"Cancel Culture" 3

[Essan]

8 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

It should be noted leftism isn’t really synonymous with liberal, and conservative isn’t synonymous with Right-wing.

Outside of the USA, liberal is the middle ground between the left and the right.    This often leads to confusion when discussing politics with people from other countries  

[DanteGabriel]

8 hours ago, TrackerNeil said:

Let me point out that I was speaking loosely and had never heard of the "horseshoe theory" before today. I don't actually believe that going left eventually brings you right, although I DO think that there is a breed of leftist as intellectually incurious as any conservative you'd care to name.

I would think of it as two axes: left or right politics on the X and dogmatism vs willingness to engage competing ideas on the Y. Kind of how those widely circulated media bias charts track political lean and trustworthiness/rigor on separate axes.

But forgive my liberal bias in thinking a high "willingness to engage" score is more rare on the right side of the X axis.

[Varysblackfyre321]

34 minutes ago, Knight Of Winter said:

What I'd want to see - 1) ceasing of harassment and online abuse towards anyone; 2) a little bit of goodwill and presumption of innocence towards the "wrongdoers". Ask them instead of accuse. discuss instead of cancel, hear what they have to say and treat them like human beings; 3) society when twitter mobs don't have the power to ruin someone's lives based on a whim.

I think these 3 would be good principles to happen.

To the bolded, I think treating someone as a human doesn't demand other human beings associate with you despite any of your statements or actions. 

”Canceling” someone by itself is not treating someone in humanely.

For example; Twitter deciding to give David Duke a platform to spread ideas that have literally lead to genocide. He says he's not anti-Semitic. I don't think having a nice debate will change his mind. 

To 3) people in public expressing discontent with someone’s political stances and businesses taking stock in their perception public sentiment  will always be a thing. 

To try to make ”Twitter mobs” not thing would be trying to silence them.

To number I sure that's a good thing.

 

[Frey family reunion]

40 minutes ago, Essan said:

Outside of the USA, liberal is the middle ground between the left and the right.    This often leads to confusion when discussing politics with people from other countries  

Since we don’t have a middle ground in the good ole US of A we don’t have a name for it.

[Knight Of Winter]

10 hours ago, DanteGabriel said:

It would take more than a few words to make that description accurate. She was his catering manager. The dates cited were off. She implicated her family and their employees in the hateful and bigoted things she said. Those go a long way to explain why the community turned on this business. And the site also misstated the consequences that business suffered, as Fury explained. It's an appallingly slanted description on a bunch of levels, like Breitbart level bad, which makes me wonder about the site author's integrity.

How much do you know about this site, its author (s) and its methods of vetting info?

 

Obviously I know nothing about authors. If I were to investigate identity, backstory, motives and political stance of every writer whose site or article I read - I'd be spending 24/7 on the internet. Generally I trust sites which are well-written, provide sources, until I find the reason not to trust them. You've given me such reason, enough to doubt the reliability of this site.

However, I'd add, this site is not synonymous with CC itself. Listing bad examples which site provides doesn't prove that CC doesn't exist - it proves only that site in question is unreliable source for it.

10 hours ago, DanteGabriel said:

So how many of the "cancelled people" listed on this site were truly Innocents who made one mistake? Adams, Bennett, and Napear didn't get suddenly struck by lightning on a clear day. To borrow an image from Terry Pratchett, it was more like they climbed to the top of a hill during a lightning storm, wearing copper armor, and yelled "All gods are bastards!"

Moving on from the part of my post above, let's agree that reliability of site can be questioned to such a degree as to doubt eevrything written on it.  From now on, I'll list examples which are either unmentioned or corroborated by other sources.

10 hours ago, DanteGabriel said:

Again, you don't know how often the results are unjust. You just have a general impression that it constantly happens to undeserving people. Do you have any statistics to back this up? I doubt we'll ever know, partially because there's no bright line that clearly indicates when someone has done something worth losing their job. But I've listed a number of cases now where the reality is more complicated than the description lets on. Do we need to vet every example? Even the sources they cite are sometimes suspect.

Neither of us can know how often the results are unjust - no more than any statistics can be found (or possibly produced). Therefore, arguing either pro or contra CC on the basis on statistics in meaningless from the start. Each of us is going by their intuition, personal experiences and gut feeling. 

