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What does "cancel" mean to you? Does it mean that people shouldn't face criticism and negative consequences for what they do in the public sphere? The argumen

What does "cancel" mean to you? Does it mean that people shouldn't face criticism and negative consequences for what they do in the public sphere? The argument was that LGBT people and their fellow travelers working for and supporting Mozilla would likely not want to continue if the head of the organization supported anti-LGBT laws. As such, that would diminish his leadership effectiveness. How is leadership effectiveness unrelated to his professional career in a leadership role? When I've looked into it, opposition to "cancel" seems more like the belief that rich, powerful, or famous people shouldn't suffer negative consequences for saying or doing something that liberals don't like.

ketamine__ 6y ago
> Does it mean that people shouldn't face criticism and negative consequences for what they do in the public sphere? It's fine to criticize people. Do you believe that someone should never be able to hold a job again because they donated money to a politician that an employee finds unsavory? > The argument was that LGBT people and their fellow travelers working for and supporting Mozilla would likely not want to continue if the head of the organization supported anti-LGBT laws. As such, that would diminish his leadership effectiveness. There is no proof he acted against the interests of LGBT employees at Mozilla. I like the idea of due process and if you can't come up with something that actually hurts employees then I don't find it to be a substantial argument. There are millions of people that don't support LGBT laws. We can't force them all to be jobless homeless. That's totalitarian. What I get from your post is that an employees personal feelings are more important than facts and reality. Employees can always go somewhere else instead of launching campaigns to have someone fired.
- eesmith 6y ago
  > Do you believe that someone should never be able to hold a job again because they donated money to a politician that an employee finds unsavory? You have changed the goalposts, because 1) "someone" is a much broader category than CEO, and 2) "an employee" is much narrower than "many employees, a board member, and external supporters." > I like the idea of due process Due process has never applied to employment positions. Ever. > There is no proof he acted against the interests of LGBT employees at Mozilla You mean against their employment interest. He did help fund opposition to their personal interests. > We can't force them all to be jobless homeless. That's totalitarian. Funny thing is, Eich is neither jobless nor homeless, and people still hear about him. Wikipedia summarizes his few on masks, for example, and his work on Brave regularly appears on HN. John Stuart Mill described it much better than I in "On Liberty": """We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement. In these various modes a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others, for faults which directly concern only himself; but he suffers these penalties only in so far as they are the natural, and, as it were, the spontaneous consequences of the faults themselves, not because they are purposely inflicted on him for the sake of punishment. """ > an employees personal feelings Multiple employees, and volunteers. And at least one board member. Certainly personal feelings are important. People are turned down all the time for a position because of "bad culture fit" or "rubs me wrong" or any number of personal reasons. The fact and reality is that we are all emotional creatures. You cannot separate them. But now that we're well off track - what does "cancel" mean? Because I've looked and looked, and never found a definition which fits better than "rich, powerful, or famous people facing unwanted negative consequences of actions or expressions that liberals disagree with"?
  - Veen 6y ago
    > Because I've looked and looked, and never found a definition which fits better than "rich, powerful, or famous people facing unwanted negative consequences of actions or expressions that liberals disagree with"? Consider how you might think differently if it were people facing unwanted negative consequences of actions or expressions that conservatives disagreed with.
    - eesmith 6y ago
      That happens all the time. It's just not called being canceled. When CPAC de-platformed Milo Yiannopoulos and Young Pharaoh, weren't they being canceled? Yet I have no problem with them doing that. Whenever I try to come up with a non-partisan definition of "cancel" - one that doesn't explicitly point to "liberals" or "left" - I easily discover that of course conservatives also cancel. Because facing negative consequences of actions or expressions is part of human nature. Now, of course there are times when I think that the "canceling" was wrong. If someone loses their job because of their support for unionizing, or faces pressure to suppress reporting sexual harassment, then that's both canceling and illegal, and I am definitely against both cases. My problem is that "cancel" seems to have a built-in anti-left bias, making it simply a proxy for "leftists should stop complaining."
