"Cancel Culture" 3

[Varysblackfyre321]

2 hours ago, Knight Of Winter said:

Second thing where we (maybe) disagree is the instrument through which CC operates. In healthy society, twitter mobs should not have the power to decide fate of someone's job, or act as a supreme judge of someone's moral actions whose judgement will decide their societal fate. There's a myriad of reasons why I think so, one of the main ones being that angry mobs can (and already have) also be produced by right-wingers. You pointed out Dixie Chiks, who are far from the only example (e.g. Kaepernick).

To the bolded, I think you understand the public has never not been judgemental of an individual’s conduct. 

Employers firing someone, or businesses choosing to dissociate from an unpopular ideas isn't new. 

You've acknowledged the Dixie Chick fiasco happened before Twitter so I think you realize cancel culture isn't an advent of modern social media.

I have to say, I don't see quelling of it as being something that can happen unless there's a willingness to suppress even more speech.

People presenting x individual who shouldn't get money, are using their freedom of speech. 

[Knight Of Winter]

12 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

To the bolded, I think you understand the public has never not been judgemental of an individual’s conduct. 

Oh, of course it was - you're correct about that. Cancel culture in some form is as old as civilization itself, there's no qualm about it.

However, I'd add that rise of social media and general bipolarisation of US's society had amplified it to yet-of-unseen degree. Along with its consequences. 

[Zorral]

The most ancient cancel culture is the patriarchy.  The second oldest is white supremacy (or whatever the equivalent is in classical Chinese, Hindi, etc. cultures).

 

[Targknight]

Don’t like cancel culture. Cancel Culture violates the first amendment. They can all be sued for violating the first amendment.

[Zorral]

Yes!  Let's sue the KKK, the cops, the colonialists (who write the histories), the jokers who wrote the Virginia History textbooks and o so very many more of the cancel cultures!

P.S. that guy above is a troll bot, by the way.

 

[sologdin]

Cancel Culture violates the first amendment. They can all be sued for violating the first amendment.

the first amendment applies to state action; this proposed 1983 claim is accordingly meritless as against private boycotts.

beyond that legal doctrine, private boycotts are perfectly consistent with the rights of expression and association--boycotts are themselves an expression of disapproval and it is difficult to compel association.

 

that said, boycotts are fairly progressive and reasonable in comparison to proscription. better a twitter mob than sulla killing holders of rival political opinions. to the left of roman thugs--liberals have gone too far this time.

[DanteGabriel]

8 hours ago, Knight Of Winter said:

Okay, if you want my response: as far as I understand it, you're arguing two things here:

1) that site in question omits information relevant to the case, and thus its relevancy as a source should be question.

Nothing to argue here. You made your point well with these 3 examples, where providing just a few more words (such as Wadi's daughter also being his catering manager) would indeed bring some context and explain some stuff.  Personally I'll continue to use it - since it's the only database of such kind that I know - but will do additional research before posting examples from it.

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?

 

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2) that these 3 cases feature people who were clearly in the wrong, and who deserved some comeuppance for their action, possibly in the form of firing.

On surface level, I have no objections to this. Bennet, for example, is sort of anti-Shor example - guy who everyone agrees was unproffesional, screwed up big way, and proved himself incompetent as an editor. So if you want me to say that "cancel culture" occasionally hits the mark and finds targets whose bigotry would otherwise escape public attention - I certainly agree.

Neither you nor I can say whether this site "occasionally" misses the mark or how often social media-driven cancellations are truly unjust. How many of the descriptions on that site are as biased as the description of Bennett? How many of the listed cases are David Shors and how many are Wadis?

Here's another case that I knew about before I read the site:

Grant Napear: Responded to tweet by saying 'All Lives Matter, Every Single One!!!'

Again this is a gross oversimplification. Read this:

https://ftw.usatoday.com/2020/06/kings-demarcus-cousins-grant-napear-resigned-twiter

Basically it looks like DeMarcus Cousins, a troublemaker player, tried to get him fired. There's a history between them. And when Cousins baited Napear into responding as he wanted, other players, including a highly respected former player, chimed in about what a racist he was. So yes, there was a tweet involved in his firing. But like Bennett and Adams, there was a lot more antagonistic history within this franchise than the site summary relates. It wasn't just that he innocently tweeted something and got canned. Players thought he was racist. One tried to get him fired, and succeeded.