So while I don't statically know how common are unjust firings, I think the answer is "common enough". Examples where the person was not only accused and fired, but sometimes also harassed, doxed, abused and generally treated like no human should, only for them to turn out innocent - are unfortunately common more then they should be - with disastrous consequences for those afflicted (if you want, there's at least 6-7 more after just a very brief research). And this is not (just) about CC's failure rate, it's also about it's utter inability to learn from its mistakes. Two months from now, when some new Shor emerges - do you think he'll be treated differently? Will he be allowed to post inconvinient research? Will he be given benefit of doubt? Will his accusers think "ok, maybe we screwed last time, let's be smarter this time"? I don't think so. Any system not learning from its mistakes is bound to repeat them - and that's exactly what CC is doing.

Personally, I think the reason for CC's far-from-good success rate is its paranoid mindset with ever constant search for various "wrongdoers" of any kind. Such is their fervor to find and expose the "guilty" that that don't really care if someone actually is guilty or not. Genuine misogyny and sexual harassment is lumped together with mistakes, misunderstandings, inappropriate jokes and people who research gender. Genuine racism is lumped together with posting research on effectiveness of violent protests. Etc. I find that quite a destructive mindset to have, especially when elevated on a level of whole society. And as a result, people are suffering where they shouldn't.  

11 hours ago, DanteGabriel said:

As I and others have said a bunch of times, people have been cancelled for stupid and capricious reasons forever. This is a democratization of the process. Now a privileged person can be cancelled instead of having the power to cancel others at a whim (I want to speak to your manager!"). I wish the "mob" had un-erring instincts, but life is full of injustice.

More like ohlocratization than democratization, but I digress. What makes you think this is such a good thing? We're talking here about destroying someone - financially, psychologically, ostracism-wise and reputation-wise. More than one person has committed suicide over this. Basically, what we're talking about is power to ruin someone's life. Do you want twitter mobs in charge of such a power. I don't. This is such a terrible power that, IMO, the very opposite of democratization is required - it should be limited to as few as possible. Ideally to nobody.

Seriously, you live in a country where half of people think Trump is the best choice for a president (and this is not a jab at USA, I assure you that my fellow countrypeople are equally lacking in sound judgement). Would you like to live in a society there Trump-supporting twitter mobs decide what's right or not, and who should get fired over what reason? I'd personally find such a world absolutely terrifying. 

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Now a privileged person can be cancelled

This, I think, is very wrong. They were plenty of cases we've discussed here across three iterations of this thread: Shor, Wadi, Bennet, Damore, Shepard, Kaepernick, Schek etc. We can disagree whether their firings were justified or not - and that's fine. That's what this entire thread is about. But I think we can't disagree that these people were neither particularly powerful nor influential. 

Actually, we've discussed one example of a person who is, without any doubt - privileged: and that's JKR. Despite her views, she... wasn't cancelled - her books are still in high demand, she's still filthy rich and her publisher still has contract with her. All in all, CC succeeded in canceling ordinary people and failed in canceling powerful ones. Which is pretty much expected, like everything else. But then lets drop the pretense that CC is this new brilliant weapon before which privileged tremble and have to face consequences.

 

[DMC]

48 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

I would think of it as two axes: left or right politics on the X and dogmatism vs willingness to engage competing ideas on the Y. Kind of how those widely circulated media bias charts track political lean and trustworthiness/rigor on separate axes.

The standard two-dimensional ideological scale is economic on the x-axis and social (i.e. libertarian/authoritarian or "individualist/collectivist") on the y-axis.  Something like this, where you can visualize the horseshoe from fascism to conservatism to liberalism to state socialism.

[Knight Of Winter]

42 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

For example; Twitter deciding to give David Duke a platform to spread ideas that have literally lead to genocide. He says he's not anti-Semitic. I don't think having a nice debate will change his mind. 

Oh come on, this is not about David Duke, CC goes way wider than that. I'm not pro-Duke, and I'm not questioning that something should be done about his speech. I'm questioning mob's ability to differentiate various Dukes from various Shors of this world. From what I've seen - I seriously doubt it.

Combine that with mob's propensity for harassment and online abuse, and you get perfect recipe for ruining the lives of undeserving people.

As for 3) - I'm not saying that Twitter mobs should be shut down. I'm saying that there's something wrong with the society where Twitter mobs have such power.

