of the Atlantic it was "Outrageous Opinion Quarterly" or some such thing.
This is also different from the writer/editor expressing this particular opinion in-private which somehow gets leaked, assuming they don't normally write about the topic. I don't care if the Sports Desk person has odious views about social policy. I also don't care if the political reporters have terrible taste in music.
This definition and the post combines different issues under the umbrella of "cancel culture", which I think is unhelpful.
I would define "Cancel Culture" as "actions to suppress an individuals free speech rights through punitive measures, by trying to shame people, organizations and companies into banning the offender".
Bringing together a group to boycott a company due to their "woke agenda", "working with Israel/Palestina/China/...", "creating surveillance tech", "<your-thing-here>" is not in this definition of cancel culture, because it does not target individuals. This form of organizing protest should be handled separately. Let me explain.
An individual has basic needs and necessities (like earning money for their livelihood or even the ability to buy goods and services). "Cancel culture" targets these by shaming a company to fire them, not allowing them to order, or restricting their right to express themselves.
In contrast, a company is a legal entity, which has certain advantages, e.g. in tax cuts, rights, but most fundamentally in reduced risk for the owners of the company. The company is always at risk of defaulting, depending on its behavior - usually the market fit. By extension, a company that does not have a target group to sell profitably to, it will default sooner or later - in other words, the risk of being defaulted is the "normal" state.
If I do not like a company or their products, it's my right as a consumer to simply not doing business with them. I can also ask for a boycott - if the company defaults over this, it's simply unfit to survive in the market.
This is completely different for individuals. Individuals should never have to fear for being thrown out of their apartment, getting fired or even not having the ability to buy stuff, because of their opinion (or political agenda or sex or race or whatever), because this indirectly prohibits freedom of speech.
This also includes Scott's experiences with the doxxing - it did not add anything to the journalistic view of the article itself, but posed enormous risk for the livelihood of Scott.
Now the edgecase coming up is naturally the question of "small businesses" and "freelancers" and if they should have the right to refuse service to someone (because they have a different opinion, are e.g. homosexual, have a different political affiliation, have a certain skin color, etc.). I'm on the side of the individual again here - if an individual is unable to buy hardware or food or participate in the daily life due to their sex/race/opinion/..., this severely limits their life, and should therefore be banned as well. I believe this is for the most part how the legal system sees this in most states and "developed" nations.
Why is banning this form of "cancel culture" so important? Because it severely hinders discourse and opinion on the expense of "shielding others from being offended". Unfortunately, Scott chose the usual go-to example of pedophilia, so let's dive into this from a different perspective - I'm trying to make a point here, bear with me on this sidenote.
<sidenote>
(Note: For the sake of argument, I rule out non-consenting sex here, but talk about sexual and consenting relations between "under-age" and "over-age" individuals.)
Most societies have some form of age-of-consent-laws. Why? Because the society sees the requirement to shield individuals in a weak position (in this case because of still developing their intelligence, view of the world, and all the things coming with developing from a child to an adult) from predatory and overpowering other individuals. So the point is: Being developed enough to make an important decision (like having sex, but also to join the military, marrying, getting into huge debt by accepting a huge loan, ingesting different levels of alcohol, smoking cigarettes, etc.) and being able to understand and consent to the consequences. It should come to no surprise, that this "level of development" is different for different individuals - some may be able to grasp everything with 13, while others are still too immature with 25. So, why is there an age-of-consent (to any of the aforementioned topics)? Because the amount of work to develop and test every single individual on their current level of development would be an insurmountable effort. So most societies decide to "proxy" this question through "age" for specific actions, and most have different ages for different actions. Noteworthy exception: Most societies _do_ invest the question of the level of development in some extreme cases, mostly when it comes to criminal acts and if the criminal should be ruled as a minor or as an adult - and provide an "age range", where a court can use one or the other. As for pedophilia, the decision to proxy the level of development through age has hard consequences. Some societies allow sex between 14-17 year olds as one "bracket", and 18+ as another "bracket". Therefore, a sexual relationship starting with a couple at 14 suddenly becomes non-consenting rape after three years, when one of the two has their 18th birthday and the other one is still 17. Is an 18 year old with an intellectual disability able to consent? And if that age-of-consent is such a clear and logically definable line (and if you overstep you have to be shamed, shunned and cancelled, because you obviously are an overpowering rapist), why do different societies have such wildly different ages-of-consent, ranging from 10 to 18...
</sidenote>
If this sidenote does not offend you at all, feel free to exchange it with any highly dividing topic you dislike (notable examples from my experience are "reasons for jewish overrepresentation in positions of power", "equality-of-outcome vs equality-of-chances", "no-womb-no-opinion", ...).
The question is: At which point is the topic or opinion so absurd, so bizarre, so illogical and twisted and mind-boggingly stupid, that you feel that someone should loose their right to live a normal life? I've had my fair share of discourses and discussions with a lot of radicals and extremists (or was viewed as the extremist by others), and at no point did I ever want the other person to not being able to live a normal life.
IMHO, the exchange of ideas and thoughts _always_ trumps the emotional hurt of being offended. And if people spew out idiotic and stupid things (in other words: things that offend me, and there's a _lot_ - a **LOT** - of that), then I have to tolerate that and am free to oppose and criticize those - and I want to live in a society, that does the same for my views, which might offend others.
Cancel culture directly (i.e. by "deplatforming") and indirectly (i.e. by getting me fired) prevents me from taking part in a society, therefore discriminates me, and therefore should be prohibited by law.
