8 ms·

Think Cancel Culture Doesn’t Exist? My Own ‘Lived Experience’ Says Otherwise

76 points by jeremylevy 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jmeister 6y ago
Check out this Twitter thread for >200 examples: https://twitter.com/SoOppressed/status/1282404647160942598?s=20 https://twitter.com/SoOppressed/status/1282404647160942598?s...
- radegast 6y ago
  This is just way too funny. Cheers for sharing!
fack 6y ago
I still don't understand what Cancel Culture is, as a concept. My (potentially flawed) understanding is it's a boycott, but rather than using normal capital, you use social capital? Welcome to the marketplace of ideas I guess...
- notahacker 6y ago
  Yep. And whilst the balance of who holds the social capital in which circles and which views they consider beyond the pale changes, it's not a new phenomenon and seldom a one-sided one. The author of the article is, after all, trying to use his social capital to, in his own words, argue that 'children are put at risk of long-term harm if they are indoctrinated with ideologically torqued misinformation about their bodies and behavior' if exposed to arguments which compete with his own. No doubt he believes this as sincerely as many of his opponents believe that his own arguments [and related arguments] are 'dangerous' to the psychological wellbeing of transpeople, but this is not a debate where the silencing and accusations of abuse and bigotry has taken place on one side only.
  - guitarbill 6y ago
    Presumably, the author has some kind of scientific studies or evidence to back up his position though (as his claims rely on that)? In which case, he would be using his "social capital" to try and have the debate be more focused on science and research, and less about belief.
    - notahacker 6y ago
      Both sides argue that based on interpretations of the scientific studies they have selected, carrying out the others' suggestions with regard to treating gender dysphoria or even saying the wrong things about gender in a manner which might form impressions upon young people is tantamount to child abuse. The author didn't write his original article arguing that medical professionals shouldn't affirm gender in order to encourage them to test their hypotheses. And needless to say there are many others who take things further than the author.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      You don't need scientific studies to prove that male and female are different, and the world isn't full of people of ambiguous gender. As the article states, that understanding is common sense to anyone who isn't an activist or professional academic.
      - DanBC 6y ago
        > You don't need scientific studies to prove that male and female are different You do if you're a scientist and you're appealing to scientific authority. You'd need to address why there have been cultures across time and geography that don't have these binary norms, and you'd need to take into account British colonialism that stamped out anything that didn't fit their binary norms. > the world isn't full of people of ambiguous gender There are about as many people with intersex conditions as there are transpeople. The world is weirder than you think. https://repeatingislands.com/2015/09/19/the-astonishing-village-where-little-girls-turn-into-boys-aged-12/ https://repeatingislands.com/2015/09/19/the-astonishing-vill... This is one of the most serious problems with the gender critical crowd: They assume that the truth is so obvious all they need to do is to state it and then insult anyone who disagrees with them. Their arguments collapse as soon as you look at the real world.
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  There's a reason people who believe in "Cancel Culture" want to talk about silencing/"cancel culture" rather than the ideas that resulted in them being "cancelled". Edit: In this case, the author makes this claim: >> ... promotes the scientifically inaccurate claims that biological sex exists on a continuous “spectrum,” that notions of male and female may be mere social constructs, and that one’s sex may be determined by self-declared “identity” instead of reproductive anatomy. Which is definitely not a claim he can make so authoritatively. Often, it's a way to draw a veil in front of, e.g., racist/sexist/homophobic commentary. Or it's people whose voices still carry tremendous power facing pushback. (E.g. JK Rowling getting told off for being a TERF.)
  - sbussard 6y ago
    > Which is definitely not a claim he can make authoritatively Did you also get your PhD in evolutionary biology?
    - Pfhreak 6y ago
