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The post, and your comment, IMO wrongly frames this as courage .vs. cowardice in standing up for friends. However, that fails to take into account any context

• cousin_it 5y ago
  My view is more like "a true friend would help you hide a body", or the short story "Friends in San Rosario" by O.Henry. If I abandoned a friend to the mob due to "screenshots of lewd DMs", I'd have a hard time living with myself afterward.
  • lloydjones 5y ago
    That doesn’t feel like a worldview that would result in a fairer society or better personal conduct. If defending a person, in the face of prima facie evidence, has the result of preserving their reputation and status (and keeping the reputation and status of the accuser in their original state) then it doesn’t feel useful or good.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • drknownuffin 5y ago
      I have a little kid. When we watch cartoons, they might point at the villain of the piece - e.g., Jafar - and say "he's a bad man!" And I take the opportunity to nudge them and ask, "They did a bad thing. Does that mean they're always bad? Can they make things better? Should we forgive them? How do we know when to forgive them?" (not in a single tirade; these are just questions I drop over time.) Because, in anticipation of the fact that they're definitely going to fuck up along the way, I want them to learn that mistakes and failures and even doing bad things don't make them irrevocably bad - that ultimately, the most important thing is making amends / trying again / etc. That your worst decision is not the sum total of who you are. I don't see why I should try so hard to teach that to my kid, and then "disavow" friends who may have fucked up.
      • _carbyau_ 5y ago
        While I agree with your worldview as presented here there is a difference between: 1. helping a friend hide the body 2. telling your friend they are in the wrong and you will help them through the consequences IE likely charges, court, gaol time, life rebuilding etc.
    • exporectomy 5y ago
      It's in the nature of friendships to not be fair or good for the whole society. We regularly favor our friends over strangers for all sorts of things. If you want fair, don't favor your friends. The trouble is, that also means probably not having any friends. There's a personal price to pay for being "good".
    • lmm 5y ago
      Our actual legal system is adversarial, and for good reason. The best way to get to the truth is to have devoted partisans on both sides.
  • exolymph 5y ago
    Just a heads up for any friends of mine reading this comment, if you kill someone, I'm not gonna help cover it up. Probably even if you were justified — you'll still have to take your chances with the court system. Good luck tho!
  • mariuolo 5y ago
    "a true friend would help you hide a body" <- if both of you are criminals, perhaps.
• 1123581321 5y ago
  That kind of scenario doesn’t seem relevant, given the kind of attacks this thread is about, but if shown a damning screenshot, I would hope that I would not not immediately disavow a friend before looking into it, and if the situation was indeed that bad, would still love my friend enough to help them rehabilitate and obtain forgiveness from the people they wronged. I believe it’s possible to temporarily withdraw good graces to that end without permanently disavowing someone.
  • lloydjones 5y ago
    This is a good and much more balanced/nuanced outlook. However (in my hypothetical scenario which was meant to challenge the utility of blanket statements of support), a message of support does effectively act as a counterweight to an accusation, and unless one possesses all of the facts it may have the effect of laundering the reputation of somebody who deserves criticism (though I’d argue that in most instances, cancellation is very very over the top as a penalty).
    • 1123581321 5y ago
      I think that a culture of lovingly challenging our friends is part of the solution to that problem of that counterweighting. I should be the first to uncover the sins, if you will, of my friend, and urge repentance and restitution, temporarily withholding approval to achieve that end, and involving more people in that knowledge to the degree necessary with public shaming being a last resort. (In this example, the problem is not one requiring legal intervention.) Sadly, the idea that a friend can be a loyal one, while insisting on good behavior, seems alien today.
      • lloydjones 5y ago
        This is very good. I definitely endorse this approach (and largely agree with your final sentence).
      • kodah 5y ago
        > I think that a culture of lovingly challenging our friends is part of the solution to that problem of that counterweighting. I should be the first to uncover the sins, if you will, of my friend, and urge repentance and restitution, temporarily withholding approval to achieve that end, and involving more people in that knowledge to the degree necessary with public shaming being a last resort. (In this example, the problem is not one requiring legal intervention.) This sounds very Catholic
• somekyle 5y ago
  I think an interesting question is: can you support people and wish the best for them even if they've done a bad thing? With the exception of some particularly abhorrent things, I'm not sure I'd consider myself a friend to someone if I'm not willing to support them even if they're in the wrong. That doesn't mean lying for them or trying to pretend it wasn't bad, but I would expect myself to push back on mischaracterizations of them (positive or negative!) and help them navigate the consequences.
