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I don't think we should lose sight of just how batshit insane the NYT editorial was. We can continue to talk about Cancel Culture, but the opening assertion of

I don't think we should lose sight of just how batshit insane the NYT editorial was. We can continue to talk about Cancel Culture, but the opening assertion of the editorial was that we have a right to, "...speak [our] minds and voice [our] opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned." That's gobsmackingly wrong. It's the kind of sentence that, to me at least, grinds my mental gears to a halt. I just... I have a very hard time thinking generously about the author of that sentence. I'm glad people like Ken exist, to put into words something more coherent than what I'd ever be able to create.

zdragnar 5y ago
It's not too far off. Any behavior which constitutes assault or harassment is not protected by the first amendment. Shaming and shunning can easily be considered harassment in the right context, though actually proving it in a court of law gets much trickier.
- akerl_ 5y ago
  Harassment is a legal concept. In what context are we considering “shaming and shunning” to be harassment in if not the context of the court of law?
- deleted 5y ago
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- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  "In the right context" is doing a lot of work there! I think we can all agree that: * If you say that vanilla ice cream is boring, and I respond by getting 10,000 Twitter users to email your CEO saying they'll boycott your company until you're fired, that's at least colloquially harassment and completely unacceptable behavior. * If you go on a 10 minute rant about how much my political and religious views suck, and I respond by uninviting you from my birthday party, that's a reasonable response and not harassment at all. So to meaningfully address the issue of "cancel culture", which the NYT and Popehat both agree is real, we really have to talk about what is and isn't the right context or we won't be able to get anywhere.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  Shaming and shunning is not harassment, harassment is harassment which requires additional components beyond just shaming and shunning; you have to take it to an excess or compound it with other behavior for shaming and/or shunning to reach anything even remotely resembling harassment. So decidedly no; you are not granted a freedom from shaming and shunning for your opinion, not in American culture, not in Western or Eastern culture, not historically, not in any religion, nowhere has this concept been held up as a societal more. The concept literally does not exist, and yet here the NYT cites it as some cultural artifact like it's been a cornerstone of American society from the beginning. And what's provable in a court of law is completely immaterial to this discussion, not sure why you'd bring that up. The NYT was not citing the First Amendment, and in fact directly says so later on in the editorial.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    There is no objective, bright line boundary at which shaming crosses into illegal harassment. They can be both one and the same thing quite easily. See also "bullying".
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    > Shaming and shunning is not harassment, harassment is harassment which requires additional components beyond just shaming and shunning Please specify which components are necessary and where the difference lies.
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  > Shaming and shunning can easily be considered harassment in the right context Shunning is never harassment. Shaming could be, but not on its own -- it would probably have to be either extraordinarily sustained/egregious and/or paired with credible threats to person or property. Even emergent behavior that has the same effect as blatant harassment isn't harassment. I.e., sending one person 10K letters, some of which contain (even unspecific) threats, is CERTAINLY harassment. But if 10K people each send one letter, there are probably zero instances of harassment unless one of the letters is seriously egregious (e.g., contains specific and credible threats). And even then, the other 99,999 letters aren't instances of harassment. Organized behavior might be. It depends on the amount of coordination. But probably the case is too difficult to take on.
  - deleted 5y ago
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- gnicholas 5y ago
  > Any behavior which constitutes assault or harassment is not protected by the first amendment. What definition of harassment are you using, and what 1A case are you thinking shows it to be unprotected speech?
akhmatova 5y ago
It's the kind of sentence that, to me at least, grinds my mental gears to a halt. This is the cortisone rush that tptacek was referring to. You need to let it go through you (or past you) until you feel your mental gears loosen up again. Then step back and look at the bigger picture. What the editorial author meant was not some kind of absolute freedom from the threat of being shamed or shunned. But that, once upon a time, and it wasn't too long ago, there was a thing known as "civil discourse" in this country. In which (and granted the boundaries are fuzzy hear) -- in itself the mere fact of having an unpopular (or difficult) opinion on the state of the world ... did not run such an alarmingly and dysfunctional risk of getting you shut down in form or another as it does today. Note that this don't mean "unpopular or difficult" in the anything-goes sense. Spouting sheer idiocy can (and should) get you shunned and shamed, along with threats of implications of violence, and a whole lot of other things I don't need to mention. But taking unpopular / difficult (or even simply naïve) stances within the boundaries of plausibility and reason, by themselves, should not merit such a reaction. And yet increasingly they do. That is what is meant by a breakdown in the standards of civil discourse. And it this breakdown of standards -- and the creeping climate of "better hold your tongue" that has taken over this country -- that is the main concern of the editorial piece. Not absolutist notions of freedom or freedom-from. Nuance. That's the key takeaway here.
- l33t2328 5y ago
  > cortisone rush This is such an outstanding term. Sometimes I’ll see a comment of someone arguing with me or insulting me and I’ll get a spike of anger and literally feel my eyes twitch for a split second and I’ve never really thought about it but that’s exactly what it is.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/