      This is the wrong question, and an appeal the authority. It doesn't matter what my credentials are. (And, I'd even go so far as to argue that an evolutionary biology doctorate is only one lens with which to observe the relationship between identity, society, and genetics.) The correct question is, "Is there evidence in the scientific community that male/female are a spectrum? That male/female are social constructs? That sex is a sociological construct beyond just reproductive anatomy?" I'm happy to provide examples where, in fact, the scientific community disagrees with him. Edit: Some off the top of my head resources: * I assume the author is explicitly talking about humans, and not the wider animal community where sex is obviously not defined by sex organs or chromosomes. (E.g. some animals are hermaphroditic, some transition from sex to sex based on environmental factors like wrasses that develop from female to male as they grow. Interestingly, the development of human fetuses has some parallels in that we all start from the same more female template.) * Chromosomes do not neatly land in XY and XX categories. A significant portion of people have other chromosomal configurations. * Androgen insensitivity can result in an XY chromosomed person who appears outwardly or developmentally female. Similarly there are conditions where XX chromosomed people develop male organs. * There are significant hormonal differences between individuals that can result in dramatically different biological characteristics, blurring the lines between what is male or female (or otherwise) quite considerably. Testosterone production, for example, is not a reliable indicator of maleness. * Approximately 2% of humans are born with genitalia that are ambiguous. Culturally, we deal with these people very differently. (E.g. in Saudi Arabia it is handled differently than the US.) This implies there is sociological input into someone's sex -- the same conditions may be altered to be male or female in different parts of the world.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- umvi 6y ago
  I understand "cancel culture" to simply be a form of mob-enforced group-think. It's "intolerance of intolerance" taken to an extreme. If you say or do something (or said or did something in the past!) that runs afoul of the mob, the mob "cancels" you (tries to get you fired from your job, kicked out of github projects you contribute to, membership revoked from organizations you participate in, your business boycotted/destroyed, etc. - essentially ruin your life as much as possible without causing bodily harm). The end goal of cancel culture is to "send a message" to other people that do similar things and get them to conform to the prevailing group-think of the mob. Maybe you were religious and voted against gay marriage in the past. Maybe you used a politically incorrect term on Twitter. Maybe you donated some money to the wrong political party. Maybe you just didn't kowtow to the mob's latest demands. All of these things can ignite the capricious maelstrom of the mob, and once you are a target, they will pursue you with righteous indignation until you are "cancelled"
  - mieses 6y ago
    It would be convenient if there was a database of cancelled people so those people could go on with their lives and operate outside cancel culture. For example, there could be institutions of higher learning that required applicants to demonstrate evidence of having been cancelled. Such institutions might be more effective at producing novel and useful scientific ideas (as opposed to theories of biological sex, for example). I wonder if there should be an age limit for being cancelled. If a 10 year old dresses as Thomas Jefferson for a school Halloween event, it might be good to give them a pass until they are 18 when they can make a better informed choice about whether they want to join the cancel culture or the resistance.
    - notahacker 6y ago
      tbh I suspect the applicants who were cancelled would come up with a lot of theories of sex, race, religion and politics and relatively little novelty. In Brave New World, all the Alpha citizens were sent to an island. Within six years they had a full scale civil war. I suspect something similar would happen if you put those cancelled for voicing their second wave feminism in a way which offended people as a threat in a faculty with those cancelled for voicing arguments considered sexist, those cancelled for making arguments considered Islamophobic with those cancelled for interpretations of the Quran considered extreme etc.
- chrismcb 6y ago
  It is more than a boycott. You go after people's livelihood, and you make such a big deal and fuss, that it works. I think a perfect example is the young man who lost his job for cracking his knuckles. The guy was driving down the road in a work vehicle, his arm hanging it the window. Someone saw him make the "white power hand sign" and snapped a picture. And posted it to social media. And the guy got fired. And he wasn't even doing the hand signal. But that is cancel culture.
