"Cancel Culture" 3

[Larry of the Lawn]

3 hours ago, Heartofice said:

What would be the logical reasons?

I'm not sure but I'd be all ears.  

Tangentially, I listened to some dude on the radio the other day taking about how with declining birth rates in much of the world, he was anticipating a peak global population around 2080 or 90  at 9 billion, and then many countries declining in population.  He figured China would be down to 750 million by 2100.

One of the things he talked about economically is how there may end up being countries like the US, Canada, Europe, and Japan clamoring for immigrants over the next 50 years to help support their inevitably older populations.

 

[Squab]

4 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

Perhaps this is the real question and not cancel culture as such per se, but certain dogma's that are coming from the left. Will it be racist to defend traditional math education? Or to defend the common law legal tradition?

I don't know if you are joking but apparently now having a loving family is an unfair advantage. And reading to your kids? Well, you're just disadvantaging other children. Not from some crazy left wing news outlet either, or is it...

They will ban a group of people or loosely defined set of ideas and then expand that group to include anyone committing wrongthink. Lets all agree to ban Nazis and then anyone to the right of about Pol Pot gets called a Nazi or Nazi apologist. And don't tell me they aren't all about redefining words to suit that purpose. Latest one I've seen is property damage is not violence but words are. 

[Ran]

13 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

One of the things he talked about economically is how there may end up being countries like the US, Canada, Europe, and Japan clamoring for immigrants over the next 50 years to help support their inevitably older populations.

Funnily enough, one of the signatories of the Harper's Weekly open letter, Matthew Yglesias, has a a book coming out in September that is very much about this topic. 

 

[DMC]

23 minutes ago, Squab said:

I don't know if you are joking but apparently now having a loving family is an unfair advantage. And reading to your kids? Well, you're just disadvantaging other children. Not from some crazy left wing news outlet either, or is it...

That's an interview with a political philosopher.  The worst he said about reading to your kids - from your link:

Quote

‘I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally,’ quips Swift.

In the end Swift agrees that all activities will cause some sort of imbalance—from joining faith communities to playing Saturday cricket—and it’s for this reason that a theory of familial goods needs to be established if the family is to be defended against cries of unfairness. 

My lord, how outrageous!  Way to vastly misrepresent a citation.

44 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

One of the things he talked about economically is how there may end up being countries like the US, Canada, Europe, and Japan clamoring for immigrants over the next 50 years to help support their inevitably older populations.

Oh it's gonna need to happen a lot more soon than anything close to 50 years.  Particularly for Japan.  They're pretty much already there.

[Darth Richard II]

37 minutes ago, Squab said:

I don't know if you are joking but apparently now having a loving family is an unfair advantage. And reading to your kids? Well, you're just disadvantaging other children. Not from some crazy left wing news outlet either, or is it...

They will ban a group of people or loosely defined set of ideas and then expand that group to include anyone committing wrongthink. Lets all agree to ban Nazis and then anyone to the right of about Pol Pot gets called a Nazi or Nazi apologist. And don't tell me they aren't all about redefining words to suit that purpose. Latest one I've seen is property damage is not violence but words are. 

...

...

...

...what? The fuck?

[Zorral]

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/7/22/21325942/free-speech-harpers-letter-bari-weiss-andrew-sullivan

[OldGimletEye]

46 minutes ago, Squab said:

I don't know if you are joking but apparently now having a loving family is an unfair advantage. And reading to your kids? Well, you're just disadvantaging other children. Not from some crazy left wing news outlet either, or is it...

Imagine that we lived all in the same country. And imagine that we were born at the same time. Before being born we each had the same amount of money. With this money we could make various trades. We also could sell insurance contracts to each other in case of bad events like being born in the world poor, sick, or having bad parents. Assuming we had the same objective views of risk, the market would be efficient.

Except, people are not born in the world at the same time. In the financial literature, this is known as lack of incomplete participation and causes deviations from Pareto Efficiency.There is my partial economic justification for the welfare state.

Also, unfortunately, I'm not joking. 

[karaddin]

I think a large part of the disconnect between @TrackerNeil and myself on this comes down to the discrepancy in what we view cancel culture up be. To me it's an invention of those who stand in the way of positive social change that is used to shut down the discussion and any criticism.

What I think you're calling cancel culture I would simply call in-fighting and I agree it can be a major problem within the left. I'm also not sure it can be fixed, to me it seems the result of a group of people that all believe passionately in their own ideas for the future and don't have much deference for authority or seniority. When you overlay that with marginalised communities, whether those are small like the trans community or large like the black American community, you also get a lot of people whose reactions are also driven by a lot of pain and trauma, who are used to being harmed my people abusing their power, and whose politics is intertwined with the above. All of which leaves people with very little patience when they think they see something repeating or looking like it will harm them again.