  - lapsis_beeftech 5y ago
    Whatever it is you are experiencing it is definitely not cortisone, which is an inactive metabolite of cortisol.
coffeemug 5y ago
From TFA: > Americans don’t have, and have never had, any right to be free of shaming or shunning. The First Amendment protects our right to speak free of government interference. It does not protect us from other people saying mean things in response to our speech. First, the term "free speech" is overloaded-- it means a legal right to speak free of government interference, and it also means a cultural environment of pluralism where opposing views are welcomed and debate is encouraged. Here Ken conflates the two meanings. Second, unlike legal norms, cultural norms are continuous rather than discrete. There are maybe 3-5 definitions of murder (premeditated, involuntary, etc.), but saying mean things is a continuum. You can live in a society like Soviet Union c 1930 where your coworker who wants your position calls for "the people's court" because of a joke you made-- a completely informal struggle session that doesn't involve the government. Or you can live in a society where you can express anything whatsoever and not get fired. Or at a million points in between. Third, legal norms follow cultural norms. See gay marriage. When people talk about cancel culture they talk about cultural norms shifting toward struggle sessions (the word "culture" is in the term!), and concerns that some day legal norms may follow this cultural shift. In this context the word "right" is used colloquially. Obviously nobody has a legal right to speak without fear of shaming. We want to live in a culture where a joke on the internet doesn't lead to a struggle session at work. It isn't batshit insane, it isn't gobsmackingly wrong, and it isn't that difficult to understand.
- otterley 5y ago
  > We want to live in a culture where a joke on the internet doesn't lead to a struggle session at work. Everyone wants to do that, until they find themselves the target of a joke while struggling to have a good career, live in a nice place, and raise a family as a member of an unprivileged group with a lot of adverse baggage to overcome. Not everyone thinks such jokes are funny, and they have just as much a right to be pissed off about them as you think you have to make them. Getting along with your peers is an essential duty at most jobs, and that includes refraining from unnecessarily upsetting them.
  - coffeemug 5y ago
    These things start out attempting to correct an injustice and then take on a life of their own. Unscrupulous people see it as a career opportunity under the pretense of moral righteousness. This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union in 1930s. All the evils were done in the name of correcting injustice and helping the oppressed. I'm in favor of correcting injustices, obviously. The problem is with the opportunists.
mrjangles 5y ago
Yeah that's a good point. There is not a single person complaining about cancel culture today that wouldn't immediately join the snarling mob and try to cancel someone that argued something like "we should rape 1 year olds" or something like that, for example. If we kept the arguments to "It is wrong to hate people just for holding the same opinion as 50% of the population", or "Hating someone for making a joke is wrong", it would make a lot more sense. You know, the more I think about it, the fact that there are a large body of people who literally hate and want to destroy the lives of half the people living in the western world, simply because of their opinions about life, really rubs in how psychotically dangerous they are. It is amazing they are allowed to get away with their behavior. The reason is that people really are instinctively terrified of a ravenous mob (and rightly so), so they keep quite, but, in the age of the internet, there is less to fear from these mobs.
- tptacek 5y ago
  I don't think "speech without social repercussions should be safe from approbation as long as it's popular speech" is a good norm either.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > there are a large body of people who literally hate and want to destroy the lives of half the people The worst part, of course, is that 'large body' is pretty close to 100%. It's mutually assured destruction, and working.
lliamander 5y ago
I can't find the quote, but Norman Rockwell said that the inspiration for his Freedom of Speech painting was a town hall he attended where a man not much liked by the community was allowed to speak his piece, even when the people did not like what he had to say. I'm not arguing we shouldn't be able to shame or shun (the NYT itself would be my preferred target). I think the idea is that we should aspire to resolving our differences through dialog. What we have now is a crowd of people who feel that dialog is no longer necessary, and that to even simply engage in dialog with one's political enemies is bad and might somehow taint you.
- yeetsfromhell 5y ago
  Once US society made the jump from "right vs wrong" to "good vs evil" it became an intractable problem. @dang: was this a mistakenly flagged post? I don't think what I said was off topic or objectionable...to anyone, really.
  - dang 5y ago
    I suppose some users thought it was too unsubstantive, given the inflammatory topic.
- RangerScience 5y ago
  > What we have now But this isn't a new thing, not even a little bit. The House Unamerican Committee, and anti-abolitionists (as in slavery) are both examples of exactly this from history. Arguably, worse and more extreme because of all the, you know, death and murder.
  - lliamander 5y ago
    Of course political violence is not a new thing. And given your choice of examples, I feel compelled to remind you that it is certainly not just a right-wing phenomenon. I am simply stating the ideal, and how the present state of affairs differs from that ideal. I would also add that we are the downslope from a relatively high-water mark period of free speech, and I see no value in regressing in the manner we have.
bko 5y ago