[sologdin]

simply a database of cases

but it lacks editorial judgment and manipulates the alleged facts to fit its predetermined political objective? that makes it a fine clausewitzian exercise, but is, once exposed, therefore trash?

 

leftist as intellectually incurious as any conservative you'd care to name

no doubt. the common law had as its great villain the officious intermeddler, and stalinism's number one enemy was the counter-revolutionary trotskyite opportunist. similarly my archnemesis is the lumpenized antisocial nihilist--though a close runner-up is the insufficiently studied and newly radicalized ex-liberal who issues unwarranted condemnations regularly with vitriol.  

 

 The first one is a very high degree of certainty that one's ideology is correct (and therefore people who disagree deserve to suffer). The second is simply unchecked power. 

i like these two elements for their elegance and explanatory power, agreed.  and i can see that if these two things occur, it will be difficult to persuade anyone afflicted thereby that the consequences thereof are deviations from doctrine (as in stalinist implementation of left ideas) as opposed to the recommendations of doctrine (as with fascism).

[DanteGabriel]

44 minutes ago, Knight Of Winter said:

However, I'd add, this site is not synonymous with CC itself. Listing bad examples which site provides doesn't prove that CC doesn't exist - it proves only that site in question is unreliable source for it.

No, and no one ever denied it doesn't exist. It just may not be the huge threat you and the JK Rowlings and Bari Weisses and Bill Mahers of the world are telling us it is.

 

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So while I don't statically know how common are unjust firings, I think the answer is "common enough". Examples where the person was not only accused and fired, but sometimes also harassed, doxed, abused and generally treated like no human should, only for them to turn out innocent - are unfortunately common more then they should be - with disastrous consequences for those afflicted (if you want, there's at least 6-7 more after just a very brief research). And this is not (just) about CC's failure rate, it's also about it's utter inability to learn from its mistakes. Two months from now, when some new Shor emerges - do you think he'll be treated differently? Will he be allowed to post inconvinient research? Will he be given benefit of doubt? Will his accusers think "ok, maybe we screwed last time, let's be smarter this time"? I don't think so. Any system not learning from its mistakes is bound to repeat them - and that's exactly what CC is doing.

Personally, I think the reason for CC's far-from-good success rate is its paranoid mindset with ever constant search for various "wrongdoers" of any kind. Such is their fervor to find and expose the "guilty" that that don't really care if someone actually is guilty or not. Genuine misogyny and sexual harassment is lumped together with mistakes, misunderstandings, inappropriate jokes and people who research gender. Genuine racism is lumped together with posting research on effectiveness of violent protests. Etc. I find that quite a destructive mindset to have, especially when elevated on a level of whole society. And as a result, people are suffering where they shouldn't. 

This is true about any power group in history. People of color have lived at the whim of white people in this country for centuries. Women have lived at the mercy of men around the world forever. Gay people have lived at the whim of hetero people forever. 

As for "learning from mistakes" -- how long as cancel culture been around? Wisdom takes time to develop. In fact, maybe cancel culture is a way that society at large tries to learn from mistakes. "Oh, right, we shouldn't be racist or misogynistic any more. Well, punish some wrong-doers, I guess." Of course they're getting it wrong sometimes, because people get things wrong, and huge masses of people get things wrong. 

 

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More like ohlocratization than democratization, but I digress. What makes you think this is such a good thing? We're talking here about destroying someone - financially, psychologically, ostracism-wise and reputation-wise. More than one person has committed suicide over this. Basically, what we're talking about is power to ruin someone's life. Do you want twitter mobs in charge of such a power. I don't. This is such a terrible power that, IMO, the very opposite of democratization is required - it should be limited to as few as possible. Ideally to nobody.

That power has existed forever, and been wielded to worse purposes on even more inoffensive people by smaller, worse groups than "the Twitter mob."

 

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Seriously, you live in a country where half of people think Trump is the best choice for a president (and this is not a jab at USA, I assure you that my fellow countrypeople are equally lacking in sound judgement). Would you like to live in a society there Trump-supporting twitter mobs decide what's right or not, and who should get fired over what reason? I'd personally find such a world absolutely terrifying. 