  - krapp 6y ago
    It doesn't look like he's cracking his knuckles to me[0], but it's admittedly ambiguous. And it's odd that cancel culture is being blamed here, and not the employer and their policies. Even the person who posted the image on social media has admitted they may have overreacted and said they didn't intend for the person to be fired, while your comment assumes that to have been the intent all along. Yet while the fault lies entirely with the employer, the blame inevitably is shifted entirely to activists on social media. [0]https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-over-alleged-racist-gesture-says-he-was-cracking-knuckles/2347414/ https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
    - gruez 6y ago
      >And it's odd that cancel culture is being blamed here, and not the employer and their policies. If someone got swatted, is it the police's fault or the person who called it in? Or when a racist calls 911 to report "suspicious activity" on a black person not doing anything that can reasonably construed as illegal or suspicious, and he ends up getting shot by the police?
      - krapp 6y ago
        >If someone got swatted, is it the police's fault or the person who called it in? Both. The police certainly have culpability for being willing to send armed thugs anywhere to bust down doors and start shooting based on nothing but an anonymous phone call. Swatting wouldn't exist without America's militant police culture. >Or when a racist calls 911 to report "suspicious activity" on a black person not doing anything that can reasonably construed as illegal or suspicious, and he ends up getting shot by the police? Again, both. The police are always, and obviously, at fault for pulling the trigger on someone who doesn't pose an obvious threat. The instigation is the fault of one party, but the escalation is the fault of the system. I'm not saying the person who posted the picture isn't at fault, obviously they have some culpability, and I'm not justifying it either. It's just odd that the employer is never considered to have any agency or responsibility in these discussions. The decision to fire the employee was entirely that of their employer. Presumably when they sat the employee down and asked for his side of the story, they weren't satisfied with "I was just cracking my knuckles." They could have taken one look at the photo and decided it was nonsense, but they decided to do an "internal investigation", suspension and eventual termination. No one made them. No one put a gun to their head.
- radegast 6y ago
  Cancel culture is when you, Johnny Depp, get indirectly accused of domestic violence by your wife, Amber Heard. Your employer immediately fires you and #MeToo people start lambasting you despite lack of any evidence. Meanwhile you are the one who is truly abused, and when you provide evidence, nothing really happens to your abuser. Cancel culture is when you, Daniel Vávra, are creating an RPG game set in 15th century Bohemia far away from Prague. And you don't include any black people in the game, so you are literally Hitler. I live in the Czech republic in a large city. Do you know how many black people I see nowadays? About 5-15 per year. Counted 7 this year so far if you are wondering. Were there any black people in rural 15th century Bohemia? Doesn't matter, we want your game to fail because you are racist! Do I need to go on?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
natrik 6y ago
I saw this posted the other day: https://mobile.twitter.com/GlennLoury/status/1288069751730831365 https://mobile.twitter.com/GlennLoury/status/128806975173083... which also provides examples.
DubiousPusher 6y ago
Of course it exists. It has always existed. People have been ostricised for holding "unacceptable" views for all of time. That hasn't changed. What has changed is which views will get you ostricised. And don't think even now there is only one side to this phenomena. Some are growing a catalog of infractions by the left but you would surely find yourself in hot water were you to tell your conservative boss or coworkers that war is a crime against humanity and all soldiers are therefore criminals (not my view but an extant one).
- thoughtstheseus 6y ago
  The scale, speed, and medium is also different. Today it’s not hard to seek out people with specific views and actively work to harm them economically and socially. My take is that the diversity of allowable view points is decreasing as a result of a minority of outspoken individuals.
  - DubiousPusher 6y ago