I don't know if I have a definition of "cancel culture" but consider the time NY Times ran an entire article about a single person from Goldman Sachs that donated to the wrong political candidate in 2016, which they publicly named. > Records show just one Goldman employee, a financial adviser in the wealth management division, has donated to Mr. Trump — $534.58, to be precise. The Times also did some research on him and found he was selling MAGA style hats. Running a side hustle while working at GS is a big no-no and it got him fired. Can we all agree that whatever the hell that is is wrong? One of the largest newspapers in the world combing through public donations, finding a private individual that happened to donate a small amount to a politician that would go on to win the presidency, and feel the need to name that person publicly. Or if you're more sympathetic to the other side, how about the woman that gave Trump the middle finger? She lost her job as a government contractor, but she won political office off of the debaucle. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/nyregion/donald-trump-nyc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/nyregion/donald-trump-nyc... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/06/juli-briskman-trump-middle-finger-wins-office-virginia https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/06/juli-briskma...
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da39a3ee 5y ago
It depends on the subject. I don't have the right to deny racial equality without fear of being shamed or shunned. But I certainly have the right to point out that transgender biological males aren't women in the normal sense and don't match many people's definitions of the word "woman" without fear of being shamed or shunned.
- tptacek 5y ago
  If you say repulsive things, lots of very qualified, valuable engineers are going to exercise their right to free association to avoid working with you. There is no cure for that problem that doesn't eliminate the right to free association (or worse). If you're odious, you can't make people work with you. And you don't get to decide what other people find odious.
  - da39a3ee 5y ago
    Of course. A better way of saying what I intended is this: We cannot control the statistical distribution of opinions within the population and hence cannot control whether we will be shunned or shamed. However, that does not mean that we throw up our hands and define "repulsive" to be whatever gets us shunned by the majority: neither truth nor morality is completely relative. The two propositions I gave differ markedly in the degree to which they should be controversial to a kind rational mind: (1) That ceteris paribus two humans who differ only in their ethnicity should be accorded the same rights, a kind rational mind will always agree with. (2) That a man who decided recently to try to become a woman is not a woman in exactly the same sense as a standard biological woman is something that most kind rational minds will agree with, but some still perhaps might not. I'm sure you're not suggesting that either of those propositions is repulsive in any absolute sense. What I am saying is that in order to maintain standards in society, rather than letting those standards drift with cultural fashions and whims, all those who write and speak with the aim of maintaining a healthy culture should state clearly that proposition (2) is not repulsive or deserving of shame.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      What I find repulsive isn't the point. There certainly are people who will avoid working with you if you make public statements in support of (2). It's not up to us to define the threshold at which people will or won't shun us. Unless you want to give up on the concept of free association --- it seems clear you don't --- you're going to have to accept that it's possible to have and express opinions that will foreclose on some options in life for you. You have freedom of speech, but not freedom from social repercussions, and there is no clean divide between "social" and "workplace".
slibhb 5y ago
If someone said "we have a right to food and housing," would you call them "batshit insane"? While I agree that we don't have a right "speak [our] minds and voice [our] opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned," you (and the author) are adopting a style of argument where certain positions are subjected to intense scrutiny. The first paragraph of the NYT op-ed doesn't stand up under that scrutiny but the rest of it does, more or less. The blog just gets weird: > It’s good that the Times is worried about speech-suppressing laws promoted by some conservatives, but it’s terrible that the Times is gullibly accepting the Right’s deeply dishonest assertion that it doesn’t engage in the sort of behavior it calls “cancel culture.” There is no serious argument that conservatives refrain from “cancel culture.” Which part of the following quote from the op-ed claims that conservatives "refrain from cancel culture"? > How has this happened? In large part, it’s because the political left and the right are caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture. Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech. Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms. None of it! It says that conservatives have taken cancel culture further. The author is worried that agreeing that cancel culture is a problem will help the right. But he does agree, so he does his agreeing in a roundabout way while heaping scorn on the op-ed. The overall effect is unpleasant.
- tptacek 5y ago
  You don't in fact have a right to food and housing. But a right to food and housing would be a coherent proposition; you could design such a right (within obvious limits). You can't do that with the proposition that people have a right to speech without fear of shame or shunning; like, the logic itself literally doesn't work. You could simply shut down anyone's objectionable political speech by saying that it is shaming or shunning; they could respond in kind. Again: this is what White is saying with his "First Speaker Problem". I don't think you've very effectively rebutted his argument here.
  - 5y ago
refurb 5y ago
You’re taking the use of the word “right” to literally in this instance. The editorial is using it in the sense when someone says “i have the right to not have my house egged by teens”. It’s more the a reference to the ideal world than some right codified in the Constitution.
raxxorrax 5y ago
I don't think it was and I believe there is a obviously missing element of letting people speak with whose opinion you disagree. Especially in the US but it also has spread beyond that. It is an intellectual requirement, it is a scientific requirement. I don't think there is much dispute to that. So especially academia has a responsibility here. And yes, the principle of free speech does not allow for retaliation aside from more speech with which you can express your disagreement with what was said. If you need a law to adhere to the principle which is often reduced to government, you are not a proponent of freedom of speech. That is an position you can take, but you should not have any further illusion about that.

