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Good grief. What happened to "Democrats are coming for your guns"? At least that one sorta made sense. Can you name three significant ideas whose debate has

Good grief. What happened to "Democrats are coming for your guns"? At least that one sorta made sense. Can you name three significant ideas whose debate has been suppressed online? Because I'll bet that for each of those I can find a 200+ comment flame war on this very site. > They've already come for anyone who showed even the faintest trace of dissent from the mindlessly woke mob's narrative They did? Who won?

kabouseng 6y ago
James Damore certainly lost.
- newacct583 6y ago
  No, he was fired because he very loudly and publicly contradicted his employers' stated policies[1]. His ideas didn't "lose", not in the free speech sense everyone is yelling about. There's not a poster here who doesn't know what he said (we spent A LOT more than 200 comments on that one!). Nor was he suppressed: he's still speaking, on the same subject! Hell, he's surely making more now as a right wing martyr than he ever was as a low level hacker for Google. [1] I mean, people get fired for this all the time, like those folks Amazon canned a few months back for union organizing with employer resources. You only care about this one guy because he happens to play for Your Team.
  - dx87 6y ago
    What he posted was on an internal message board specifically for employees to discuss controversial subjects. It was only public because another google employee got upset and made it public.
    - newacct583 6y ago
      I probably should have said "broadly", I guess. But I still don't see how that differs from the union folks, who used an internal messaging system to notify other employees about their rights. Again, I can't help but think what you people really want is the inalienable right, not to "free speech", but to be Offensive Without Consequence. And again, Damore is a genuine celebrity now, he's a very bad example of the kind of repressive woke hegemony you're invoking.
      - baby-yoda 6y ago
        >you people what is this ambiguous group you speak of? >Offensive Without Consequence is being offended a protected class? why is the "right to be offended" more important than the "right to offend"?
        joshuamorton 6y ago
        It doesn't matter if being offended is a protected class. Offending someone isn't. And I. Our society we give individuals and groups broad powers to associate with only the people they choose to. You can offend whomever you want, your right is protected! But if people don't like you, they're under no obligation to deal with you.
        baby-yoda 6y ago
        the previous poster presented it as a binary set of options but i agree with what you're saying - i think its safe to say we have all, at some point and in some scenario, been both victims and perpetrators. for me the answer is to simply move along with my life and associate with those who seem to be well intentioned and have positive world views. but going up a few comments relating to the cancel culture issue, for some that is simply not enough. they must become the enforcer, alert the world of the offender, until the offender is ostracized from society (judge jury and executioner perhaps). its hard for me to understand the motive but alas here we are.
        joshuamorton 6y ago
        You raise an interesting question. Why not ignore people? Let me start by pointing out that this applies in both directions. When I post on twitter saying, for example, that "@FSF, you should fire Richard Stallman because he is a bad man", I am simply exercising my ability to speak. The FSF can choose to ignore me. Why doesn't the FSF just move on and ignore the tweet? Before we move on I really want you to consider that question. I'm curious what yours is. Here's mine: The people speaking out have power. The FSF is influential because people trust it to act ethically. If people no longer trust the FSF to act ethically around women, can they it to act ethically around software freedom? What about when software freedom intersects with the issues of marginalized peoples (think, for example, ML ethics or signal's value to marginalized groups). If people stop listening to the FSF it loses its influence, which (from the FSF's perspective) is a bad thing for its mission. But from the perspective of me, a person tweeting, I'm not necessarily looking to "punish" Stallman, but to hold people to high ethical standard. To be clear, I'm not saying that there's never a punitive aspect to cancellation. What I am saying is that it's wrong to believe that there must be. So I hold other individuals accountable to my values (or actually in some cases their own values). I "vote with my feet" and part ways with organizations that don't uphold the values I feel are important. When enough people do that, collectively, the force behind it becomes powerful enough that even relatively entrenched organizations have to pay some attention. In other words, decentralized collective action has power and ignoring it carries some risk for organizations. This represents a shift in power and influence in a few ways. Some random individual is able to start a movement