My approach to trying to change that culture is just advocating for more compassion for each other rather than trying to call it out, but I'm not going to put money on that being effective either.

 

[TrackerNeil]

19 minutes ago, karaddin said:

I think a large part of the disconnect between @TrackerNeil and myself on this comes down to the discrepancy in what we view cancel culture up be. To me it's an invention of those who stand in the way of positive social change that is used to shut down the discussion and any criticism.

I would say that my main problem with CC was stated quite eloquently up-thread by @Knight Of Winter, and that problem has nothing to do with free speech. I'll quote him here:

Quote

I'll preface this by saying this is abstract and speculative: but it seems to me that one of CC's main issues is this constant and ever-vigilant search for assholes of all kinds, this mindset that the world is simply teeming with various -ists and -phobes who lurk hidden in every shadow and are just waiting for an opportunity to jump on you - unless you jump on them first. Such a mindset is predicated on conflict and perpetual search for new targets, whether they deserve it or not. If there are no actual racists to be found, misunderstood "racists" will take their place. If you can't turn your hammer of righteousness on actual bigots, people like Shor will do. If Republicans keep quiet for a week, you'll instead turn on your fellow leftists. Etc. Ultimately, given enough time, CC will devour its own children. That's why I think cases like Shor's are not a bug in CC - instead they're a feature.

Like you, I don't have any problem leftists with calling out assholes for being assholes. But I'm increasingly unsure of their ability to distinguish assholes from non-assholes.

Oh, and the transitive property of CC, too. 

[DaveSumm]

I would add to that, that “calling out assholes” too frequently means de-platforming instead of dismantling their arguments. I know you can’t waste every second responding to every possible assholes point of view, but as was mentioned on the last thread, rational responses are a little too difficult to find on some issues. The fact that certain people have platforms at all (thinking more of journalists, not so much JK Rowling) is because there’s an audience for them, so all deplatforming achieves is to leave that audience behind and doesn’t actually change anyone’s mind on anything.

So I guess cancel culture is less a free speech issue than it is a tactical error of the left. It too often feels like the left’s position is “we’ve gone away and decided the truth on these matters, here’s the language you must now use, or else”, but they’re far less interested in showing their working.

[TrueMetis]

De-platforming is effective "rational responses" aren't. It's not a tactical error, its the exact opposite, treating an argument like it is worth actual debating gives it a form of legitimacy even when it deserve none. Ben Shapiro has had rational responses to literally every word he's spoken, not only does it not work, he doesn't even change his fucking arguments.

[Heartofice]

12 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

De-platforming is effective "rational responses" aren't. It's not a tactical error, its the exact opposite, treating an argument like it is worth actual debating gives it a form of legitimacy even when it deserve none. Ben Shapiro has had rational responses to literally every word he's spoken, not only does it not work, he doesn't even change his fucking arguments.

Funnily enough Ben Shapiro was on Joe Rogan very  recently, in a long form discussion and I would say Rogan , who is hardly an expert on lots of these subjects, dismantled many of the things Shapiro was saying, and really didn’t agree with him. 
 

There is little value in pushing someone like Shapiro off to somewhere that leads to his little rants , which go unanswered. But just put him in a room with someone who is half reasonable and isn’t trying to ‘cancel’ him, and there is quite a lot of value in that discussion. Someone like Shapiro might not change his mind but the viewer might.

[DMC]

7 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

There is little value in pushing someone like Shapiro off to somewhere that leads to his little rants

Oh, I think there is.  Acting as if Ben Shapiro's arguments and rhetoric are legitimate enough to be discussed on mainstream network will garner his stance much more credence with many voters than if he's getting taken down by Joe Rogan instead of, say, Chris Wallace.  There is certainly a tactical benefit in delegitimizing people that propagate hateful views.  More importantly, there's also the normative benefit of making it clear such views are not an acceptable part of discourse, or outside (I hate this term but..) "the Overton window."

[Heartofice]

5 minutes ago, DMC said:

Oh, I think there is.  Acting as if Ben Shapiro's arguments and rhetoric are legitimate enough to be discussed on mainstream network will garner his stance much more credence with many voters than if he's getting taken down by Joe Rogan instead of, say, Chris Wallace.  There is certainly a tactical benefit in delegitimizing people that propagate hateful views.  More importantly, there's also the normative benefit of making it clear such views are not an acceptable part of discourse, or outside (I hate this term but..) "the Overton window."