zdragnar 5y ago

It's not too far off. Any behavior which constitutes assault or harassment is not protected by the first amendment. Shaming and shunning can easily be considered harassment in the right context, though actually proving it in a court of law gets much trickier.

akerl_ 5y ago
Harassment is a legal concept. In what context are we considering “shaming and shunning” to be harassment in if not the context of the court of law?
deleted 5y ago
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SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
"In the right context" is doing a lot of work there! I think we can all agree that: * If you say that vanilla ice cream is boring, and I respond by getting 10,000 Twitter users to email your CEO saying they'll boycott your company until you're fired, that's at least colloquially harassment and completely unacceptable behavior. * If you go on a 10 minute rant about how much my political and religious views suck, and I respond by uninviting you from my birthday party, that's a reasonable response and not harassment at all. So to meaningfully address the issue of "cancel culture", which the NYT and Popehat both agree is real, we really have to talk about what is and isn't the right context or we won't be able to get anywhere.
TameAntelope 5y ago
Shaming and shunning is not harassment, harassment is harassment which requires additional components beyond just shaming and shunning; you have to take it to an excess or compound it with other behavior for shaming and/or shunning to reach anything even remotely resembling harassment. So decidedly no; you are not granted a freedom from shaming and shunning for your opinion, not in American culture, not in Western or Eastern culture, not historically, not in any religion, nowhere has this concept been held up as a societal more. The concept literally does not exist, and yet here the NYT cites it as some cultural artifact like it's been a cornerstone of American society from the beginning. And what's provable in a court of law is completely immaterial to this discussion, not sure why you'd bring that up. The NYT was not citing the First Amendment, and in fact directly says so later on in the editorial.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  There is no objective, bright line boundary at which shaming crosses into illegal harassment. They can be both one and the same thing quite easily. See also "bullying".
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  > Shaming and shunning is not harassment, harassment is harassment which requires additional components beyond just shaming and shunning Please specify which components are necessary and where the difference lies.
throwawaygh 5y ago
> Shaming and shunning can easily be considered harassment in the right context Shunning is never harassment. Shaming could be, but not on its own -- it would probably have to be either extraordinarily sustained/egregious and/or paired with credible threats to person or property. Even emergent behavior that has the same effect as blatant harassment isn't harassment. I.e., sending one person 10K letters, some of which contain (even unspecific) threats, is CERTAINLY harassment. But if 10K people each send one letter, there are probably zero instances of harassment unless one of the letters is seriously egregious (e.g., contains specific and credible threats). And even then, the other 99,999 letters aren't instances of harassment. Organized behavior might be. It depends on the amount of coordination. But probably the case is too difficult to take on.
- deleted 5y ago
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gnicholas 5y ago
> Any behavior which constitutes assault or harassment is not protected by the first amendment. What definition of harassment are you using, and what 1A case are you thinking shows it to be unprotected speech?