that picks up lots of steam very quickly. There's danger to this (think Reddit and the Boston Bomber), but there's always been a danger from what power can do (think Donald Trump taking out a full page NYT advertisement to enforce the death penalty against the Central Park Five). Similarly, "blacklists" and "old boys clubs" have existed since forever and are harmful to people. My claim is that those will never go away. So empowering the previously unempowered is probably a good thing. There's questions about harm in individual cases, but those need to be balanced against harms prevented and existing systems, which also systematically fail certain peoples. The question shouldn't be "is cancel culture perfect", but "does it cause less harm than existing structures for handling criticism and accountability".
Emma_Goldman 6y ago
It's an unhelpful exaggeration to suggest that speech is being suppressed in the conventional sense that the threat or use of coercion is being employed to restrict speech. But we care not only about whether debate is suppressed. We also care about the quality of debate, the culture, values and practices through which we engage with one another in the public sphere. The concern over 'cancel culture' would be, I think: (1) certain arguments are beyond the pale of legitimate debate (2) those arguments should not be engaged with, or their proponents persuaded, but should be met with opprobrium and abuse (3) we can safely infer that someone has a malignant character if they make an individual statement which is considered illegitimate (4) if someone makes an illegitimate statement then we should ostracise them, deplatform them, and agitate their employer to fire them Obviously 'cancel culture' is internally varied, and this list presents some of its worst aspects, while ignoring what can be said in favour of it. But my point is that we can reasonably argue over several of its features. The problem as I see it is how to criticise unreflective and exclusionary discourses, while engaging in debate, persuading rather than abusing, avoiding heavy-handed retributivism, and thinking for ourselves. It is also worth asking whether cancel culture is more of a problem online that it is offline because it is encouraged by the design of several platforms, most egregiously Twitter.
- newacct583 6y ago
  Are those list items really that bad, though? Paraphrasing #4: you're saying that we need to welcome, broadcast and hire people who we genuinely think are vile and awful? Where's the middle ground. If we can't fire, say, violent racists, and we can't escape their words, and we can't avoid them socially, what can we do? I think the answer to that, if you look at it carefully, is going to be pretty much isomorphic to what we're already doing. There are excesses and mistakes (David Shor shouldn't have been fired), but that's true of all things. What I don't see is a definition of "cancel culture" as a "problem" that isn't basically a defense of conservative opinions.
  - Emma_Goldman 6y ago
    I agree that its implicit values are generally egalitarian, or at least aspire to be egalitarian, but I don't think there's a clear left-right split. My concern is not that we shouldn't be egalitarians. I'm a socialist; my avatar is named after a famous anarchist. It's that there is a culture of debate - 'cancel culture' - that betrays several flaws. Should we value debate and engage with those we disagree with or ignore their arguments and ostracise them? Should we persuade those we disagree with or tell them they're horrible people? Should we address ourselves to the causes of prejudice and small-mindedness, or retributively punish those who misstep? Debate, persuasion, and opposition to retributive justice - those are scarcely values that are the monopoly of the right, and indeed, the last one runs counter to the right. You are focusing on 'easy cases'. You write, 'you're saying that we need to welcome, broadcast and hire people who we genuinely think are vile and awful?' But that presupposes the precise crux of the debate: whether most people targeted by 'cancel culture' really are, as you say, 'vile and awful'. You say we should encourage the firing of 'violent racists'. I think that's a reasonable option, depending on the context. But that's an easy case. The kind of problems I highlighted are found arrayed against people of all political stripes, often for minor offences or errors. I was reading a large number of people abuse a Guardian journalist this morning for including the owner of a Pizzeria in a write-up of how working-class life has been affected by COVID - a mistake, for sure, even a humorous one, but not one that should be met by abuse. The owner in question was being doxxed, and his restaurant down-voted on review sites. To me, this kind of case is entirely typical of cancel culture, not anti-fascism.
as1mov 6y ago
This article from The Atlantic[1] does a much better job explaining the issue. It contains more than a handful of examples of people getting fired for really benign opinions, also this is just in the last few months. [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/perils-us-or-against-us/613981/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/perils-us-...