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!"

 

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First thing I'd (presumably) disagree is the overall success rate of such examples. The number of times that "cancel culture" has fired, harassed, abused and labeled people whose actions were legitimate, or at least ambiguous, is much above any reasonable threshold. If any other system had such a failure rate - its users would be rightfully furious. And not only does CC often end up targeting undeserving people, it also shows no sign of self-reflection, no sign of rational debate, no sign of "due process" and no signs of learning from its mistakes. I fully believe that cases like Shor's will start piling up.

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.

This strikes me as yet another panic kicked up by out of touch people who are uncomfortable with how culture has developed. It strikes me as an exaggerated and manufactured crisis hyped up by people who never had to face consequences for offensive speech or entitled actions before.

 

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Second thing where we (maybe) disagree is the instrument through which CC operates. In healthy society, twitter mobs should not have the power to decide fate of someone's job, or act as a supreme judge of someone's moral actions whose judgement will decide their societal fate. There's a myriad of reasons why I think so, one of the main ones being that angry mobs can (and already have) also be produced by right-wingers. You pointed out Dixie Chiks, who are far from the only example (e.g. Kaepernick).

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.

[Martell Spy]

Another unjust cancellation. (Sarcasm)

David Duke has been banned from Twitter

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/31/tech/david-duke-twitter-ban/index.html

Quote

 

New York (CNN Business)Twitter permanently banned the account of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke on Thursday night, after multiple violations of the company's hateful conduct policy.

The company's policy forbids accounts that "promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people" on the basis of personal characteristics. Duke, who was the leader of a KKK offshoot from 1974 to 1978, has been routinely condemned for racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia.

It was unclear what specific action warranted Duke's suspension, but a Twitter spokesperson told CNN that the decision was "in line with our recently-updated guidance on harmful links."

 

 

[TrackerNeil]

12 hours ago, sologdin said:

am a bit skeptical of the horseshoe theory of the spectrum. specifically, i do not know if left principles, if taken progressively far enough along a continuum quantitatively, qualitatively transform dialectically into rightwing principles. if there's an appearance of that sort of transformation, my hypothesis is that the appearance is not correct because either the principles were always already rightwing or that the principle itself has changed qualitatively not because of internal quantitative development but because of an extraneous, pathological impingement.  

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.

[Varysblackfyre321]

21 minutes 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.

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

[Altherion]

13 hours ago, sologdin said:

am a bit skeptical of the horseshoe theory of the spectrum. specifically, i do not know if left principles, if taken progressively far enough along a continuum quantitatively, qualitatively transform dialectically into rightwing principles. if there's an appearance of that sort of transformation, my hypothesis is that the appearance is not correct because either the principles were always already rightwing or that the principle itself has changed qualitatively not because of internal quantitative development but because of an extraneous, pathological impingement.  

I don't think the ideologies ever converge on their principles, but after a certain point, they become so monstrous in their actions that people outside of them simply don't care anymore what the principles are. There are really only two ingredients that go into creating such an evil. 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. It doesn't matter what the underlying ideology is (it could be some variant of Christianity or dialectical materialism or corporatism or anything else); once it accumulates enough power that nothing in a specific domain can oppose it, it invariably starts committing atrocities.

[Varysblackfyre321]

12 hours ago, Knight Of Winter said:

However, I'd add that rise of social media and general bipolarisation of US's society had amplified it to yet-of-unseen degree. Along with its consequences. 

Not really. Like in the 50s in America being an outspoken socialist probably could you jailed and lose everything.

I have to ask what do you want to see actually happen?

Because I can see things that would entail the silencing of others.

The people on Twitter are usually just exercising their freedom of speech.

Should they be pushed to practice self-censorship? Should government step in?

Like what do you want exactly to see happen?

[Heartofice]

One of the issues as I see it, is one of incentives within the media and the internet.