      - salawat 6y ago
        It absolutely doesn't have a built in anti-left bias. Who do you think were canceling in the 80's? (The Right) The point is, there is always someone trying to push things one way or another, and up until about 20 years ago, it seemed like things always found their way to an equilibrium... My how things have changed.
        eesmith 6y ago
        If you can't give a definition of "cancel" then how do you tell there was an equilibrium or that there isn't a built-in anti-left bias? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture gives example definitions: "to stop giving support to that person" That happens all the time. My Senator consistently voted in ways I don't like, so I'm voting for someone else next election and not contributing to his election campaign = stop giving support = cancel? Yet, entirely acceptable. "withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive" You'll note that "public figures and companies" has the built-in bias to the rich, powerful, and famous I mentioned - minimum-wage service employees cannot be canceled, according to this definition. You'll also notice a long history of, say, the NRA withdrawing support from a politician after that politician support gun sale restrictions. And what happened to Kaepernick in the NFL is surely an example of cancelling, yes? That is, both definitions are so broad that, when stripped of its specific anti-left bias, becomes no different than what John Stuart Mill says we should expect from liberty, and may even be our duty.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  >Employees can always go somewhere else instead of launching campaigns to have someone fired. So can Brendan Eich, which is what he did? Is the CEO not an employee of a company? I think you're confused about what totalitarianism is. Totalitarianism is the government sending you to the gulag, not consumers or workers boycotting individuals or companies whose values they dislike. That's both the literal market and the marketplace of ideas doing their job. What exactly is it actually you're suggesting here, that people aren't allowed to speak their mind, or lobby against CEOs? That Brendan Eich has some sort of job guarantee regardless of what people think of his beliefs? That's actually fairly totalitarian.
inglor_cz 6y ago
> The argument was that LGBT people and their fellow travelers working for and supporting Mozilla would likely not want to continue if the head of the organization supported anti-LGBT laws. How many of them actually said so? Or was someone offended on their behalf, preemptively?
- eesmith 6y ago
  How many of them actually need to say so before it makes sense to you? 10? 100? 1000? This is part of what I mean by how "cancel" is only applied to the powerful. How many managers are needed to fire someone? Often, only one. https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/3/5579516/outfoxed-how-protests-forced-mozillas-ceo-to-resign-in-11-days https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/3/5579516/outfoxed-how-prote... reports about one of the fellow travelers: > On a rainy morning this week in San Francisco, newly appointed Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich sat down for coffee with one of the people calling for his resignation. Hampton Catlin, a prominent developer of apps for the nascent Firefox OS, announced he was abandoning the platform due to Eich’s handling of the disclosure that in 2008 he donated $1,000 to the fight against same-sex marriage. California’s Proposition 8, which passed with 52 percent of the vote in 2008, made same-sex marriage illegal in California until the law was overturned by the Supreme Court. Over the course of an hour, Catlin explained the suffering that Prop. 8 caused for him and his partner, a Brit who couldn’t immigrate until marriage became legal. Catlin asked Eich for an apology. He didn’t get one. And it's not like this reaction was out of the blue: > ... For starters, Mozilla already fought this battle once, in 2012. That’s when Eich’s donation first became public, leading to a firestorm on Twitter. The Verge also links to https://twitter.com/iamjessklein/status/449233331352514560 https://twitter.com/iamjessklein/status/449233331352514560 "@amjessklein Have waited too long to say this. I'm an employee of @mozilla and I'm asking @brendaneich to step down as CEO.", so there's at least one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Catlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Catlin says "After a large public outcry and several Mozilla Foundation employees publicly calling for him to step down". So there's at least "several". Is that enough for you? If not, how many are enough? To get back to my main thesis - which is that "cancel" has a built-in bias against left-leaning views - we need only to look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Firearms_of_Montana#Political_donation_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Firearms_of_Montana#Pol... , where the founder and CEO was ousted for supporting Obama. I don't see any mention of employees there, and while discussions about "cancel culture" often mention things like Eich's situation, they rarely include Cooper.

