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.
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.”
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.
You could prohibit the worst types of cancellations (which are firings and refusals to hire). For instance California Labor Code 1101 says:
1101. No employer shall make, adopt, or enforce any rule, regulation, or policy:
(a) Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office.
(b) Controlling or directing, or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees.
That law hasn’t been declared unconstitutional for violating employers’ freedom of speech. An individual boycott should be considered protected freedom of speech but companies retaliating against individuals should be considered action rather than speech because of the power differential.
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).
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 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.)
"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.
>unduly _severe_ sentences for ... protestors against fracking
Is this those guys who were planning to shut down the freeways? Such protestors _should_ be severely cracked down on, especially after all the shit they've been getting away with for at least a decade. Lengthy jail sentences are entirely appropriate for conspiring to sabotage infrastructure.
And waving them away as "protestors against fracking" kind'a buries the lede and tries to make it sound like they were punished for their views, not their actions. As someone put it on Twitter: you assault me and then start dancing, the cops grab you and then you complain "I'm being arrested for dancing??"
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.
Ah, okay. I don't know what the specific sentence in question is, then, so I can't judge whether it's too serious in the abstract or not. That said, part of the problem is that "protesters" have been allowed to commit massive disruptions of all sorts for years now without suffering any real consequences -- indeed, often while being applauded by society's elites -- and winding that back is going to require levels of law enforcement that is guaranteed to feel excessive to people who have become used to being above the law.
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 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.
Even for positions I despise I don't go all the way to A11. Part of it is principle, but also part of that is the sort of people to brandish tactics A9 and above are usually weirdos who have their own idiosyncratic definition of whatever the offense in question is, and if you sign on to their crusade you'll regret it.
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 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.
There are contexts where you're considered a bigot for holding that view, and these contexts are the ones that have been getting their way for many years now. Women, lesbians in particular, have been getting it a lot worse, but make no mistake, you are on the list.
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.)
>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.
The owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop will be happy to hear he's imagining the decade of legal persecution he's received. What a relief! I wonder if he can get a refund for those legal fees.
>Also, when people use terms like "genocide" to describe language, ignore them.
Look, I admire the confidence, but that's like saying "when those guys with greatcoats, badges, and guns use terms like 'anti-Soviet activities' to describe language, ignore them." The "genocide" users have a lot of social power, especially in contexts where readers of this blog tend to live.
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?
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.
>It's particularly common among groups that are hostile to trans people existing at all
Another annoying tic here you need to stop using: "existing."
Some guy who thinks he's Napoleon "exists." I am not obligated to believe he is actually Napoleon, and if I refuse to play along with this I am not preventing him from literally existing.
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.
Oh, so that boxer _has_ done a genetic test, then? Glad to hear everyone decided to be reasonable and just resolve it one way or the other. Do you have a link to the results?
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.)
>their default frame is "all reasonable people have always agreed with whatever we say"
See also "Star Trek was always woke" or "Edwardian Britain was racially integrated." It brings up the question: if culture was always woke, why did it stop being woke _just_ before the point where there would have been evidence of it being woke? All those black people vanished from Britain the day before the camera was invented, apparently.
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.
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."
People on the left have been insisting to us for a decade that "woke" is meaningless and only lame nerds would ever use it and the whole concept doesn't even exist and frankly methinks the lady doth protest too much.
As FdB said, we need _some_ word for this nonsense. At least "woke" is short and everyone knows what it refers to even if they desperately pretend they don't.
> 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 do in fact define woke that way. "Star Trek was always woke" is really just epistemic stolen valor. Star Trek supported racial and sexual equality, we support slavery reparations, mass censorship, and youth gender transition, those are the same thing right? Well... no, that entirely does not go without saying.
It's an attempt to take literally everyone who has pushed for something that would be considered progressive at the time -- women's suffrage, abolishing slavery, democratic government, a written constitution, whatever -- and claim them and their supporters as your supporters. You don't get to do that. You have to make your case on your own merits.
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.
>I'm not entirely clear on WHO you think is doing that
If you think it's silly to assert "Star Trek was always woke" maybe you should take it up with that Agrajagagain guy a few replies up. He seems pretty set on it.
> 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.
"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.
To dismiss "woman" as a core notion you are listing a bunch of core things -- physical safety, strength, personality, ability to birth children -- and dismissing them as surface-level, while listing a bunch of surface-level things -- your job opportunities, your political representation -- as core. I don't think this stands up. The core things would be core no matter what society one lived in. That's what _makes_ them core.
I suspect this is also what's behind a lot of general unhappiness nowadays. People are told that the core of their being is unimportant trivia. It really isn't.
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.
The commenter raises an interesting point. The right has historically been much more cancel-happy than the left. They had McCarthyism (the original cancel culture), they had the “patriotic correctness” of the Bush years, and 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. And while California had passed laws against political discrimination against employers, no red state has. So a lot of the left’s “march through institutions” was simple self-defense. It’s unfortunate that some of them (in academia especially) then decided to engage in revenge rather than upholding everyone’s right to their views. But we should be under no illusion that the right would be any better than the left if they had similar power.
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.
Is that pro-Palestinian speech along the lines of "there should be a negotiated settlement and a two-state solution," or is it along the lines of "October 7th was a blessing, Jews back to Poland?" Because whenever you drill down on these it's amazing how often it tends to be the latter.
> 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.
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?
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.”
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.
You could prohibit the worst types of cancellations (which are firings and refusals to hire). For instance California Labor Code 1101 says:
1101. No employer shall make, adopt, or enforce any rule, regulation, or policy:
(a) Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office.