akhmatova 5y ago

It's the kind of sentence that, to me at least, grinds my mental gears to a halt. This is the cortisone rush that tptacek was referring to. You need to let it go through you (or past you) until you feel your mental gears loosen up again. Then step back and look at the bigger picture. What the editorial author meant was not some kind of absolute freedom from the threat of being shamed or shunned. But that, once upon a time, and it wasn't too long ago, there was a thing known as "civil discourse" in this country. In which (and granted the boundaries are fuzzy hear) -- in itself the mere fact of having an unpopular (or difficult) opinion on the state of the world ... did not run such an alarmingly and dysfunctional risk of getting you shut down in form or another as it does today. Note that this don't mean "unpopular or difficult" in the anything-goes sense. Spouting sheer idiocy can (and should) get you shunned and shamed, along with threats of implications of violence, and a whole lot of other things I don't need to mention. But taking unpopular / difficult (or even simply naïve) stances within the boundaries of plausibility and reason, by themselves, should not merit such a reaction. And yet increasingly they do. That is what is meant by a breakdown in the standards of civil discourse. And it this breakdown of standards -- and the creeping climate of "better hold your tongue" that has taken over this country -- that is the main concern of the editorial piece. Not absolutist notions of freedom or freedom-from. Nuance. That's the key takeaway here.

l33t2328 5y ago
> cortisone rush This is such an outstanding term. Sometimes I’ll see a comment of someone arguing with me or insulting me and I’ll get a spike of anger and literally feel my eyes twitch for a split second and I’ve never really thought about it but that’s exactly what it is.
- dekhn 5y ago
  https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/
- lapsis_beeftech 5y ago
  Whatever it is you are experiencing it is definitely not cortisone, which is an inactive metabolite of cortisol.

coffeemug 5y ago

From TFA: > Americans don’t have, and have never had, any right to be free of shaming or shunning. The First Amendment protects our right to speak free of government interference. It does not protect us from other people saying mean things in response to our speech. First, the term "free speech" is overloaded-- it means a legal right to speak free of government interference, and it also means a cultural environment of pluralism where opposing views are welcomed and debate is encouraged. Here Ken conflates the two meanings. Second, unlike legal norms, cultural norms are continuous rather than discrete. There are maybe 3-5 definitions of murder (premeditated, involuntary, etc.), but saying mean things is a continuum. You can live in a society like Soviet Union c 1930 where your coworker who wants your position calls for "the people's court" because of a joke you made-- a completely informal struggle session that doesn't involve the government. Or you can live in a society where you can express anything whatsoever and not get fired. Or at a million points in between. Third, legal norms follow cultural norms. See gay marriage. When people talk about cancel culture they talk about cultural norms shifting toward struggle sessions (the word "culture" is in the term!), and concerns that some day legal norms may follow this cultural shift. In this context the word "right" is used colloquially. Obviously nobody has a legal right to speak without fear of shaming. We want to live in a culture where a joke on the internet doesn't lead to a struggle session at work. It isn't batshit insane, it isn't gobsmackingly wrong, and it isn't that difficult to understand.