    > The scale, speed, and medium is also different. I don't know how often the thousands of small puritan communities that dotted Eastern colonial North America drove people off nor how many communist youths were alienated from their families during the past 150 years but I would guess the numbers are likely unknowable and am therefore suspicious of any attempt to create a quantitative comparison.
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      I figured scale in this case was not the size of people affected but rather the size of the area in which someone could be marked as a bad person. I wouldn't say that size is necessarily global now, but it is at least easy enough to mark someone throughout a nation the size of the U.S
wcerfgba 6y ago
Throughout the article the author repeatedly conflates sex and gender. He even links to "an editorial [in Nature] claiming that classifying an individual’s sex using any combination of anatomy and genetics “has no basis in science.”", which is actually titled "US proposal for defining gender has no basis in science". Sex and gender are not the same this and this lazy fumbling between the two concepts is a classic trans-exclusionary tactic.
- stefantalpalaru 6y ago
  > Sex and gender are not the same Tell that to those who started calling sex "biological gender": http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2016/gender-lines-science-transgender-identity/ http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2016/gender-lines-science-...
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  Yes, it basically turns the entire rant into one giant strawman argument. By substituting sex for gender in his opponents' arguments, he is replacing their arguments with weaker ones.
- DanBC 6y ago
  The Nature article is correctly stating that sex is not as simple as chromosomes or genitalia, and that we should avoid classifying people into either gender or sex roles based on these.
fabiofzero 6y ago
Mental note: never click a Quilette link again.
- ThA0x2 6y ago
  Why?
DoreenMichele 6y ago
He didn't just express a politically incorrect opinion. He did so in a fundamentally offensive and dismissive fashion, asserting that he's right and people who see it otherwise are straight up wrong. This is not how you do science well. Real science allows for questions and debate. It's also just obnoxious and makes you unbearable to be around. It's hard to imagine he would be faring much better even without a world that has the phrase cancel culture, whether you believe that's a real thing or not.
- Udik 6y ago
  > asserting that he's right and people who see it otherwise are straight up wrong. That seems to be the same thing his opponents are saying about his positions. So do you maintain the same attitude towards them?
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    If true, I'm guessing I would. I have a long history of saying "All y'all are wrong and both sides need to quit this crap." My mother always said "Two wrongs don't make a right."
    - Udik 6y ago
      It's definitely true- after all we're talking about people who stalked him and his (potential) employers because of how wrong he is. On the other hand, science is about finding truths. It needs to be flexible to replace old truths with new ones, but that doesn't mean that each single scientist must be flexible. It's fine for scientists to be absolutely convinced of the value of their theories and to defend them the best they can. After all, it has been said that science advances one funeral at a time. Scientists can be (and have been, historically, in various cases) giant assholes.
      - DoreenMichele 6y ago
        I don't really know the whole story. I'm guilty of not even reading the entire article. I'm a woman on the internet. I have had my fair share of mansplaining assholes let me know that I'm wrong and stupid and have zero right to have a personal opinion about my own life, so I didn't have a lot of patience for this piece. But given the topic, I'm guessing he was stalked and harassed by people for whom this topic is a survival issue. So they did their best to make it a survival issue for him. That doesn't make them right, not by any stretch of the imagination. But trans rights are not about mere scientific opinion. It's a political battle and lives are at stake. Among other things, LGBTQ individuals are at very high risk of homelessness and homeless individuals have a life expectancy that's about two decades shorter than average.
GoodJokes 6y ago
One person is not a culture. By labeling this a culture, the "afflicted" can criticize without inspecting the individual merits of each "case."
nebulosa 6y ago
Anecdotes don't make data. I'm keen to see any significant study that demonstrates the existence of so-called cancel culture, but for now it seems to be making a big fuss over a few overzealous institutions and some well-meaning but decidedly myopic liberals.