And this is why the narrow definition at the beginning of this comment makes more sense to me than Lukianoff's - or for that matter the amalgamation of different topics in Scotts' article.
As Scott spells out in full detail, there is a continuum from regular reaction to something unpalatable, to the worst excesses of cancel culture. Which means that you can't really define cancel culture without going into the substantive issues of why the stuff that's being cancelled is not in the same league as other bad stuff we'd generally very much like to deplatform.
But another thing that stands out in the recent excesses of the "woke" movement, it's people getting super invested in the plights of marginalized or disadvantaged groups that they don't actually belong to. This goes way beyond the laudable idea of solidarity, to the point where formal or informal committees of e.g white dudes are literally telling the Black community what they should fight for, groups of cis-straight dudes are leading social media fights around the meaning of "gay" or "woman" in the name of the trans, gay or queer communities, plus plenty of male randos pontificating on feminism. I'm sure you can make up your own examples.
Not that I'm a super fan of N. Taleb here, but the concept of "skin in the game" surely applies here. If you're all involved in some group's plight, and neither you nor the people around you actually belong to that group, please consider the possibility that you're not actually helping anyone - the group in question, the world at large, or even your own image.
I think the missing ingredient here is intent. If you intend to eliminate someone’s ability to express their opinion, either by removing their access to the platforms they use, or by intimidating them with personal consequences such as job loss (contacting an employer with the intent to get them fired, for instance), then you are engaging in ”cancellation”.
If you are simply no longer interested in supporting someone, but you are not actively trying to prevent their ability to say things, that is not “cancellation”.
A petition requesting the NYT not dox SA is not cancellation, and it is not an attempt to remove the ability to say things generally. It is rather an attempt at censorship, which is different. If the petition was to fire the journalist, it would be cancellation.
Asking others to cancel their subscription to a podcast because you find the pedophilia discussions objectionable is not cancellation, unless it is done with the intent of shutting down the podcast entirely.
If enough subscribers of something find the content so objectionable that they stop paying money, and the platform changes the content, that is not cancellation: that is market forces which have been at work for a long time.
If instead large groups of people threaten to cancel their subscription unless a certain journalist is fired, as they find that journalist’s content objectionable, that IS cancellation.
Intent matters.
Suppose that podcaster A loses his popularity because he is cancelled over expressing an opinion (let's assume that it's an unambiguously fine opinion like "hats are cool" and he happens to have an irrationally anti-hat audience), and podcaster B never gets popular in the first place because he has an annoying voice.
Why is podcaster A's failure more unfair than podcaster B's failure?
Because it's reasonable to expect that being pro-hat will not be controversial and that a person won't have to take it into account when making important life decisions like choosing a career in podcasting and, say, taking out a mortgage based on his podcasting income. The capriciousness of cancel culture is a major reason many people object to it.
You could say that podcaster B faces unfairness because voice is largely out of his control, but this is a different kind of unfairness that doesn't relate to the topic.
Perhaps unrelated to being fair to the individual, but the first scenario leads to conformity in opinions and the second one to lower diversity in podcaster voices. One is more harmful to society than the other
I don't know if you'd count it as a greater *unfairness*, specifically, but it's generally more psychologically distressing to have been successful in the past but now be a nobody than it is to always have been a nobody, because in the first case you have experience of success to contrast with your current insignificance. Podcaster A, then, is probably going to be more upset than Podcaster B.
Cancel culture is a tool deployed by people who truly believe that social justice or other political goals can be achieved by enforcing language and speech codes. They’re obsessed with language and symbol, and because of this they’re ultimately unable to produce material changes in the world of the kind they are imagining they’re producing. The result is that people’s lives and reputations get ruined, perhaps sometimes fairly but more often than not unfairly, and ultimately nothing changes. The entire premise of cancel culture is an attempt to narrow the scope of our axioms down to a very narrow set of beliefs about what is right or wrong, even though this is ultimately futile. People are drawn to cancel culture because real change is hard, but destroying people’s reputations is easy.
^like^
I think the main thing that distinguishes cancel culture from normal behavior is the third partying. It's okay if you personally are offended by someone to unsubscribe/avoid/boycott that person and/or their stuff. It's also okay to point out why you're offended and let other people know that if they are likewise offended for the same reasons, they can unsubscribe/avoid/boycott that person and/or their stuff.
It's not okay the pressure people to care more by adding consequences to them. If the company was not itself offended by the speech of an employee who does not speak for them, do not threaten to boycott the company (explicitly or implicitly) or unless they fire the employee. If a person already had a platform, do not pressure the platform to remove them. If a person has friends and family, do not harass the friends and family in order to punish the person through them.
If person A wants to speak and person B wants to hear them and/or pay them, do not as third party C act deliberately to prevent this mutually consensual exchange. You can control what you do with your own time, attention, and money. You do not get to control other people.
There's still a couple of edge cases this doesn't explain, but I think it gets most of it.
I think you’ve touched on something important that the cancelling needs to be stopped by the affected institution/organization. Getting people to stop wanting to pressure other people to shut-up will never work. We need institutions whose knee-jerk reaction is to resist the pressure and examine the situation.
Perhaps we try seeding a culture that doesn’t demand immediate gratification?
I think the key element of Lukianoff's definition is *people* here:
> ...get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished...