otterley 5y ago
> We want to live in a culture where a joke on the internet doesn't lead to a struggle session at work. Everyone wants to do that, until they find themselves the target of a joke while struggling to have a good career, live in a nice place, and raise a family as a member of an unprivileged group with a lot of adverse baggage to overcome. Not everyone thinks such jokes are funny, and they have just as much a right to be pissed off about them as you think you have to make them. Getting along with your peers is an essential duty at most jobs, and that includes refraining from unnecessarily upsetting them.
- coffeemug 5y ago
  These things start out attempting to correct an injustice and then take on a life of their own. Unscrupulous people see it as a career opportunity under the pretense of moral righteousness. This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union in 1930s. All the evils were done in the name of correcting injustice and helping the oppressed. I'm in favor of correcting injustices, obviously. The problem is with the opportunists.

mrjangles 5y ago

Yeah that's a good point. There is not a single person complaining about cancel culture today that wouldn't immediately join the snarling mob and try to cancel someone that argued something like "we should rape 1 year olds" or something like that, for example. If we kept the arguments to "It is wrong to hate people just for holding the same opinion as 50% of the population", or "Hating someone for making a joke is wrong", it would make a lot more sense. You know, the more I think about it, the fact that there are a large body of people who literally hate and want to destroy the lives of half the people living in the western world, simply because of their opinions about life, really rubs in how psychotically dangerous they are. It is amazing they are allowed to get away with their behavior. The reason is that people really are instinctively terrified of a ravenous mob (and rightly so), so they keep quite, but, in the age of the internet, there is less to fear from these mobs.

tptacek 5y ago
I don't think "speech without social repercussions should be safe from approbation as long as it's popular speech" is a good norm either.
rootusrootus 5y ago
> there are a large body of people who literally hate and want to destroy the lives of half the people The worst part, of course, is that 'large body' is pretty close to 100%. It's mutually assured destruction, and working.

lliamander 5y ago

I can't find the quote, but Norman Rockwell said that the inspiration for his Freedom of Speech painting was a town hall he attended where a man not much liked by the community was allowed to speak his piece, even when the people did not like what he had to say. I'm not arguing we shouldn't be able to shame or shun (the NYT itself would be my preferred target). I think the idea is that we should aspire to resolving our differences through dialog. What we have now is a crowd of people who feel that dialog is no longer necessary, and that to even simply engage in dialog with one's political enemies is bad and might somehow taint you.

yeetsfromhell 5y ago
Once US society made the jump from "right vs wrong" to "good vs evil" it became an intractable problem. @dang: was this a mistakenly flagged post? I don't think what I said was off topic or objectionable...to anyone, really.
- dang 5y ago
  I suppose some users thought it was too unsubstantive, given the inflammatory topic.
RangerScience 5y ago
> What we have now But this isn't a new thing, not even a little bit. The House Unamerican Committee, and anti-abolitionists (as in slavery) are both examples of exactly this from history. Arguably, worse and more extreme because of all the, you know, death and murder.
- lliamander 5y ago
  Of course political violence is not a new thing. And given your choice of examples, I feel compelled to remind you that it is certainly not just a right-wing phenomenon. I am simply stating the ideal, and how the present state of affairs differs from that ideal. I would also add that we are the downslope from a relatively high-water mark period of free speech, and I see no value in regressing in the manner we have.

bko 5y ago

I don't know if I have a definition of "cancel culture" but consider the time NY Times ran an entire article about a single person from Goldman Sachs that donated to the wrong political candidate in 2016, which they publicly named. > Records show just one Goldman employee, a financial adviser in the wealth management division, has donated to Mr. Trump — $534.58, to be precise. The Times also did some research on him and found he was selling MAGA style hats. Running a side hustle while working at GS is a big no-no and it got him fired. Can we all agree that whatever the hell that is is wrong? One of the largest newspapers in the world combing through public donations, finding a private individual that happened to donate a small amount to a politician that would go on to win the presidency, and feel the need to name that person publicly. Or if you're more sympathetic to the other side, how about the woman that gave Trump the middle finger? She lost her job as a government contractor, but she won political office off of the debaucle. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/nyregion/donald-trump-nyc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/nyregion/donald-trump-nyc... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/06/juli-briskman-trump-middle-finger-wins-office-virginia https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/06/juli-briskma...