I disagree. Left to his own devices, someone like Shapiro is able to just run off his arguments unchallenged, and will always find and audience for it. But put him in front of someone who he respects and more importantly the audience respects and you get a real understanding of where the flaws in his rhetoric are. Rogan has done the same thing to other characters like Candace Owens, and it’s times like that where you really see just how stupid some people are
 

I think the issue is if views are not challenged, which is part of the problem with partisan platforms. 

[Ran]

1 minute ago, DMC said:

(I hate this term but..) "the Overton window."

Time to defenstrate the Overton window.

I'll never forget when Shapiro ran away, tail between his legs, after calling arch-conservative Andrew Neil a "leftist" and whining that Neil was pressing him only because he was chasing clout because of Shapiro being more famous.

[sologdin]

can’t waste every second responding to every possible assholes point of view,

a matter of shrugging away that some numbnut on the internet is wrong, yeah.

 

Ben Shapiro has had rational responses to literally every word he's spoken, not only does it not work, he doesn't even change his fucking arguments.

i had to look him up. he seems very dumb, but why would anyone care enough about some random kid with silly ideas on his youtube channel?

[DMC]

26 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I think the issue is if views are not challenged, which is part of the problem with partisan platforms.

I think the issue is some views are not worthy of being challenged.  Not gonna dignify that with a response and all that.  Obviously, Shapiro or anyone else is always going to find an outlet, especially these days.  Hell, one could argue that for many "journalists" at least that have been subject to "cancel culture," getting lambasted by the left boosts their career prospects.  Tucker Carlson may have absconded to a "vacation," but I'm sure his publicist is loving all the coverage he's getting right now.

[Heartofice]

11 minutes ago, DMC said:

I think the issue is some views are not worthy of being challenged.  Not gonna dignify that with a response and all that.  Obviously, Shapiro or anyone else is always going to find an outlet, especially these days.  Hell, one could argue that for many "journalists" at least that have been subject to "cancel culture," getting lambasted by the left boosts their career prospects.  Tucker Carlson may have absconded to a "vacation," but I'm sure his publicist is loving all the coverage he's getting right now.

Yeah again, I disagree. Someone like Shapiro or Owens are both good at making their arguments seem reasonable, especially when left unchallenged. And on many of these issues they might be able to gather sympathy because there are kernels of truth in what they are saying. 
 

You can either pretend these people don’t exist and that by ignoring them or banishing them then their arguments will lose their power, but that doesn’t happen. Even if you manage to ‘cancel’ one person , someone else will take up the mantle and be fuelled by the seeming injustice of that cancellation. 
 

I think what we actually need is more daylight for a lot of these views, not less. If Candace Owens think global warming doesn’t exist then let her say that in front of a Joe Rogan and have her be utterly ridiculed for it for years to come. If Ben Shapiro thinks black people are to blame for their situation, let him say it and have his notions be challenged. Those ideas are not going away because you hide them away somewhere or cancel one person.

 

I also think there is nothing more powerful than the ‘forbidden’ information. If Twitter / YouTube / Google don’t want you to know something then it holds a lot of allure and seems to many people like information that is being kept from them. That sort of thing is pretty enticing to a certain type of person

[TrackerNeil]

5 hours ago, Ran said:

I'll never forget when Shapiro ran away, tail between his legs, after calling arch-conservative Andrew Neil a "leftist" and whining that Neil was pressing him only because he was chasing clout because of Shapiro being more famous.

Heh...yeah, that was great.

The trick to debating Shapiro is to keep in mind that he's really just a smarmy teenager who isn't as smart as he thinks he is., Ben Shapiro has a very particular way of reframing the topic of debate in a way that leaves his opponents at a disadvantage, but Neil refused to let the frame of reference be shifted. Sean Illing once politely dismantled Shapiro, in an interesting exchange.

I go back and forth on "deplatforming" people. One one hand, I agree that more discussion helps reveal these people for who they are, so there is value in debating them. However, I think there are some whose opinions are bizarre, outrageous, or downright hateful enough to warrant them being shunned, or those who really aren't interested in debate but in publicly trolling others. Dave Rubin, IMO, falls into the first category, while, say, Richard Spencer is reliably in the second. Maybe Shapiro, too...I've seen him deliberately use the wrong pronouns with trans people, obviously just trying to tick them off. Fuck that guy.

[Ran]

20 minutes ago, sologdin said:

i had to look him up. he seems very dumb, but why would anyone care enough about some random kid with silly ideas on his youtube channel?

He was a "wunderkind", studying at UCLA a 16 and getting a law degree for Harvard by 23, while writing in nationally syndicated columns at 17, so he was embraced by the right... but now he's 36 and he still thinks he's a wunderkind, and that being smart is a substitute for empathy and nuance.