When you talk about Trump-supporting mobs deciding what's right or not, you're basically describing the first few hundred years of the history of the United States. Angry, ignorant white people have cancelled members and entire communities of every other goddamn demographic in this country forever. They just didn't coordinate their efforts with Twitter. If you find such a world terrifying, maybe you understand the rage of previously marginalized or unheard people who now use the power afforded them by social media to voice their complaints.

 

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This, I think, is very wrong. They were plenty of cases we've discussed here across three iterations of this thread: Shor, Wadi, Bennet, Damore, Shepard, Kaepernick, Schek etc. We can disagree whether their firings were justified or not - and that's fine. That's what this entire thread is about. But I think we can't disagree that these people were neither particularly powerful nor influential. 

Actually, we've discussed one example of a person who is, without any doubt - privileged: and that's JKR. Despite her views, she... wasn't cancelled - her books are still in high demand, she's still filthy rich and her publisher still has contract with her. All in all, CC succeeded in canceling ordinary people and failed in canceling powerful ones. Which is pretty much expected, like everything else. But then lets drop the pretense that CC is this new brilliant weapon before which privileged tremble and have to face consequences.

 

Bennett wasn't influential? He was in charge of the editorial page of the goddamn New York Times. Wadi wasn't influential? He was a wealthy businessman who could "cancel" any employee he wanted at any time, and he did in fact cancel his own daughter. Even people like Adams and Napear had more power and platform than a single ordinary Twitter user.

Yes, JK Rowling is too big to really cancel -- though I wonder how well any new book she puts out would do. She won't go to prison or end up penniless, but maybe she'll sell less. Same is probably true of, say, Oprah, or Jeff Bezos, or anyone else with gobs of money and cultural capital. Such people have always been beyond the reach of the kind of regulatory systems of society. I don't see how that's an indictment of the unique failings of cancel culture.

Again, I am not saying Internet mob justice is a great thing. It's a consequence of the power of social media, which I too find to be too much. I would have been happy if we'd gotten as far as email, websites, and Livejournal. But I disagree with your attempt to impute to me the "pretense that CC is this brilliant new weapon." I observed that the privileged have seen some of their own taken down by it and overhype the threat it poses.

We're going in circles here, the thread is past 400, and I want to stop before you again try and accuse me of being some kind of champion for indiscriminate mob justice. But I'm glad you have at least acknowledged that this website is very suspect.

[Varysblackfyre321]

49 minutes ago, Knight Of Winter said:

Oh come on, this is not about David Duke, CC goes way wider than that. I'm not pro-Duke, and I'm not questioning that something should be done about his speech. I'm questioning mob's ability to differentiate various Dukes from various Shors of this world. From what I've seen - I seriously doubt it.

Combine that with mob's propensity for harassment and online abuse, and you get perfect recipe for ruining the lives of undeserving people.

As for 3) - I'm not saying that Twitter mobs should be shut down. I'm saying that there's something wrong with the society where Twitter mobs have such power.

You've posited that someone getting canceled is being treated in humanely.

David Duke was ”canceled” from various media platforms.

Was he treated in humanely?

I think you'd agree ”canceling” someone by itself is not worthy of condemnation.

I have to say so long as individual exists in a society public sentiment will affect how an individual is treated.

There's nothing wrong in it of itself  with business choosing to dissociate with x.

I know you recognize this not to be a new thing.

Twitter, social media in general simply allow people to do what people have always done in society big and small.

Pass judgements on individuals.

I don't see ”Twitter mobs” as some existential threat to freedom of speech, and democracy.

58 minutes ago, Knight Of Winter said:

Personally, I think the reason for CC's far-from-good success rate

You haven't given a rate. You say it's success rate isn't good, but you're just giving a personal impression of it being like that off a few examples.

I can easily say it's largely successful if I desire to cite a few examples.

Molineux, Duke, Spencher, Jones they're all less dangerous by virtue of being kicked off various social media platforms.

58 minutes ago, Knight Of Winter said:

We're talking here about destroying someone - financially, psychologically, ostracism-wise and reputation-wise. More than one person has committed suicide over this. Basically, what we're talking about is power to ruin someone's life. Do you want twitter mobs in charge of such a power. I don't. This is such a terrible power that, IMO, the very opposite of democratization is required - it should be limited to as few as possible. Ideally to nobody.

We’re talking about a public perception of an individual effecting how they get along in society.