76 points by jeremylevy 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Check out this Twitter thread for >200 examples: https://twitter.com/SoOppressed/status/1282404647160942598?s=20 https://twitter.com/SoOppressed/status/1282404647160942598?s...

radegast 6y ago
This is just way too funny. Cheers for sharing!

fack 6y ago

I still don't understand what Cancel Culture is, as a concept. My (potentially flawed) understanding is it's a boycott, but rather than using normal capital, you use social capital? Welcome to the marketplace of ideas I guess...

notahacker 6y ago
Yep. And whilst the balance of who holds the social capital in which circles and which views they consider beyond the pale changes, it's not a new phenomenon and seldom a one-sided one. The author of the article is, after all, trying to use his social capital to, in his own words, argue that 'children are put at risk of long-term harm if they are indoctrinated with ideologically torqued misinformation about their bodies and behavior' if exposed to arguments which compete with his own. No doubt he believes this as sincerely as many of his opponents believe that his own arguments [and related arguments] are 'dangerous' to the psychological wellbeing of transpeople, but this is not a debate where the silencing and accusations of abuse and bigotry has taken place on one side only.
- guitarbill 6y ago
  Presumably, the author has some kind of scientific studies or evidence to back up his position though (as his claims rely on that)? In which case, he would be using his "social capital" to try and have the debate be more focused on science and research, and less about belief.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    Both sides argue that based on interpretations of the scientific studies they have selected, carrying out the others' suggestions with regard to treating gender dysphoria or even saying the wrong things about gender in a manner which might form impressions upon young people is tantamount to child abuse. The author didn't write his original article arguing that medical professionals shouldn't affirm gender in order to encourage them to test their hypotheses. And needless to say there are many others who take things further than the author.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    You don't need scientific studies to prove that male and female are different, and the world isn't full of people of ambiguous gender. As the article states, that understanding is common sense to anyone who isn't an activist or professional academic.
    - DanBC 6y ago
      > You don't need scientific studies to prove that male and female are different You do if you're a scientist and you're appealing to scientific authority. You'd need to address why there have been cultures across time and geography that don't have these binary norms, and you'd need to take into account British colonialism that stamped out anything that didn't fit their binary norms. > the world isn't full of people of ambiguous gender There are about as many people with intersex conditions as there are transpeople. The world is weirder than you think. https://repeatingislands.com/2015/09/19/the-astonishing-village-where-little-girls-turn-into-boys-aged-12/ https://repeatingislands.com/2015/09/19/the-astonishing-vill... This is one of the most serious problems with the gender critical crowd: They assume that the truth is so obvious all they need to do is to state it and then insult anyone who disagrees with them. Their arguments collapse as soon as you look at the real world.
Pfhreak 6y ago
There's a reason people who believe in "Cancel Culture" want to talk about silencing/"cancel culture" rather than the ideas that resulted in them being "cancelled". Edit: In this case, the author makes this claim: >> ... promotes the scientifically inaccurate claims that biological sex exists on a continuous “spectrum,” that notions of male and female may be mere social constructs, and that one’s sex may be determined by self-declared “identity” instead of reproductive anatomy. Which is definitely not a claim he can make so authoritatively. Often, it's a way to draw a veil in front of, e.g., racist/sexist/homophobic commentary. Or it's people whose voices still carry tremendous power facing pushback. (E.g. JK Rowling getting told off for being a TERF.)
- sbussard 6y ago
  > Which is definitely not a claim he can make authoritatively Did you also get your PhD in evolutionary biology?
  - Pfhreak 6y ago
    This is the wrong question, and an appeal the authority. It doesn't matter what my credentials are. (And, I'd even go so far as to argue that an evolutionary biology doctorate is only one lens with which to observe the relationship between identity, society, and genetics.) The correct question is, "Is there evidence in the scientific community that male/female are a spectrum? That male/female are social constructs? That sex is a sociological construct beyond just reproductive anatomy?" I'm happy to provide examples where, in fact, the scientific community disagrees with him. Edit: Some off the top of my head resources: * I assume the author is explicitly talking about humans, and not the wider animal community where sex is obviously not defined by sex organs or chromosomes. (E.g. some animals are hermaphroditic, some transition from sex to sex based on environmental factors like wrasses that develop from female to male as they grow. Interestingly, the development of human fetuses has some parallels in that we all start from the same more female template.) * Chromosomes do not neatly land in XY and XX categories. A significant portion of people have other chromosomal configurations. * Androgen insensitivity can result in an XY chromosomed person who appears outwardly or developmentally female. Similarly there are conditions where XX chromosomed people develop male organs. * There are significant hormonal differences between individuals that can result in dramatically different biological characteristics, blurring the lines between what is male or female (or otherwise) quite considerably. Testosterone production, for example, is not a reliable indicator of maleness. * Approximately 2% of humans are born with genitalia that are ambiguous. Culturally, we deal with these people very differently. (E.g. in Saudi Arabia it is handled differently than the US.) This implies there is sociological input into someone's sex -- the same conditions may be altered to be male or female in different parts of the world.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