IMO, there is a clear schelling point line between asking an institution to discontinue specific speech and asking that institution to fire the specific speaker. In the A and B series given here, it is never considered that the activist or grad student be asked to stop talking about their unpopular opinions. Obviously we cannot reasonably expect "X activists" to have some non-X subject to bring to the next podcast, so this is a more reasonable omission in the A series. But in the B series it would be completely reasonable to tell the grad student to find a different subject area.
It would be the case that the ideas themselves still get "cancelled", and so free-speech absolutists will not be satisfied, but at least people would be free to *try* promoting their unpopular ideas and they only put themselves at risk if they refuse to stop. This seems like a worthwhile middle ground.
As for the "people shouldn’t be fired from their job for speech that they made outside of their job" norm. Here's another situation, similar to your P1-P3, which challenges this. (And this is less hypothetical; real companies are being faces with this dilemma now.)
Acme Corporation is located in a state that bans abortion. They offer an employee benefit where they will pay for their employees' travel to other states to get abortions. One of the people involved in administering this employee benefit is Bob, who has, outside of work, engaged in substantial anti-abortion advocacy. The organizations' employees express concern that, due to Bob's anti-abortion beliefs, they can't trust Bob to administer the process the way he is supposed to. For instance, they suspect that Bob will deliberately break the confidentiality of users using this benefit to expose them to retaliation. Several employees threaten to quit over this.
(Of course, if Bob in fact does break confidentiality, he can be fired for that. But the damage has still already been done. And one can imagine there are ways for Bob to break confidentiality that are hard to detect or prove. For instance, if Bob "accidentally" leaves his screen open when he walks away for a moment, and Alice's boss "coincidentally" walks by, and starts treating Alice poorly from then on, it might be very hard for someone else to connect the dots.)
Similar to the above choices we have:
Q1: The employees threatening to quit are wrong, and they should just accept the risk that Bob will break confidentiality?
Q2: Acme Corporation is morally obligated to keep Bob on, even if it means losing several other valuable employees, or
Q3: It's okay for Acme Corporation to fire Bob, "for his outside-of-work speech"?
This particular example might seem like a sort of edge case, but one could consider a similar case like:
R: Bob doesn't have access to any information about individual employees, but is in charge of the company's employee benefits strategy, and has to decide what to prioritize. The employees are concerned that Bob will deprioritize abortion-related benefits (and might even be concerned that Bob's anti-abortion advocacy is evidence that he doesn't care about women's issues in general, and so will deprioritize benefits that help women in general). It is likely not possible to say "okay, if Bob in fact deprioritizes these things, we'll get rid of him then" because these are high-context decisions that Bob is the only one that has full context on, so if Bob says "we're deprioritizing X because it's too expensive" for instance, it will be hard to tell whether that is because X actually is too expensive, or because Bob is just making an excuse. Or maybe there are decisions that could harm abortion-seekers (or other women) whose effects won't be visible until years later, so if you wait and see then a lot of harm could already have happened.
I think that **most** jobs where this sort of thing comes up have some element of R in them. I'm reminded of an example Scott gave years ago of a pro-Nazi schoolteacher:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/is-it-possible-to-have-coherent-principles-around-free-speech-norms/
where he said that "if the schoolteacher credibly promises not to be repugnant in any way in front of the kids, you let her keep teaching until she slips up." I think this is a lot harder than it sounds. If they do something really blatant, like go on a slur-filled rant in the classroom, that will probably be found out pretty quickly. But there are lots of subtler, high-context decisions that teachers are making all the time - who to call on in class, what topics to emphasize in discussions, who to give the benefit of the doubt to in disputes - that have a lot of opportunities for teachers to sneak in bias that are hard to detect until it's been going on for a long time. when you hire a teacher (or hire someone for a lot of other jobs) that often involves giving them a position of trust over something you can't easily verify. So you really do have to make a subjective judgment of "does this person share my values?" and outside-of-work speech could be a reasonable indicator of that.
In the Acme Corporation example, I think it much more likely Bob will ask not to be tasked with implementing the "pay travel expenses for abortion trips" and he'll be penalised for not doing the work, or that even if he agrees to do it because it's part of the job and he keeps his personal life and work life separate, some/many/lots of the staff will complain that they don't feel safe with such a bigot in a position of authority.
What I'm saying is that it's much more likely Bob gets cancelled just for his views, than that Bob poses a real threat of "psst I'm gonna email the abortion bounty hunters with your travel details".
The idea is that it's possible that Bob asks TO be tasked with implementing the "pay travel expenses for abortion trips", precisely SO THAT he can "email the abortion bounty hunters." (And there are things that aren't as bad a "abortion bounty hunters" but could be a real threat.) Or at least that there will be a real perception of that threat.
My source for this was:
https://www.askamanager.org/2022/07/companies-offering-to-pay-for-abortion-travel-genuine-help-or-performative-stunt.html
Look in the comments; ctrl-F for "treated badly by boss". The commenters there at least think this is a realistic threat.
Sure, that could happen. But while I am aware that some people do in reality think that the Republicans/Trump/MAGA are just itching to implement "The Handmaid's Tale" in reality, and that the Supreme Court has been taken over by far-right extremists who intend to subject women to forced pregnancy and take away their rights to contraception next, I don't believe that.
I treat it as any other tinfoil-hat wearing exercise.
I could counter that Alice might ask for the task so *she* could send on a list of those employees/bosses who object to Emily's List and get them cancelled, but if we're going to construct bogeymen for both sides of the disagreement, then we're not really engaging with reality.