ketamine__ 6y ago

> Does it mean that people shouldn't face criticism and negative consequences for what they do in the public sphere? It's fine to criticize people. Do you believe that someone should never be able to hold a job again because they donated money to a politician that an employee finds unsavory? > The argument was that LGBT people and their fellow travelers working for and supporting Mozilla would likely not want to continue if the head of the organization supported anti-LGBT laws. As such, that would diminish his leadership effectiveness. There is no proof he acted against the interests of LGBT employees at Mozilla. I like the idea of due process and if you can't come up with something that actually hurts employees then I don't find it to be a substantial argument. There are millions of people that don't support LGBT laws. We can't force them all to be jobless homeless. That's totalitarian. What I get from your post is that an employees personal feelings are more important than facts and reality. Employees can always go somewhere else instead of launching campaigns to have someone fired.

eesmith 6y ago
> Do you believe that someone should never be able to hold a job again because they donated money to a politician that an employee finds unsavory? You have changed the goalposts, because 1) "someone" is a much broader category than CEO, and 2) "an employee" is much narrower than "many employees, a board member, and external supporters." > I like the idea of due process Due process has never applied to employment positions. Ever. > There is no proof he acted against the interests of LGBT employees at Mozilla You mean against their employment interest. He did help fund opposition to their personal interests. > We can't force them all to be jobless homeless. That's totalitarian. Funny thing is, Eich is neither jobless nor homeless, and people still hear about him. Wikipedia summarizes his few on masks, for example, and his work on Brave regularly appears on HN. John Stuart Mill described it much better than I in "On Liberty": """We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement. In these various modes a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others, for faults which directly concern only himself; but he suffers these penalties only in so far as they are the natural, and, as it were, the spontaneous consequences of the faults themselves, not because they are purposely inflicted on him for the sake of punishment. """ > an employees personal feelings Multiple employees, and volunteers. And at least one board member. Certainly personal feelings are important. People are turned down all the time for a position because of "bad culture fit" or "rubs me wrong" or any number of personal reasons. The fact and reality is that we are all emotional creatures. You cannot separate them. But now that we're well off track - what does "cancel" mean? Because I've looked and looked, and never found a definition which fits better than "rich, powerful, or famous people facing unwanted negative consequences of actions or expressions that liberals disagree with"?
- Veen 6y ago
  > Because I've looked and looked, and never found a definition which fits better than "rich, powerful, or famous people facing unwanted negative consequences of actions or expressions that liberals disagree with"? Consider how you might think differently if it were people facing unwanted negative consequences of actions or expressions that conservatives disagreed with.
  - eesmith 6y ago
    That happens all the time. It's just not called being canceled. When CPAC de-platformed Milo Yiannopoulos and Young Pharaoh, weren't they being canceled? Yet I have no problem with them doing that. Whenever I try to come up with a non-partisan definition of "cancel" - one that doesn't explicitly point to "liberals" or "left" - I easily discover that of course conservatives also cancel. Because facing negative consequences of actions or expressions is part of human nature. Now, of course there are times when I think that the "canceling" was wrong. If someone loses their job because of their support for unionizing, or faces pressure to suppress reporting sexual harassment, then that's both canceling and illegal, and I am definitely against both cases. My problem is that "cancel" seems to have a built-in anti-left bias, making it simply a proxy for "leftists should stop complaining."
    - salawat 6y ago
      It absolutely doesn't have a built in anti-left bias. Who do you think were canceling in the 80's? (The Right) The point is, there is always someone trying to push things one way or another, and up until about 20 years ago, it seemed like things always found their way to an equilibrium... My how things have changed.
      - eesmith 6y ago
        If you can't give a definition of "cancel" then how do you tell there was an equilibrium or that there isn't a built-in anti-left bias? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture gives example definitions: "to stop giving support to that person" That happens all the time. My Senator consistently voted in ways I don't like, so I'm voting for someone else next election and not contributing to his election campaign = stop giving support = cancel? Yet, entirely acceptable. "withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive" You'll note that "public figures and companies" has the built-in bias to the rich, powerful, and famous I mentioned - minimum-wage service employees cannot be canceled, according to this definition. You'll also notice a long history of, say, the NRA withdrawing support from a politician after that politician support gun sale restrictions. And what happened to Kaepernick in the NFL is surely an example of cancelling, yes? That is, both definitions are so broad that, when stripped of its specific anti-left bias, becomes no different than what John Stuart Mill says we should expect from liberty, and may even be our duty.
Barrin92 6y ago
>Employees can always go somewhere else instead of launching campaigns to have someone fired. So can Brendan Eich, which is what he did? Is the CEO not an employee of a company? I think you're confused about what totalitarianism is. Totalitarianism is the government sending you to the gulag, not consumers or workers boycotting individuals or companies whose values they dislike. That's both the literal market and the marketplace of ideas doing their job. What exactly is it actually you're suggesting here, that people aren't allowed to speak their mind, or lobby against CEOs? That Brendan Eich has some sort of job guarantee regardless of what people think of his beliefs? That's actually fairly totalitarian.

inglor_cz 6y ago

> The argument was that LGBT people and their fellow travelers working for and supporting Mozilla would likely not want to continue if the head of the organization supported anti-LGBT laws. How many of them actually said so? Or was someone offended on their behalf, preemptively?

eesmith 6y ago
How many of them actually need to say so before it makes sense to you? 10? 100? 1000? This is part of what I mean by how "cancel" is only applied to the powerful. How many managers are needed to fire someone? Often, only one. https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/3/5579516/outfoxed-how-protests-forced-mozillas-ceo-to-resign-in-11-days https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/3/5579516/outfoxed-how-prote... reports about one of the fellow travelers: > On a rainy morning this week in San Francisco, newly appointed Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich sat down for coffee with one of the people calling for his resignation. Hampton Catlin, a prominent developer of apps for the nascent Firefox OS, announced he was abandoning the platform due to Eich’s handling of the disclosure that in 2008 he donated $1,000 to the fight against same-sex marriage. California’s Proposition 8, which passed with 52 percent of the vote in 2008, made same-sex marriage illegal in California until the law was overturned by the Supreme Court. Over the course of an hour, Catlin explained the suffering that Prop. 8 caused for him and his partner, a Brit who couldn’t immigrate until marriage became legal. Catlin asked Eich for an apology. He didn’t get one. And it's not like this reaction was out of the blue: > ... For starters, Mozilla already fought this battle once, in 2012. That’s when Eich’s donation first became public, leading to a firestorm on Twitter. The Verge also links to https://twitter.com/iamjessklein/status/449233331352514560 https://twitter.com/iamjessklein/status/449233331352514560 "@amjessklein Have waited too long to say this. I'm an employee of @mozilla and I'm asking @brendaneich to step down as CEO.", so there's at least one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Catlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Catlin says "After a large public outcry and several Mozilla Foundation employees publicly calling for him to step down". So there's at least "several". Is that enough for you? If not, how many are enough? To get back to my main thesis - which is that "cancel" has a built-in bias against left-leaning views - we need only to look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Firearms_of_Montana#Political_donation_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Firearms_of_Montana#Pol... , where the founder and CEO was ousted for supporting Obama. I don't see any mention of employees there, and while discussions about "cancel culture" often mention things like Eich's situation, they rarely include Cooper.