umvi 6y ago
I understand "cancel culture" to simply be a form of mob-enforced group-think. It's "intolerance of intolerance" taken to an extreme. If you say or do something (or said or did something in the past!) that runs afoul of the mob, the mob "cancels" you (tries to get you fired from your job, kicked out of github projects you contribute to, membership revoked from organizations you participate in, your business boycotted/destroyed, etc. - essentially ruin your life as much as possible without causing bodily harm). The end goal of cancel culture is to "send a message" to other people that do similar things and get them to conform to the prevailing group-think of the mob. Maybe you were religious and voted against gay marriage in the past. Maybe you used a politically incorrect term on Twitter. Maybe you donated some money to the wrong political party. Maybe you just didn't kowtow to the mob's latest demands. All of these things can ignite the capricious maelstrom of the mob, and once you are a target, they will pursue you with righteous indignation until you are "cancelled"
- mieses 6y ago
  It would be convenient if there was a database of cancelled people so those people could go on with their lives and operate outside cancel culture. For example, there could be institutions of higher learning that required applicants to demonstrate evidence of having been cancelled. Such institutions might be more effective at producing novel and useful scientific ideas (as opposed to theories of biological sex, for example). I wonder if there should be an age limit for being cancelled. If a 10 year old dresses as Thomas Jefferson for a school Halloween event, it might be good to give them a pass until they are 18 when they can make a better informed choice about whether they want to join the cancel culture or the resistance.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    tbh I suspect the applicants who were cancelled would come up with a lot of theories of sex, race, religion and politics and relatively little novelty. In Brave New World, all the Alpha citizens were sent to an island. Within six years they had a full scale civil war. I suspect something similar would happen if you put those cancelled for voicing their second wave feminism in a way which offended people as a threat in a faculty with those cancelled for voicing arguments considered sexist, those cancelled for making arguments considered Islamophobic with those cancelled for interpretations of the Quran considered extreme etc.
chrismcb 6y ago
It is more than a boycott. You go after people's livelihood, and you make such a big deal and fuss, that it works. I think a perfect example is the young man who lost his job for cracking his knuckles. The guy was driving down the road in a work vehicle, his arm hanging it the window. Someone saw him make the "white power hand sign" and snapped a picture. And posted it to social media. And the guy got fired. And he wasn't even doing the hand signal. But that is cancel culture.
- krapp 6y ago
  It doesn't look like he's cracking his knuckles to me[0], but it's admittedly ambiguous. And it's odd that cancel culture is being blamed here, and not the employer and their policies. Even the person who posted the image on social media has admitted they may have overreacted and said they didn't intend for the person to be fired, while your comment assumes that to have been the intent all along. Yet while the fault lies entirely with the employer, the blame inevitably is shifted entirely to activists on social media. [0]https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-over-alleged-racist-gesture-says-he-was-cracking-knuckles/2347414/ https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
  - gruez 6y ago
    >And it's odd that cancel culture is being blamed here, and not the employer and their policies. If someone got swatted, is it the police's fault or the person who called it in? Or when a racist calls 911 to report "suspicious activity" on a black person not doing anything that can reasonably construed as illegal or suspicious, and he ends up getting shot by the police?
    - krapp 6y ago
      >If someone got swatted, is it the police's fault or the person who called it in? Both. The police certainly have culpability for being willing to send armed thugs anywhere to bust down doors and start shooting based on nothing but an anonymous phone call. Swatting wouldn't exist without America's militant police culture. >Or when a racist calls 911 to report "suspicious activity" on a black person not doing anything that can reasonably construed as illegal or suspicious, and he ends up getting shot by the police? Again, both. The police are always, and obviously, at fault for pulling the trigger on someone who doesn't pose an obvious threat. The instigation is the fault of one party, but the escalation is the fault of the system. I'm not saying the person who posted the picture isn't at fault, obviously they have some culpability, and I'm not justifying it either. It's just odd that the employer is never considered to have any agency or responsibility in these discussions. The decision to fire the employee was entirely that of their employer. Presumably when they sat the employee down and asked for his side of the story, they weren't satisfied with "I was just cracking my knuckles." They could have taken one look at the photo and decided it was nonsense, but they decided to do an "internal investigation", suspension and eventual termination. No one made them. No one put a gun to their head.
radegast 6y ago
Cancel culture is when you, Johnny Depp, get indirectly accused of domestic violence by your wife, Amber Heard. Your employer immediately fires you and #MeToo people start lambasting you despite lack of any evidence. Meanwhile you are the one who is truly abused, and when you provide evidence, nothing really happens to your abuser. Cancel culture is when you, Daniel Vávra, are creating an RPG game set in 15th century Bohemia far away from Prague. And you don't include any black people in the game, so you are literally Hitler. I live in the Czech republic in a large city. Do you know how many black people I see nowadays? About 5-15 per year. Counted 7 this year so far if you are wondering. Were there any black people in rural 15th century Bohemia? Doesn't matter, we want your game to fail because you are racist! Do I need to go on?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