Right now to get your voice heard in the cacophony of social media, the incentive is to be as loud and reactive as possible. You often need to deliver ideas and messages in simplistic, extreme , emotional terms if you want to gain any traction.

Social media also incentivises short snappy messaging and makes adding nuance or illustrating complicated themes almost impossible. Also I just don’t think people are interested in nuance, it doesn’t hit the right brain receptors.

Online media itself relies on clicks and views, and going viral often means an over the top, emotion grabbing headline and skewed content. On top of that it’s been pretty apparent that to be successful you need to find a target market and deliver content they already agree with, that’s why you get the Breitbarts of the world. 
 

I see Cancel Culture as just the logical conclusion of our social media landscape, along with many other unpleasant symptoms. Until there is deep intervention into the financing incentives of the internet and media itself I don’t see how anything will change. 
 

Ive even heard Jack Dorsey of Twitter talking about how he wants to try and help burst those echo chamber bubbles, but I can’t see it really happening, the moves they’ve made so far have been very minor. 
 

[DanteGabriel]

18 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

One of the issues as I see it, is one of incentives within the media and the internet.

Right now to get your voice heard in the cacophony of social media, the incentive is to be as loud and reactive as possible. You often need to deliver ideas and messages in simplistic, extreme , emotional terms if you want to gain any traction.

Social media also incentivises short snappy messaging and makes adding nuance or illustrating complicated themes almost impossible. Also I just don’t think people are interested in nuance, it doesn’t hit the right brain receptors.

 

Indeed. I've been saying for years that the attention-based economy is going to be the doom of our species.

I guess the need to use short, snappy messaging and the elimination of nuance might even extend to the creation of a website devoted to tracking cancel culture, where a subject's complicated relationship with an employer and colleagues that led to a firing might get boiled down to "fired for a single tweet." You might use simplistic and extreme appeals to fear of the nebulous "cancellation" to get your site noticed.

Then an ignorant person who isn't interested in nuance and just wants to be proven right about a Dramatic Moral Panic That is Taking Over the Internet will cite your list of exaggerated one-line horror stories. And if that person had already been making hyperbolic claims about great numbers of people having their lives destroyed for mere accusations of racism and had trouble backing them up, they'd probably be poorly equipped to respond honestly when someone makes a substantive, fact-based critique of the list. Woe to the integrity of discourse when such calamities happen!

[maarsen]

38 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

One of the issues as I see it, is one of incentives within the media and the internet.

Right now to get your voice heard in the cacophony of social media, the incentive is to be as loud and reactive as possible. You often need to deliver ideas and messages in simplistic, extreme , emotional terms if you want to gain any traction.

Social media also incentivises short snappy messaging and makes adding nuance or illustrating complicated themes almost impossible. Also I just don’t think people are interested in nuance, it doesn’t hit the right brain receptors.

Online media itself relies on clicks and views, and going viral often means an over the top, emotion grabbing headline and skewed content. On top of that it’s been pretty apparent that to be successful you need to find a target market and deliver content they already agree with, that’s why you get the Breitbarts of the world. 
 

I see Cancel Culture as just the logical conclusion of our social media landscape, along with many other unpleasant symptoms. Until there is deep intervention into the financing incentives of the internet and media itself I don’t see how anything will change. 
 

Ive even heard Jack Dorsey of Twitter talking about how he wants to try and help burst those echo chamber bubbles, but I can’t see it really happening, the moves they’ve made so far have been very minor. 
 

The issue seems to be that those with very little to say see Twitter and such as a way of gaining attention that is otherwise directed elsewhere. Simplistic extreme and emotional statements are not a tool but the actual content they wish to put out. There is no attempt to debate as debate is not the intent. The intent is to be the biggest bubble in a sea of froth. 

[Heartofice]

14 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

Indeed. I've been saying for years that the attention-based economy is going to be the doom of our species.

I guess the need to use short, snappy messaging and the elimination of nuance might even extend to the creation of a website devoted to tracking cancel culture, where a subject's complicated relationship with an employer and colleagues that led to a firing might get boiled down to "fired for a single tweet." You might use simplistic and extreme appeals to fear of the nebulous "cancellation" to get your site noticed.