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da39a3ee 5y ago

It depends on the subject. I don't have the right to deny racial equality without fear of being shamed or shunned. But I certainly have the right to point out that transgender biological males aren't women in the normal sense and don't match many people's definitions of the word "woman" without fear of being shamed or shunned.

tptacek 5y ago
If you say repulsive things, lots of very qualified, valuable engineers are going to exercise their right to free association to avoid working with you. There is no cure for that problem that doesn't eliminate the right to free association (or worse). If you're odious, you can't make people work with you. And you don't get to decide what other people find odious.
- da39a3ee 5y ago
  Of course. A better way of saying what I intended is this: We cannot control the statistical distribution of opinions within the population and hence cannot control whether we will be shunned or shamed. However, that does not mean that we throw up our hands and define "repulsive" to be whatever gets us shunned by the majority: neither truth nor morality is completely relative. The two propositions I gave differ markedly in the degree to which they should be controversial to a kind rational mind: (1) That ceteris paribus two humans who differ only in their ethnicity should be accorded the same rights, a kind rational mind will always agree with. (2) That a man who decided recently to try to become a woman is not a woman in exactly the same sense as a standard biological woman is something that most kind rational minds will agree with, but some still perhaps might not. I'm sure you're not suggesting that either of those propositions is repulsive in any absolute sense. What I am saying is that in order to maintain standards in society, rather than letting those standards drift with cultural fashions and whims, all those who write and speak with the aim of maintaining a healthy culture should state clearly that proposition (2) is not repulsive or deserving of shame.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    What I find repulsive isn't the point. There certainly are people who will avoid working with you if you make public statements in support of (2). It's not up to us to define the threshold at which people will or won't shun us. Unless you want to give up on the concept of free association --- it seems clear you don't --- you're going to have to accept that it's possible to have and express opinions that will foreclose on some options in life for you. You have freedom of speech, but not freedom from social repercussions, and there is no clean divide between "social" and "workplace".

slibhb 5y ago

If someone said "we have a right to food and housing," would you call them "batshit insane"? While I agree that we don't have a right "speak [our] minds and voice [our] opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned," you (and the author) are adopting a style of argument where certain positions are subjected to intense scrutiny. The first paragraph of the NYT op-ed doesn't stand up under that scrutiny but the rest of it does, more or less. The blog just gets weird: > It’s good that the Times is worried about speech-suppressing laws promoted by some conservatives, but it’s terrible that the Times is gullibly accepting the Right’s deeply dishonest assertion that it doesn’t engage in the sort of behavior it calls “cancel culture.” There is no serious argument that conservatives refrain from “cancel culture.” Which part of the following quote from the op-ed claims that conservatives "refrain from cancel culture"? > How has this happened? In large part, it’s because the political left and the right are caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture. Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech. Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms. None of it! It says that conservatives have taken cancel culture further. The author is worried that agreeing that cancel culture is a problem will help the right. But he does agree, so he does his agreeing in a roundabout way while heaping scorn on the op-ed. The overall effect is unpleasant.

tptacek 5y ago
You don't in fact have a right to food and housing. But a right to food and housing would be a coherent proposition; you could design such a right (within obvious limits). You can't do that with the proposition that people have a right to speech without fear of shame or shunning; like, the logic itself literally doesn't work. You could simply shut down anyone's objectionable political speech by saying that it is shaming or shunning; they could respond in kind. Again: this is what White is saying with his "First Speaker Problem". I don't think you've very effectively rebutted his argument here.
- 5y ago

refurb 5y ago

You’re taking the use of the word “right” to literally in this instance. The editorial is using it in the sense when someone says “i have the right to not have my house egged by teens”. It’s more the a reference to the ideal world than some right codified in the Constitution.

raxxorrax 5y ago

I don't think it was and I believe there is a obviously missing element of letting people speak with whose opinion you disagree. Especially in the US but it also has spread beyond that. It is an intellectual requirement, it is a scientific requirement. I don't think there is much dispute to that. So especially academia has a responsibility here. And yes, the principle of free speech does not allow for retaliation aside from more speech with which you can express your disagreement with what was said. If you need a law to adhere to the principle which is often reduced to government, you are not a proponent of freedom of speech. That is an position you can take, but you should not have any further illusion about that.