  • lloydjones 5y ago
    I’d like to think I could but it’s largely context and “acknowledgement + repentance dependent” on the part of the ‘accused’ (if they did do the bad thing). That is, I am not going to defend somebody who won’t even be honest and open about their wrongdoing.
  • dwild 5y ago
    > I would expect myself to push back on mischaracterizations of them (positive or negative!) and help them navigate the consequences. The thing is, what tell you it's actually mischaracterizations. You can believe me, I'm not the same in front of my parents, versus in front of my boss or in front of my friends. I'm not saying I'm doing anything bad, but there's trait that I'll show more or less depending on the involved party. It can also pretty easily change between public and private settings, I don't have much situation for which it happens for me, except obviously my SO, but I have known people that does adapt to my more relax personality when they are alone with me. Nothing nefarious in my case, but a good example on how in private someone may act differently based on the other party. So sure I agree that you may support them, tell your own story about that person, but you still need to understands that it's only your story, that has nothing to do with anyone else story.
• BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  Screenshots are trivially easy to fake. Friends don’t have to be character references, just public opinion defense attorneys who play dirty.
  • lloydjones 5y ago
    I should have caveated my comment with “screenshots that can be proved to be real”
    • cortesoft 5y ago
      What screenshots can be proven to be real?
      • lloydjones 5y ago
        You’re right. It was a bad, rushed example on my part. I was effectively trying to say “Imagine a scenario where the wrongdoing was basically certain”, for the purposes of focusing on the ‘backing up friends with a public statement’ part of the situation. I know that in reality this (probability of guilt) can’t readily be uncoupled from the result (the statement) but I asked people to imagine a situation of certain ‘guilt’.
• hexane360 5y ago
  Speaking of Scott Alexander, this kind of thinking seems exactly like the kind of virtue signaling he writes about in "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup". As the priest in the parable says: >It seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. You forgive a conventional duel just as you forgive a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn’t anything to be forgiven. And as Scott continues: >Actual forgiveness, the kind the priest needs to cultivate to forgive evildoers, is really really hard. The fake forgiveness the townspeople use to forgive the people they like is really easy, so they get to boast not only of their forgiving nature, but of how much nicer they are than those mean old priests who find forgiveness difficult and want penance along with it. I think about this a lot when I see the perennial discourse on canceling. Scott talks about this argument in terms of people being canceled by leftists, but I think it applies almost as well to people on the opposite side handwringing about cancellation. There are lots of great points to be made about the corrosive effects of cancellation mob rule, but I sometimes wonder if most of the left-right difference on this issue comes down to how strongly they feel about the infraction in question, rather than any level-headed consideration of what policy would lead to the best society.
  • zerocrates 5y ago
    > most of the left-right difference on this issue comes down to how strongly they feel about the infraction in question I would say this is pretty clearly the case. Most of the time the question seems to be "is this cancel-worthy": the difference in your reaction to the "cancellation" of, say, J.K. Rowling vs. Nikole Hannah-Jones probably depends more on your feeling about what they've done than on your stance on "cancellation" itself.
• brailsafe 5y ago
  This happened to a friend of mine recently. Some woman posted their conversation to an instagram story, saying all my friend wanted was sex and implying that people should stay away from him. It seemed like she thought she was doing something courageous, when in reality she's kind of a monster. The dude did nothing more than unfollow her on insta after she strongly hinted that there would be no possibility for romance after he invited her to hangout. Instead of just getting rejected for a pretty standard way to meet people, he gets shamed in front of potentially hundreds of people. So much for ostensibly sex friendly liberalism. Screenshots of DMs are hardly smoking gun evidence of anything if your audience is heavily inclined to pile on, nor does it matter because that's a shit way to communicate anyway and removes from someone any kind of recourse. I couldn't have done anything because she had a private account, but I couldn't have done anything to counter it anyway because it was just an outlet form of social media. My point is that nobody did a bad thing until someone actually did a bad thing, and I think that's most people's gripe with 'cancellation'.
  • Opt_Out_Fed_IRS 5y ago
    He should have sent vocals which cannot be screenshot
    • aiisjustanif 5y ago
      Screen record.
      • Opt_Out_Fed_IRS 5y ago
        Ok but you have to do it immediately or you lose the ability to re-play the audio
• chmod775 5y ago
  > eg, A situation with damning screenshots of lewd DMs are pretty ‘smoking gun’ Not really. Fake screenshots of such things are trivial to create. For example: https://streamable.com/zcgqie https://streamable.com/zcgqie