And I'll counter your "look at the comments" with a "look at the comments" of my own; even when companies (paternalistically, be that mistaken or not, or even just virtue-signalling) provide "we'll pay for your abortion as health care", there are a lot of "humph! privileged out-of-touch corporate males who don't understand real people's lives!" comments.
Biting the hand that feeds, because there is no such thing as gratitude, because whatever you do it is never enough and they're never satisfied. That don't impress me much 😁
EDIT: I did as you requested, ctrl+F for "treated badly by boss", and got one comment about someone imagining that "rabid anti-choicers" might treat the abortion-haver badly:
"An interesting approach, that sounds good in theory, but it won’t take long for people – especially rabidly anti-choice people – to figure out what’s going on. And the employee really has no recourse if they suddenly start being treated badly by boss or coworkers, who can claim they didn’t even know and that they aren’t treating the person any differently."
Also, I think the discussion about "cancel culture" can usefully divided into three questions:
(1) How much, and in what circumstances, SHOULD people be fired/deplatformed/etc for their speech?
(2) How much, and in what circumstances, ARE PEOPLE IN FACT being fired/deplatformed/etc for their speech?
(3) How much, and in what circumstances, DO PEOPLE THINK PEOPLE ARE being fired/deplatformed/etc for their speech?
--
Some frequent statements made in these discussions could be interpreted in multiple ways. For instance "cancel culture doesn't exist" could mean either:
(a) people aren't being punished for their speech (i.e. (2) is low)
(b) people are being punished for their speech, and this is justified (i.e. (1) is high)
Another possible question here is where is (3) in relation to (2) or (1). For instance, one possible state of affairs is that people *aren't in fact* being punished much for their speech, but people *think* it's happening a lot, so they self-censor. In this case what's needed is to give people more accurate information about the real risks of punishment.
I wonder if anyone's done a survey on this? You could ask people something like "are there any opinions you have that you self-censor, and if so what are they" and show those to other people and ask "do you think that someone who expresses these opinions should be punished?" To see if people have accurate views over what actually gets punished.
One problem here is that the term "cancel culture" has acquired a meaning similar to terms like "wasteful spending" - nobody is in favor of being wasteful, but an expenditure that one person might consider "wasteful spending" another person might consider justified.
I also agree with some of the other commenters that these sorts of discussions might be more fruitful if you talk about real examples, or things closer to real examples, rather than a bunch of hypotheticals that involve stand-ins, for a few reasons:
First, it's hard to tell how much this actually happens. I mean, millions of people are laid off every year for all sorts of reasons (unrelated to their speech/opinions), and a lot of the discourse on "people being fired for their speech/opinions" focuses on the same few dozen individual examples, so it's hard to tell if this is because (a) there's lots of people being fired for speech that you never hear about, or (b) being fired for speech is just really rare. So it would be good to know more about how/when this actually happens.
Second, the way I would respond to real situations depends on a lot of nuanced factors. For instance, if Bob fired due to saying something nasty about group X they said on social media, I would have questions like:
- Does it seems plausible they were thinking through something related in good faith and they said it in a context where they reasonably thought it made sense? Or was this just a random potshot that doesn't seem to have any purpose beyond nastiness?
- How does Bob treat the people of group X that they work with? Do those people say "yeah, Bob's been nasty to us for a while, we've just never felt comfortable calling it out until now when the spotlight is on it?" Or do those people say "Bob's always been good to us" and it's only external pressure?
- What kind of job and position is this specifically? Is public communications a core part of the job? Is it a position where someone who dislikes group X has the opportunity to undermine or otherwise harm them? If Bob has been in the job for a while and never done anything like that, is it plausible that he's been doing it without being detected yet, or that he's biding his time until he can get away with it?
When it comes to employment, there is an obvious bright line: if it impacts your work, then it matters, and if not, you should basically be able to say whatever you want. In the examples of you not subscribing to the Atlantic, it's because you hated one of their pieces. Same with you not subscribing to a podcast that promotes pedophilia--though trying to get it "deplatformed" would count as cancel culture. I guess B1 is unclear to me because it's not obvious if he's publishing articles under your lab/letterhead that you don't want to publish (impacts the work), or is just blogging on his own time (does not).
I think the point is that arguably "impacts the work" is broad enough that it applies to just about any situation. In the example of the grad student blogging about pedophilia, even if he's just doing it on his own time and isn't publishing it in any place associated with the lab:
(1) others might not believe you when you say "we don't support what the student is doing, he's doing it on his own time", and that could impact the lab's ability to get funding, support, personnel, etc.
(2) colleagues might surmise that if he thinks that "people who claim to be victims of pedophilia are lying," then he might think the same about people who claim to be victims of other things, so they might be less comfortable talking about any problems they might be having with others in the lab.
(3) if some of the other psychology experiments in the lab involve kids, there's likely a higher chance that the student might molest them, given what he believes. Even if he hasn't shown any tendency to want to molest kids in the past (he's just written articles), that could be because he's biding his time, waiting to get into a position where he can get away with it. And even if he never in fact does so, the fact that he's perceived to have a high risk of that might make it harder for the lab to recruit subjects.
Number (3) I think is probably the most interesting one. In general, I think there's an interesting question here: if someone does thing X, which isn't bad on its own but the kind of people who do X also are more likely to do bad thing Y, when is it okay to restrict their actions to preemptively deny them the opportunity to do Y, and when do you have to wait until they actually do or attempt to do Y? What if the perceived risk of Y is already causing problems, even if they haven't done Y yet?