kabouseng 6y ago

James Damore certainly lost.

newacct583 6y ago
No, he was fired because he very loudly and publicly contradicted his employers' stated policies[1]. His ideas didn't "lose", not in the free speech sense everyone is yelling about. There's not a poster here who doesn't know what he said (we spent A LOT more than 200 comments on that one!). Nor was he suppressed: he's still speaking, on the same subject! Hell, he's surely making more now as a right wing martyr than he ever was as a low level hacker for Google. [1] I mean, people get fired for this all the time, like those folks Amazon canned a few months back for union organizing with employer resources. You only care about this one guy because he happens to play for Your Team.
- dx87 6y ago
  What he posted was on an internal message board specifically for employees to discuss controversial subjects. It was only public because another google employee got upset and made it public.
  - newacct583 6y ago
    I probably should have said "broadly", I guess. But I still don't see how that differs from the union folks, who used an internal messaging system to notify other employees about their rights. Again, I can't help but think what you people really want is the inalienable right, not to "free speech", but to be Offensive Without Consequence. And again, Damore is a genuine celebrity now, he's a very bad example of the kind of repressive woke hegemony you're invoking.
    - baby-yoda 6y ago
      >you people what is this ambiguous group you speak of? >Offensive Without Consequence is being offended a protected class? why is the "right to be offended" more important than the "right to offend"?
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        It doesn't matter if being offended is a protected class. Offending someone isn't. And I. Our society we give individuals and groups broad powers to associate with only the people they choose to. You can offend whomever you want, your right is protected! But if people don't like you, they're under no obligation to deal with you.
        baby-yoda 6y ago
        the previous poster presented it as a binary set of options but i agree with what you're saying - i think its safe to say we have all, at some point and in some scenario, been both victims and perpetrators. for me the answer is to simply move along with my life and associate with those who seem to be well intentioned and have positive world views. but going up a few comments relating to the cancel culture issue, for some that is simply not enough. they must become the enforcer, alert the world of the offender, until the offender is ostracized from society (judge jury and executioner perhaps). its hard for me to understand the motive but alas here we are.
        joshuamorton 6y ago
        You raise an interesting question. Why not ignore people? Let me start by pointing out that this applies in both directions. When I post on twitter saying, for example, that "@FSF, you should fire Richard Stallman because he is a bad man", I am simply exercising my ability to speak. The FSF can choose to ignore me. Why doesn't the FSF just move on and ignore the tweet? Before we move on I really want you to consider that question. I'm curious what yours is. Here's mine: The people speaking out have power. The FSF is influential because people trust it to act ethically. If people no longer trust the FSF to act ethically around women, can they it to act ethically around software freedom? What about when software freedom intersects with the issues of marginalized peoples (think, for example, ML ethics or signal's value to marginalized groups). If people stop listening to the FSF it loses its influence, which (from the FSF's perspective) is a bad thing for its mission. But from the perspective of me, a person tweeting, I'm not necessarily looking to "punish" Stallman, but to hold people to high ethical standard. To be clear, I'm not saying that there's never a punitive aspect to cancellation. What I am saying is that it's wrong to believe that there must be. So I hold other individuals accountable to my values (or actually in some cases their own values). I "vote with my feet" and part ways with organizations that don't uphold the values I feel are important. When enough people do that, collectively, the force behind it becomes powerful enough that even relatively entrenched organizations have to pay some attention. In other words, decentralized collective action has power and ignoring it carries some risk for organizations. This represents a shift in power and influence in a few ways. Some random individual is able to start a movement that picks up lots of steam very quickly. There's danger to this (think Reddit and the Boston Bomber), but there's always been a danger from what power can do (think Donald Trump taking out a full page NYT advertisement to enforce the death penalty against the Central Park Five). Similarly, "blacklists" and "old boys clubs" have existed since forever and are harmful to people. My claim is that those will never go away. So empowering the previously unempowered is probably a good thing. There's questions about harm in individual cases, but those need to be balanced against harms prevented and existing systems, which also systematically fail certain peoples. The question shouldn't be "is cancel culture perfect", but "does it cause less harm than existing structures for handling criticism and accountability".