natrik 6y ago

I saw this posted the other day: https://mobile.twitter.com/GlennLoury/status/1288069751730831365 https://mobile.twitter.com/GlennLoury/status/128806975173083... which also provides examples.

DubiousPusher 6y ago

Of course it exists. It has always existed. People have been ostricised for holding "unacceptable" views for all of time. That hasn't changed. What has changed is which views will get you ostricised. And don't think even now there is only one side to this phenomena. Some are growing a catalog of infractions by the left but you would surely find yourself in hot water were you to tell your conservative boss or coworkers that war is a crime against humanity and all soldiers are therefore criminals (not my view but an extant one).

thoughtstheseus 6y ago
The scale, speed, and medium is also different. Today it’s not hard to seek out people with specific views and actively work to harm them economically and socially. My take is that the diversity of allowable view points is decreasing as a result of a minority of outspoken individuals.
- DubiousPusher 6y ago
  > The scale, speed, and medium is also different. I don't know how often the thousands of small puritan communities that dotted Eastern colonial North America drove people off nor how many communist youths were alienated from their families during the past 150 years but I would guess the numbers are likely unknowable and am therefore suspicious of any attempt to create a quantitative comparison.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    I figured scale in this case was not the size of people affected but rather the size of the area in which someone could be marked as a bad person. I wouldn't say that size is necessarily global now, but it is at least easy enough to mark someone throughout a nation the size of the U.S

wcerfgba 6y ago

Throughout the article the author repeatedly conflates sex and gender. He even links to "an editorial [in Nature] claiming that classifying an individual’s sex using any combination of anatomy and genetics “has no basis in science.”", which is actually titled "US proposal for defining gender has no basis in science". Sex and gender are not the same this and this lazy fumbling between the two concepts is a classic trans-exclusionary tactic.

stefantalpalaru 6y ago
> Sex and gender are not the same Tell that to those who started calling sex "biological gender": http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2016/gender-lines-science-transgender-identity/ http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2016/gender-lines-science-...
TheCoelacanth 6y ago
Yes, it basically turns the entire rant into one giant strawman argument. By substituting sex for gender in his opponents' arguments, he is replacing their arguments with weaker ones.
DanBC 6y ago
The Nature article is correctly stating that sex is not as simple as chromosomes or genitalia, and that we should avoid classifying people into either gender or sex roles based on these.

fabiofzero 6y ago

Mental note: never click a Quilette link again.

ThA0x2 6y ago
Why?

DoreenMichele 6y ago

He didn't just express a politically incorrect opinion. He did so in a fundamentally offensive and dismissive fashion, asserting that he's right and people who see it otherwise are straight up wrong. This is not how you do science well. Real science allows for questions and debate. It's also just obnoxious and makes you unbearable to be around. It's hard to imagine he would be faring much better even without a world that has the phrase cancel culture, whether you believe that's a real thing or not.

Udik 6y ago
> asserting that he's right and people who see it otherwise are straight up wrong. That seems to be the same thing his opponents are saying about his positions. So do you maintain the same attitude towards them?
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  If true, I'm guessing I would. I have a long history of saying "All y'all are wrong and both sides need to quit this crap." My mother always said "Two wrongs don't make a right."
  - Udik 6y ago
    It's definitely true- after all we're talking about people who stalked him and his (potential) employers because of how wrong he is. On the other hand, science is about finding truths. It needs to be flexible to replace old truths with new ones, but that doesn't mean that each single scientist must be flexible. It's fine for scientists to be absolutely convinced of the value of their theories and to defend them the best they can. After all, it has been said that science advances one funeral at a time. Scientists can be (and have been, historically, in various cases) giant assholes.
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      I don't really know the whole story. I'm guilty of not even reading the entire article. I'm a woman on the internet. I have had my fair share of mansplaining assholes let me know that I'm wrong and stupid and have zero right to have a personal opinion about my own life, so I didn't have a lot of patience for this piece. But given the topic, I'm guessing he was stalked and harassed by people for whom this topic is a survival issue. So they did their best to make it a survival issue for him. That doesn't make them right, not by any stretch of the imagination. But trans rights are not about mere scientific opinion. It's a political battle and lives are at stake. Among other things, LGBTQ individuals are at very high risk of homelessness and homeless individuals have a life expectancy that's about two decades shorter than average.

GoodJokes 6y ago

One person is not a culture. By labeling this a culture, the "afflicted" can criticize without inspecting the individual merits of each "case."

nebulosa 6y ago

Anecdotes don't make data. I'm keen to see any significant study that demonstrates the existence of so-called cancel culture, but for now it seems to be making a big fuss over a few overzealous institutions and some well-meaning but decidedly myopic liberals.