I think there are clear examples of cases on different parts of the spectrum:
- If people who practice religion R are more likely to hijack planes, is it okay to deny them the ability to board planes? The answer seems pretty clearly "no", and I think few if any people would argue otherwise.
- If people with shorter credit histories are more likely to default on loans, is it okay to not give them a loan? Under the US system we do in fact do that, but there's reasonable debate on both sides: there are lots of regulations about what they're allowed to use in credit scores, and and there are certainly people arguing that the current system includes factors that are unfair to certain groups.
- If people with severely impaired vision (that can't be corrected) are more likely to get in a car crash, should they be denied drivers' licenses? The answer seems pretty clearly "yes", and I think few if any people would argue otherwise.
I think you're not giving Lukianoff enough credit for the ways in which his definition is actually quite precise. His definition requires three separate things to all occur:
- "Protected Speech" under the first amendment, meaning that this is speech the _government_ could not legally attempt to suppress, were it to happen in a place the government had the ability to do so (even though it didn't).
- A "campaign" meaning you need to be trying to convince someone else to join you in getting the target...
- "fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished".
Here's a fun and probably wrong opinion on this: What people call cancel culture now exists because we got rid of all the unions. Now [huge and unjustified overgeneralisation ahead:] people still have an urge to change things they don't like about the world, but there's no institutions with history and knowledge and strategy behind them. We've lost our experience of cooperative action and wielding people power on every scale. So instead we just get weird misfires where people form loose temprary coalitions with weak targets that have low strategic value, ultimately not getting what they really want and staying frustrated and becoming more upset and hostile.
I seem to recall reading something from Nellie Bowes that the NYT union was a major force trying to get her fired for wrongthink.
I think that can coexist with this theory if you consider that ‘cancel progressivism’ is 1) a pretty new invention and 2) now essentially demanded of any leaders within a leftist organization. I get the sense that until ~15 years ago Unions didn’t ‘cancel’ anyone (except for directly labor-rights-related reasons), like most organizations. Now that the cancellation meme has spread, especially within leftist circles (in that any leader won’t last long unless they conform to cancelling), Unions have made a hard turn towards cancelling people. It’s unfortunate because Unions best serve their constituents by being focused on a single agenda - labor rights - and distractions from that cause mostly make them ineffectual. On the other hand, we’ve also had historical moments where unions incited racial massacres (e.g. Rock Springs), so it does seem important that they be influenced by ‘intersectionality’ or consideration of non-labor issues on some level.
It seems like two important ideas that are key to making cancel culture destructive are:
a. Attempts to coordinate meanness. Not only do I unsubscribe from your substack, I go out on Twitter and post about what a terrible person you are and how you're a racist fascist homophobe and everyone should unsubscribe from your substack.
b. Contagious shunning--not only do I shun you, I shun anyone who doesn't shun you. Like deciding that because Rogan has interviewed Alex Jones, you should shun Rogan and also shun anyone who goes on Rogan's show.
[edited] Part of what makes this so nasty is that social media have made it a lot easier to make sure everyone gets the memo about what is in/out right away, and this has made it more efficient to coordinate meanness.
US society is very diverse. We have people with wildly different personal lives, morals, religions, taboos, etc. It seems like the best way to have a society like ours work smoothly is to have people be pretty tolerant of "wrong" opinions and ideas and ways of life of others with whom they interact on a casual or occasional professional basis. Like, what if the lady who does my taxes is a lesbian, my dentist is Jewish, my cardiologist is on his fourth trophy wife, the guy who works on my car is a socialist? One way for things to work is that I refuse to associate with such people, and find straight white Catholics with good family lives and sensible political views to do business with. Another is to decide that what I really want from these people is good work at a fair price, and that their personal lives, religion, political beliefs, etc., are irrelevant to that. The second one works a hell of a lot better in a multicultural society, but it does require that I accept that there will be people with whom I do business who believe the wrong things and live the wrong way.
It seems like the basis of cancel culture is to try to push against that. And you can find places where this makes sense--if my dentist hates Gentiles and won't give them novacaine or something, yeah, I'm finding another dentist. You can find places where someone's expressed beliefs or outside-of-work activities make you worry about how they will do their job. But also, it seems like a lot of the time when I hear about these cancellation campaigns (probably I hear about the outrageous ones, because media), and people make this kind of argument, it's a huge stretch, or it ignores contradictory evidence.
You make a good post here, but it undersells what cancel culture does.
"One way for things to work is that I refuse to associate with such people, and find straight white Catholics with good family lives and sensible political views to do business with."
You presented this as the more negative/extreme option. And compared to your 2nd option, it is.
But it's actually LESS negative/extreme than what cancel culture does, and our modern society would in fact be better if the most cancel-loving people out there chose your first option instead of what they do.
"I'll only do business with companies that share my values" is honestly not the problem here, at least not if it's done in a non-aggressive way similar to someone simply unsubscribing from a YouTube channel or blocking someone on social media, and leaving it at that. Trying to minimize your exposure to companies or content that goes against your values is not the core problem here, and if everyone did only this, cancel culture would not be a significant issue. The issue happens when some individuals/groups attempt to force EVERYONE to go along with their values. And given that you're right about how very diverse US society is, this causes severe problems.
If more people could simply accept that a lot of people out there have "wrong" opinions and choose to minimize their own personal contact with such people BUT LEFT IT AT THAT, things would be far better.