(b) Controlling or directing, or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees.
That law hasn’t been declared unconstitutional for violating employers’ freedom of speech. An individual boycott should be considered protected freedom of speech but companies retaliating against individuals should be considered action rather than speech because of the power differential.
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?).
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 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.)
"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.
>unduly _severe_ sentences for ... protestors against fracking
Is this those guys who were planning to shut down the freeways? Such protestors _should_ be severely cracked down on, especially after all the shit they've been getting away with for at least a decade. Lengthy jail sentences are entirely appropriate for conspiring to sabotage infrastructure.
And waving them away as "protestors against fracking" kind'a buries the lede and tries to make it sound like they were punished for their views, not their actions. As someone put it on Twitter: you assault me and then start dancing, the cops grab you and then you complain "I'm being arrested for dancing??"
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.
Ah, okay. I don't know what the specific sentence in question is, then, so I can't judge whether it's too serious in the abstract or not. That said, part of the problem is that "protesters" have been allowed to commit massive disruptions of all sorts for years now without suffering any real consequences -- indeed, often while being applauded by society's elites -- and winding that back is going to require levels of law enforcement that is guaranteed to feel excessive to people who have become used to being above the law.
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 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.
Even for positions I despise I don't go all the way to A11. Part of it is principle, but also part of that is the sort of people to brandish tactics A9 and above are usually weirdos who have their own idiosyncratic definition of whatever the offense in question is, and if you sign on to their crusade you'll regret it.
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 wouldn't disagree. But the voices amplified by social media tend to be the weirdos in question.
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.
>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.
>nobody is making me fuck trans men
Yet.
There are contexts where you're considered a bigot for holding that view, and these contexts are the ones that have been getting their way for many years now. Women, lesbians in particular, have been getting it a lot worse, but make no mistake, you are on the list.
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.)
>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.
The owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop will be happy to hear he's imagining the decade of legal persecution he's received. What a relief! I wonder if he can get a refund for those legal fees.
>Also, when people use terms like "genocide" to describe language, ignore them.
Look, I admire the confidence, but that's like saying "when those guys with greatcoats, badges, and guns use terms like 'anti-Soviet activities' to describe language, ignore them." The "genocide" users have a lot of social power, especially in contexts where readers of this blog tend to live.
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?
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.
>It's particularly common among groups that are hostile to trans people existing at all
Another annoying tic here you need to stop using: "existing."
Some guy who thinks he's Napoleon "exists." I am not obligated to believe he is actually Napoleon, and if I refuse to play along with this I am not preventing him from literally existing.
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.
Oh, so that boxer _has_ done a genetic test, then? Glad to hear everyone decided to be reasonable and just resolve it one way or the other. Do you have a link to the results?
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.)
>their default frame is "all reasonable people have always agreed with whatever we say"
See also "Star Trek was always woke" or "Edwardian Britain was racially integrated." It brings up the question: if culture was always woke, why did it stop being woke _just_ before the point where there would have been evidence of it being woke? All those black people vanished from Britain the day before the camera was invented, apparently.
"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.
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.
People on the left have been insisting to us for a decade that "woke" is meaningless and only lame nerds would ever use it and the whole concept doesn't even exist and frankly methinks the lady doth protest too much.
As FdB said, we need _some_ word for this nonsense. At least "woke" is short and everyone knows what it refers to even if they desperately pretend they don't.
> 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 do in fact define woke that way. "Star Trek was always woke" is really just epistemic stolen valor. Star Trek supported racial and sexual equality, we support slavery reparations, mass censorship, and youth gender transition, those are the same thing right? Well... no, that entirely does not go without saying.
It's an attempt to take literally everyone who has pushed for something that would be considered progressive at the time -- women's suffrage, abolishing slavery, democratic government, a written constitution, whatever -- and claim them and their supporters as your supporters. You don't get to do that. You have to make your case on your own merits.
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.
>I'm not entirely clear on WHO you think is doing that
If you think it's silly to assert "Star Trek was always woke" maybe you should take it up with that Agrajagagain guy a few replies up. He seems pretty set on it.
> 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/
"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.
To dismiss "woman" as a core notion you are listing a bunch of core things -- physical safety, strength, personality, ability to birth children -- and dismissing them as surface-level, while listing a bunch of surface-level things -- your job opportunities, your political representation -- as core. I don't think this stands up. The core things would be core no matter what society one lived in. That's what _makes_ them core.
I suspect this is also what's behind a lot of general unhappiness nowadays. People are told that the core of their being is unimportant trivia. It really isn't.
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.
The commenter raises an interesting point. The right has historically been much more cancel-happy than the left. They had McCarthyism (the original cancel culture), they had the “patriotic correctness” of the Bush years, and 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. And while California had passed laws against political discrimination against employers, no red state has. So a lot of the left’s “march through institutions” was simple self-defense. It’s unfortunate that some of them (in academia especially) then decided to engage in revenge rather than upholding everyone’s right to their views. But we should be under no illusion that the right would be any better than the left if they had similar power.
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.
>even today they have major law firms openly announcing policies of not hiring people with pro-Palestinian views
You're kinda soft-pedaling it: the views in question were "October 7th was good."
>I have never heard of a company with an open policy of not hiring people with any type of conservative views
The word "open" is doing a lot of work here!
> 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
Is that pro-Palestinian speech along the lines of "there should be a negotiated settlement and a two-state solution," or is it along the lines of "October 7th was a blessing, Jews back to Poland?" Because whenever you drill down on these it's amazing how often it tends to be the latter.
> 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.