58 minutes ago, Knight Of Winter said:

Personally, I think the reason for CC's far-from-good success rate is its paranoid mindset with ever constant search for various "wrongdoers" of any kind. Such is their fervor to find and expose the "guilty" that that don't really care if someone actually is guilty or not. Genuine misogyny and sexual harassment is lumped together with mistakes, misunderstandings, inappropriate jokes and people who research gender. Genuine racism is lumped together with posting research on effectiveness of violent protests. Etc. I

I think CC is a useful boogeyman for sexists, and racists to blame for whenever there's a social consequence for their speech.

[Knight Of Winter]

@DanteGabriel - sure, then let's wrap this up.  

14 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

We're going in circles here, the thread is past 400, and I want to stop before you again try and accuse me of being some kind of champion for indiscriminate mob justice. But I'm glad you have at least acknowledged that this website is very suspect.

Just to adress this - I'm not accusing you of anything, and while I'm fallible and susceptible of strawmaning your argument, I generally try to avoid it and answer the points you made. So likewise,  I'd appreciate your assumption of at least some goodwill for me. This was a debate of two people with different opinions, nothing more. And the one I enjoyed and which gave me some food for thought.

Other than this, while we agree on some stuff: the main difference is that it seems to me that you think (correct me if I'm wrong) that CC may be fallible, but has many upsides and can be used as a good tool to make better, less-bigoted world. I think it opposite - that it's a step in wrong direction. Elaborating on this will be - as you say - going in circles, so we can agree to disagree here.

[DanteGabriel]

20 minutes ago, Knight Of Winter said:

@DanteGabriel - sure, then let's wrap this up.  

Just to adress this - I'm not accusing you of anything, and while I'm fallible and susceptible of strawmaning your argument, I generally try to avoid it and answer the points you made. So likewise,  I'd appreciate your assumption of at least some goodwill for me. This was a debate of two people with different opinions, nothing more. And the one I enjoyed and which gave me some food for thought.

Other than this, while we agree on some stuff: the main difference is that it seems to me that you think (correct me if I'm wrong) that CC may be fallible, but has many upsides and can be used as a good tool to make better, less-bigoted world. I think it opposite - that it's a step in wrong direction. Elaborating on this will be - as you say - going in circles, so we can agree to disagree here.

I appreciate the clarification and the discussion we've had. It is a long distance from the screaming match we had about whether we were ignorant or lazy for talking about Nazis in an earlier iteration of this topic.

I wouldn't say "many upsides" -- I am more making an almost sociological observation that crowds of otherwise non-influential people now may have access to some small amount of power that people like Masjid Wadi and James Bennett used to have exclusively. I think people are working towards a less-bigoted world but the very nature of crowd dynamics makes it inevitable that they will go overboard. And if assholes think they need to watch what they say or do because someone might try to cancel them over it... is it really that different from when religion was more central to the moral underpinnings of society?

[sologdin]

The standard two-dimensional ideological scale is economic on the x-axis and social (i.e. libertarian/authoritarian or "individualist/collectivist") on the y-axis.  Something like this, where you can visualize the horseshoe from fascism to conservatism to liberalism to state socialism.

not a bad two-dimensional representation.  the thing with the horseshoe is that it suggests a continuum as though the breaks in doctrine were merely incremental variations on each other.  i still wanna see a three-dimensional representation that expands it to 8 fields, based i think on procedural methodology. we can have state socialists who are peaceful parliamentarians (kautsky) and others who are violent conspirators (lenin). we can imagine theocrats who run both ways (the current pope both vs OBL).

 

something wrong with the society where Twitter mobs have such power.

does such a thing exist in a meaningful way, or isn't it just some people having a boycott and now the boycott is republished repeatedly on the internet so its target has no insulatory repose? and if it does exist, what is wrong with boycotts?

[Varysblackfyre321]

27 minutes ago, Knight Of Winter said:

Other than this, while we agree on some stuff: the main difference is that it seems to me that you think (correct me if I'm wrong) that CC may be fallible, but has many upsides and can be used as a good tool to make better, less-bigoted world. I think it opposite - that it's a step in wrong direction. Elaborating on this will be - as you say - going in circles, so we can agree to disagree here.

I think it's just society functioning as it always has, and always will.

An individual is not insular in society, judgements will be made of them, by others  and those judgements will/can garner social repercussions.