I don't mind people who carefully curate their social media experience, for example. Block whoever you want. That's purely defensive. By itself, that's not the same as someone trying to deplatform everybody they disagree with.
This distinction is completely crystal clear to me, so much so that I'm surprised that a lot of people don't seem to see it.
For me a big part of what makes "cancel CULTURE" a *culture* is the online social media mob aspect of it. So I think the think I particularly object to about it is that. Random individual people, even in large numbers just aren't as much a concern to me (though obviously can still present problems and moral/practical failings).
Not that idea that people shouldn't be able to mobilize letter writing campaigns about things they don't like, and not that people shouldn't be able to do what they want with their time/money.
But the particular nature of the online low effort social media brushfire where thousands, sometimes millions of people decide some person or thought is now verboten/ostracized/thoughtcrime/unemployable. In particular, since they seem to be able to use allies in HR/legal departments in the business world to make their displeasure have real teeth.
Often based on very little personal involvement/interest/stakes.
It is the great mass of many mobilizing and aggregating minor annoyance into a tidal wave of consequence for one person or small group of people.
I suspect villages frowned on and even had rules against this sort of mob incitement on those smaller scales, and it makes sense for the online global village to have such norms/rules too.
Anyway, that would be my slightly different spin on it.
I am pretty tired of the "free speech" legalism around this issue, because I think most people can agree that free speech norms outside of the government's sphere are also SUPER VALUABLE, and there should be strong bias towards them.
Should people be free to not patronize a store of someone just because they don't like their politics? Absolutely. Is it good for society when everyone is constantly conducting these ideological litmus tests on everyone else. No it is terrible.
So you gotta figure out how to discourage/minimize it without making it outright banned. Maybe it is like drugs that way.
The Internet (really, social media) seems to create an amplification effect.
Previously, if you did some asshole-ish thing, you'ld just annoy the people who saw you do it.
But now, a sufficiently amusing case of being an asshole can get thousands (maybe millions) of people made at you.
The thing is, the virality of people getting mad at you is not quite tied to the badness of whatever it wss you did.
Here is a podcast promoting pedophilia: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Vd8CiBeKpECoYqtyjTQ8X
Maybe if you actually listened to the podcast promoting pedophilia, you would learn a thing or two about pedophiles, such as the fact that pedophilia (i.e. being attracted to children before puberty) does not equal child sexual abuse, that the large majority of pedophiles never have sex with children, and that stigmatizing pedophilia actually increases the risks to children.
So yeah, let's not cancel people too eagerly.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/14/far-right-twitter-identity-revealed
Here, for example, we have an article where The Guardian newspaper doxes Lomez.
It does feel like here The Guardian is trying to whip up retaliation against someone whose views they don't like.
Possibly noteworthy that it is established print newspapers engaging in this kind of behavior.
Got around to reading the infamous Atlantic article discussed above.
It's quite stupid in a particularly dense and entitled manner which has made my teeth grind since I was myself a dense and entitled young person. The author is apparently _not_ a young person which is a bit sad. Yes the article does imply that to prefer peace and quiet -- even at 2 am -- is an example of white-person arrogance/insensitivity/racism/etc. Yes it is yet another example of how far the Atlantic has fallen (I'm old enough to remember when that publication was a home for thoughtful journalism and essay-writing) (no, seriously).
All that said -- the article doesn't name anybody who is supposed to be shamed or shunned, doesn't suggest boycotts of anybody or anything, etc. So I'm not sure it really represents an example of cancel culture in action, though I can see how it could ring that particular bell for people nowadays.
At its heart the piece strikes me as just another addition to the ancient and endless pile of passive-aggressive pontificating which boils down to: things are no longer as they were when the writer was young which was the perfect way that things should always be. That genre is literally as old as the written word and for my money hasn't become any more interesting or meaningful than it ever was.
I think there is a false equivalence between (1) organising or calling for violence against a person or a group of people and (2) other types of speech. For me, answers to many of the questions Scott posesdepend on whether the speech in question is of the first or second kind. Coincidentally, there is a large movement I the US that is focused on blurring this boundary. One of their slogans is literally "silence is violence" but they work on blurring this boundary in many other situations. This is so pervasive that at the end of this essay Scott implies equivalence between supporting murder and political terrorism and simply "criticizing" a group of people. These things are not the same and no fair coalition can be built this way.
"I think there is a false equivalence between (1) organising or calling for violence against a person or a group of people and (2) other types of speech."
I think you will find that a very hard line to properly define.
Suppose hypothetically
A) I am very pro abortion. Am I organizing violence against Foetuses?
B) I am pro death penalty and want to bring back whipping. Is that organizing violence against prisoners?
C) I think circumcision of infants is a generally good idea and improves health. Is this organizing violence against babies? Does it matter if it's done by doctors or by religious leaders with no medical training or anesthetic?
D) I think people should have greater right to self defense and defense of property. If someone picks your pocket in the street, you should absolutely be allowed to pull out a gun and shoot them. Is this a call for violence against thieves.
E) I am organizing a BSDM party.
F) I think OSHA is far too strict. Let people do jobs that will get them maimed or killed in industrial accidents.
G) I am pro euthanasia.
H) I am a soldier in a war calling in an artillery strike.
I) I am calling for various highly unpleasant, but technically not violent things to happen to a group of people. I say they should all be sacked and have all their money seized and be forced to live in a labor camp eating gruel. But I never specify anything outright violent.