Emma_Goldman 6y ago

It's an unhelpful exaggeration to suggest that speech is being suppressed in the conventional sense that the threat or use of coercion is being employed to restrict speech. But we care not only about whether debate is suppressed. We also care about the quality of debate, the culture, values and practices through which we engage with one another in the public sphere. The concern over 'cancel culture' would be, I think: (1) certain arguments are beyond the pale of legitimate debate (2) those arguments should not be engaged with, or their proponents persuaded, but should be met with opprobrium and abuse (3) we can safely infer that someone has a malignant character if they make an individual statement which is considered illegitimate (4) if someone makes an illegitimate statement then we should ostracise them, deplatform them, and agitate their employer to fire them Obviously 'cancel culture' is internally varied, and this list presents some of its worst aspects, while ignoring what can be said in favour of it. But my point is that we can reasonably argue over several of its features. The problem as I see it is how to criticise unreflective and exclusionary discourses, while engaging in debate, persuading rather than abusing, avoiding heavy-handed retributivism, and thinking for ourselves. It is also worth asking whether cancel culture is more of a problem online that it is offline because it is encouraged by the design of several platforms, most egregiously Twitter.

newacct583 6y ago
Are those list items really that bad, though? Paraphrasing #4: you're saying that we need to welcome, broadcast and hire people who we genuinely think are vile and awful? Where's the middle ground. If we can't fire, say, violent racists, and we can't escape their words, and we can't avoid them socially, what can we do? I think the answer to that, if you look at it carefully, is going to be pretty much isomorphic to what we're already doing. There are excesses and mistakes (David Shor shouldn't have been fired), but that's true of all things. What I don't see is a definition of "cancel culture" as a "problem" that isn't basically a defense of conservative opinions.
- Emma_Goldman 6y ago
  I agree that its implicit values are generally egalitarian, or at least aspire to be egalitarian, but I don't think there's a clear left-right split. My concern is not that we shouldn't be egalitarians. I'm a socialist; my avatar is named after a famous anarchist. It's that there is a culture of debate - 'cancel culture' - that betrays several flaws. Should we value debate and engage with those we disagree with or ignore their arguments and ostracise them? Should we persuade those we disagree with or tell them they're horrible people? Should we address ourselves to the causes of prejudice and small-mindedness, or retributively punish those who misstep? Debate, persuasion, and opposition to retributive justice - those are scarcely values that are the monopoly of the right, and indeed, the last one runs counter to the right. You are focusing on 'easy cases'. You write, 'you're saying that we need to welcome, broadcast and hire people who we genuinely think are vile and awful?' But that presupposes the precise crux of the debate: whether most people targeted by 'cancel culture' really are, as you say, 'vile and awful'. You say we should encourage the firing of 'violent racists'. I think that's a reasonable option, depending on the context. But that's an easy case. The kind of problems I highlighted are found arrayed against people of all political stripes, often for minor offences or errors. I was reading a large number of people abuse a Guardian journalist this morning for including the owner of a Pizzeria in a write-up of how working-class life has been affected by COVID - a mistake, for sure, even a humorous one, but not one that should be met by abuse. The owner in question was being doxxed, and his restaurant down-voted on review sites. To me, this kind of case is entirely typical of cancel culture, not anti-fascism.

as1mov 6y ago

This article from The Atlantic[1] does a much better job explaining the issue. It contains more than a handful of examples of people getting fired for really benign opinions, also this is just in the last few months. [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/perils-us-or-against-us/613981/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/perils-us-...