Then an ignorant person who isn't interested in nuance and just wants to be proven right about a Dramatic Moral Panic That is Taking Over the Internet will cite your list of exaggerated one-line horror stories. And if that person had already been making hyperbolic claims about great numbers of people having their lives destroyed for mere accusations of racism and had trouble backing them up, they'd probably be poorly equipped to respond honestly when someone makes a substantive, fact-based critique of the list. Woe to the integrity of discourse when such calamities happen!

Lol, I know you think this is some sort of clever gotcha.. again, but before you start slapping yourself on the back too hard, the link posted, without comment btw, is simply a database of cases, used as a way of documenting known cases. They are also mostly user submitted, and they contain links to the actual news article. So you are free to go and read the article if you wish. 

I posted it as a useful resource for discussion. I think it is. I'm not claiming that everything contained on the site is accurate or that every case is someone underserving of their punishment (and neither is the site itself)

So yes, I'm sure it's very amusing to you what you wrote, but it's almost as amusing as the idea that someone who spends large amounts of their day engaging in bad faith arguments, online harassment and personal attacks on people they don't agree with,  should be someone who seems to want to claim that cancel culture doesn't exist, or is justified.

Anyway, from that very website:
 

• This is not a comprehensive list of cancelation events. We rely on you to submit canceled people for inclusion into the database. Similarly, if you believe there is an error in the database, please make a submission.
• We are not making a judgement call on whether or not someone ‘deserved’ to be canceled (although we do not include cases of outright hate speech in the database). The goal is to collect as many valid data points as possible.
• There is often room for interpretation in these cases. For instance, if someone resigns under pressure, is this equivalent to being canceled? For now we are doing our best to parse the gray area. In the future we hope to add detailed, well-cited pages with community moderation for each case.
•  

[DanteGabriel]

@Heartofice You didn't say what you intended when you posted the site. Might have been useful to say that you didn't necessarily believe all of it and you thought it was a "resource for discussion" at the time, instead of claiming so now after I've blown up a few examples. You didn't really discuss it even when I and others were. Seriously, you constantly make claims about wanting nuance and then you drop this site of hyperbolized, misleading one-liners on us. It's not for nothing that I said some of it reads like you wrote it.

I did look at their disclaimers, etc. Seems like they do a piss-poor job of vetting their examples. I even said some of their source links were pretty iffy.

So what do we have here? A few dozen examples of purportedly unjust cancellations? Even if all of them were as bad as the authors want us to believe they are, out of the great sea of billions of people interacting with each other in the streets and online, these few dozen are the evidence of intolerant liberalism run amok? Yes, I know there are, in fact, intolerant hyperbolic liberals out there who don't listen to reason. I just think trying to make a moral panic out of it is unwarranted. It's the "knock-out game" all over again.

Thanks for helping me clarify my thoughts on the validity of "cancel culture." I used to have mixed feelings about it. And I still agree unjust firings happen sometimes. But seeing you and the likes of Bill Maher going on about it, maybe I'm more okay with it now.

[Heartofice]

I dunno, other people seemed to understand the reason for posting it. You jumped on it and interpreted it in your own way. Not that surprising , but it’s of little interest to me. 
 

To be honest if I could have been bothered to indulge you I probably would have agreed with you on the cases you highlighted , they were ones I would have picked out as being pretty dubious as well. 
 

I’m not even arguing that there isn’t hyperbole around the issue, I’ve said that a couple of times in this thread already. The discussion lays more around to what extent we think CC is an issue, you think it’s not much of one, I think it’s slightly more of one. 

[Knight Of Winter]

1 hour ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Should they be pushed to practice self-censorship? Should government step in?

Like what do you want exactly to see happen?

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.

[Inkdaub]

21 hours ago, Ran said:

I suspect there are Mexicans who have yet to encounter Mexican food in Albuquerque, so seems fair enough. 

I suppose it's theoretically possible that souls as poor as the ones you hypothesize above could maybe exist in some way.  Troubling indeed.

21 hours ago, sologdin said:

my preference is for new mexican style, acquired while living in las cruces.

Solo gets it.