And of course this is speech, so you can call for things that are physically unrealistic. Like calling for a wizard to magically turn someone into a toad. Or saying someone should be tickled to death. Or gored by a unicorn.
Lesson. Drawing sharp lines is really hard.
I agree that drawing lines is hard and there are always tricky edging cases. Scott is laying out a lot of examples on the broad spectrum of cancellation reactions, my point is that there an important dimension in the kind of speech we are protecting or prosecuting.
Having said that, some of your edge cases are much harder than others. I agree that A is a fundamental conundrum (alongside cow and fish violence), while I see no problem with advocating for consensual or legalised violence even when I disagree with its desirsbiluty, as in B, C, D, E, F, G, H or non violence as in I or wizard summoning.
I don't think "cancelling" at least in the form people find most odious is really any of these things. I don't necessarily find boycotting (personal or public) or arguing for deplatforming necessarily evil in their own right, although they can be self-righteous and silly depending on the "infraction".
But I think there's a line between stumbling upon something that you find untenable and being upset by it (like the Atlantic article situation), and deciding you dislike someone/something so combing through all their history to try to find something unpopular enough to make some portion of the public upset. You can organically stumble on actions that you find appalling to the point of broadcasting this opinion to others, but when there is a calculated move to find a reason to hate someone you already dislike, that's the true spirit of "cancel culture".
I think that the line of going out of your way to cause others harm is the line.
Read part 4 of https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/21/current-affairs-some-puzzles-for-libertarians-treated-as-writing-prompts-for-short-stories/
There are actions that are permissible as things an individual is at liberty to do, yet can be part of a pattern of maliciousness.
Whether it's a rich person with a horse based grudge, or a person with a speech based grudge.
Cancellation is doing this, because you don't like what someone said. It means having a negative term for someone elses wellbeing in your utility function.
If not interacting with a person is the easy default option, and your dislike of someones speech is causing you to go out of your way to interact, in a way clearly detrimental to that person, that's cancelation.
(Disagreeing with them is ok. Polite explanations of why you think their wrong, totally fine. Yelling slurs at them, not on.)
Personally, I feel like the line is when you try to coerce (morally or otherwise) everyone else into doing what you want them to do.
In scenario A, I'd draw the line at A9. A1 to A7 are firmly your individual response and choices. A8 is a bit blurrier, but there's no real coercive attempt. A9 is where consequences of not joining the bandwagon start getting thrown around, and that's where I'd say it starts becoming "cancel culture".
In scenario B, it's a bit murkier for me. None of these seem particularly like "cancel culture" as I'd intuit the term - the closest is B3, but even there it's the actions of the audience pressuring the university to fire the student that comprises the cancellation. The article being written and people decrying the student without calling for their firing wouldn't be "cancellation".
In Scenario C, I don't think it's an example of cancel culture at all. The journalists did get fired, but the CEO didn't fire them because the baying mob demanded it, they did so because the article was bad for business. The journalists weren't inherently wrong as journalists writing opinion pieces, but they were wrong as employees hired to maintain and grow the business. If the article had *gained* the publication subscribers and critical acclaim, but the authors were fired anyway at the demand of an aggrieved group of protesters, *that* would be cancellation.
I'd tentatively offer a definition of "cancellation" as "attempting to morally or economically coerce others into enacting consequences upon undesirables that go beyond your personal choices".
Thus, "I don't like this, so I'm not going to consume it" isn't cancellation. "I don't like this, and I'm going to name and shame anyone who says they do" is (moral coercion). "I don't like this, so I'm going to start a petition calling for the creator to be fired" is as well (economic coercion).
The way I'd want cancel culture to be limited is by treating out-of-work political opinions and (legally permitted) actions as somewhat similar to 'protected classes'. So this totally wouldn't apply to half of the examples above which involve intentional acts of companies, or acts of their employees as representatives of the company, but would apply for the various out-of-work acts.
There are many people with opinions and moral values which I consider morally repugnant and evil, and probably my opinions and moral values are considered morally repugnant and evil by some other people, but the core social contract (in my opinion) is that we want everyone to be permitted to freely function in society - being able to shop, get services, rent or buy housing, and work for a living - unless a VERY high bar is met, which is equivalent to being convicted by a court of law; practical ostracism is very severe punishment and should be handed out with the same level of care as prison sentences; and employers shouldn't be able to fire someone just because they don't like someone's political opinions.
Like, the basic level of anti-cancellation is someone should be able to be a card-carrying party member, a candidate and/or a political activist of a cause totally opposed to the manager/leader/owner of the company without risking their job. It should be impossible for a Trump-loving company owner to fire someone for organizing e.g. pride marches or BLM protests (within the bounds of law), and it should be just as impossible for a liberal democrat company owner to fire someone for organizing e.g. pro-life marches or participating in J6 (if they were within the bounds of law).
And that kind of sidesteps many of the issues described above - it should be permissible for people to write angry letters to a company or cancel their subscriptions, but the company should not be permitted to act on that, *exactly* just as they would not be permitted to fire a Black employee due to pressure or protests or boycotts from racist customers, or fire a Muslim or gay employee due to pressure or protests or boycotts, etc; if some employee is e.g. communist or MAGA or pro-pedophilia (within bounds of law) or agitating for some unpopular policy, that's their right to do so, and if customers complain about that, well, it's their problem and shouldn't permit the employer to fire an employee without a proper cause.
To me, cancel culture is all about treatment of people from 'enemy tribe' - my definition of cancel culture is refusal of these basic transactions (goods, services, housing, employment) to someone who is openly and defiantly of the 'enemy tribe' (whatever that means), and it shouldn't happen. We do live in a single society, and tribalism should be forced down (both legally and in practice) so that people don't get to refuse service, housing or employment to the enemy. You get freedom of association, you don't have to be friends with them, but you should be forced to tolerate them being at the desk or chair next to you, or across the counter in a business - they have the same right to be there as do you.
I'm kind of surprised by your use of the term pedophilia. That is a psychiatric disorder, right? It is not illegal to have a disorder. It is only illegal to enact it, i.e., sexually abuse children. It is unfortunate that you are conflating the two (see, e.g., Wikipedia) by just calling it all pedophilia. Since you are a psychiatrist, I am mightily confused by this.
(1) For the purpose of the article, the only property that is required of the thing is that people don’t like it (2) the DSM uses the term “Pedophilic disorder”, while “pedophilia” is used in many parts of the English speaking world to interchangeably refer to either the act of child sexual abuse or the motivating psychology for adults who pursue it
Very good article with a lot to chew over. The A, B and C propositions seem trivially easy, but the P propositions are very hard. As for whether people with drastically different opinions and values can find common cause supporting mutual freedom of speech, regrettably experience suggests the answer is no. But the effort to thrash out a basis for this is still salutary.
I think cancel culture refers to the overreach of a natural phenomenon that is good and should exist. We need to be able to socially ostracize *profoundly* bad views. But many people felt that only mildly bad, or even mundane or mainstream views began to receive this reaction in 2014.
It's like when white blood cells in the body start attacking things that are harmless (peanuts, shellfish), creating an allergic reaction. Humans use gossip and withdrawal of support to express their preferences, and that isn't going away. But like the immune system, group dynamics can create a hysterical or "allergic" overreaction.
Thus the phrase refers to behaviors at the end of the spectrum, but since humans may not be able to agree where to draw the line, it may be impossible to reach a consensus. I think we can agree on some common elements:
- The target of anger is a low-profile civilian. Exceptions exist.
- The viewpoint being punished is held by more than 5-10% of the population (or, those who find the viewpoint enraging are a small 5-10% vocal minority)
- Context or intent is ignored in favor of evaluating only perceived harm
- Pressure is applied to risk-averse institutions rather than onto the individual
- The reaction to the viewpoint could be described as a moral panic. Emotions are high and intense.
If we’re going to try and invent a compromise people would mostly agree to, I would personally prefer if the criteria included “action related to creating consequences for the person who engaged in the undesirable communications is being taken by someone who is only loosely connected to the circumstances
of their communication”.
For me the hallmark of “cancelling” was always “someone is trying to get me to call Joe’s boss to tell them Joe is a horrible person. I don’t know very well the person who is trying to get me to do this, they don’t know Joe at all, and neither of us has spent more than an hour thinking about the actions we’re now feeling highly motivated to take”
Just coming back to this, I thought it worth pointing out that logically speaking, of course there is the option of saying the writer was morally wrong for writing the piece but everyone else acted acceptably.
I might be taking Lukianoff's definition too literally, but if Cancel Culture there refers to only the uptick in as opposed to the baselint of campaigns to get people punished for speech protected by the First Amendment, the question that would maybe most often have to decide if something on the edge is a part of cancel culture is "would this have been the reaction before 2014, as well?"
Even before 2014, people were not seeking out pedophilia-promotion podasts all the time, and I don't suppose A12 would be very common before 2014, so it covers the extremes correctly (and I don't know enough about what was usual in 2014 to accurately guess everything in the middle). The problem would of course be that it makes it hard to prove one specific instance of trying to get people punished for first amendment speech, but you can pretty easily apply it to the number of such campaigns overall and determine the total "amount" of Cancel Culture.
If our brains naturally run the algorithm: "When people say bad/wrong things, we should stop them", then there is obvious incompatibility between people with different beliefs, and what you are doing amounts to trying to find/establish a fairness override. You want a principle that says "I will view my own stances and my opponent's from an outside view and establish a boundary that we both have to be held to."
The problem is that the algorithm our brains seems to be running isn't *just* "When people say bad/wrong things, we should stop them"... it has the added proviso, "How far we go in stopping them should depend on how bad/wrong the thing is."
That proportionality is why it's tricky-to-the-point-of-impossibility to draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable reactions to disagreement. If everyone only ever said things with 3 units of evilness, then we could all agree that, when someone says something we disagree with, it's ok to respond with 3 units of activism, but not with 4 units of activism. But when you can imagine people saying things with 4 units of evilness, or 50, or a bajillion, then you can't agree to a rule that limits you to 3 units of activism.
And if you set the bar high enough to cover how evil people really think others' opinions are, then you end up with allowing all of cancel culture.
And if you try to make a rule that says, 'ok, you can respond with 3 units of activism to 3 units of evil, but you can't respond with 4 units of activism to 3 units of evil', then you run into the problem that people are already doing that, they just have wildly different notions about how many units of evil different sayings have.
FWIW, as a descriptive take on the phrase "cancel culture", I would draw the line between A7 and A8, because that's where it crosses the line from "me" to "you", that is, from "my reaction is..." to "you should...". Prescriptively, A8-A10 seem morally justifiable, at least in some cases.
From Google: Aristotle wrote, "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it". This means that an educated person can evaluate different values without necessarily adopting them.
Cancel culture is predicated on not understanding this.