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>A significant proportion of our society has become totally OK with censorship, cancellation This specific phrasing jumped out to me because being against both

by slg 4y ago

>A significant proportion of our society has become totally OK with censorship, cancellation This specific phrasing jumped out to me because being against both censorship and cancellation should be a contradiction. Cancellation is an example of the exercising of free speech. Should I not have the freedom to organize a protest of my local theater for hosting a controversial figure that I think is worthy of cancellation? Isn't that a very basic and fundamental example of free speech? Comments like yours seems to reveal a lack of a consistent principle underlying your argument. Instead, you seem to be defining free speech as some narrow window of speech that you agree with and speech outside that isn't worth protecting. Ironically it ends up making your comment a good example of the exact thing you were decrying.

throwaway23597 4y ago
You're reading too much into my comment. I specifically tried to stay neutral because this sort of tactical escalation could come from either side. In no way am I attempting to "define free speech as some narrow window of speech that I agree with". I'm specifically talking about people using seemingly private data to comb over people's private statements, which is a bad thing regardless of the content of those private statements.
- slg 4y ago
  >You're reading too much into my comment. I specifically tried to stay neutral because this sort of tactical escalation could come from either side. Fair enough, but you should know that calling out cancelation as a growing flaw of society will often not be received as a neutral position. The people who complain the loudest about cancelation generally do not come from "either side". It ends up making your comment appear to have a specific political slant even if that wasn't intentional.
  - chitowneats 4y ago
    "One side often uses a particular tactic against their enemies (cancellation). You criticizing it makes you sound biased". No. The only one here who comes off as biased is you.
  - StanislavPetrov 4y ago
    >Fair enough, but you should know that calling out cancelation as a growing flaw of society will often not be received as a neutral position Unfortunately, to those who view the world through the warped prism of partisanship, there are no neutral positions. Everything is tribal - Red or Blue. Statements aren't ever read with an open mind about what is actually being discussed, but rather scrutinized for indications about whether the author is on one team or the other, so they can be either supported or attacked. >It ends up making your comment appear to have a specific political slant even if that wasn't intentional. To tribalists, everything has a political slant.
  - mecha_ghidorah 4y ago
    >> The people who complain the loudest about cancelation generally do not come from "either side". Look you aren't wrong exactly but for those of us who grew up being incredibly left aligned and still are on a majority of things like myself expressing concerns about cancellation will make others put us in the out group. Genuinely though I am concerned about it because I think it has a tendency to encourage people to think about others one dimensionally. One of my friends has told another one of my friends that they are a bad person for not cutting someone out of their life because that person voted for the LNP (the major Australian conservative party). This is trying to guilt and shame someone into "cancelling" someone else on a micro scale and it freaks me the fuck out. I genuinely don't think this would have happened if cancel culture wasn't such a thing. >> It ends up making your comment appear to have a specific political slant even if that wasn't intentional. This kind of thing also worries me, the idea that viewing a single thing as a flaw culturally speaking is enough to put someone on a specific political slant. To me it feels somewhat prejudicial. I am not going to pretend I've not been guilty of it, because I absolutely have... just it feels to me like everyone is very quick to take positions on a particular thing as evidence as a side in an all encompassing culture war and I hate it
tomrod 4y ago
Not to jump into US political discussion, but the phrase you call out is what was typically called a dog whistle a few years ago.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hombre_fatal 4y ago
I can support the concept of free speech without cheering on everything someone might utter with their speech. I support free speech but I’m against dishonesty and calling someone’s employer to fire them because you disagree with them. I just don’t necessarily think those cases should let the state prosecute you. You might want to be sure you’re interpreting someone’s position in a way they would agree with before leveling something as grave as to assert their principals are inconsistent. Free speech is generally a legal thing while one may expect social mores to correct for the things they find distasteful and be disappointed when they don’t. That is not a contradiction.
- slg 4y ago
  > I support free speech but I’m against dishonesty and calling someone’s employer to fire them because you disagree with them. Do you not see any contradiction in this sentence? Dishonest speech is still speech. If you support free speech, you support the ability for people to lie because often whether a person is lying or not is not black and white. If a company employs someone who makes objectionable statements, how is it not free speech to call up that company and threaten a boycott unless they are fired? Boycotts are one of the more fundamental examples of free speech. How can you be against them but for free speech unless you have a very narrow definition of what speech qualifies as being worthy of protection?
  - bostonsre 4y ago
    Don't your statements also have contradictions? I am not condoning one viewpoint or another, but this is not black and white. The definition of freedom of speech: the right to express any opinions without censorship or restraint. Is it right that your free speech supersedes the free speech of others to the point where you actively fight against their free speech and which means the speech of others isn't really free then, is it?
    - jonnybgood 4y ago
      It seems you’re suggesting that by exercising disagreement we would be limiting the free speech of those we disagree with. Freedom of speech is not freedom of consequences. Others have the freedom of speech to speak against your freedom of speech. Only the government is disallowed in interfering.
brobdingnagians 4y ago
I agree with free speech and oppose censorship, but I also promote tolerance of those we disagree with and a certain degree of latitude in putting up with things others say without jumping on them immediately for things I disagree with or endless protests for what many believe to be innocuous or good faith beliefs. Cancellation is usually not just protest, it is warfare by any means to smear and destroy someones life and silence dissent from your position. It is dirty tricks instead of intellectual dialogue.
- slg 4y ago
  >I agree with free speech and oppose censorship, but I also promote tolerance of those we disagree with Does this mean you would support legislation to outlaw hate speech? After all that works against tolerance of others and is often used "to smear and destroy someones life and silence dissent from your position" "for what many believe to be innocuous or good faith beliefs."
  - dirheist 4y ago
    How do you get him supporting legislating to outlaw hate speech from him saying he wants to promote tolerance? Tolerance is something every human possesses and should exercise, it's not something that can be legislated. An intolerant person will use their free speech to attack, malign and try to get you fired (which is fair). A tolerant person will let you speak your mind even if they disagree. In no point is there the need for hate speech legislation if you have true free speech.
    - slg 4y ago
      Because both hate speech and cancellation are forms of speech that can be used to suppress the speech of others. I assumed their opposition to cancellation was more than just a distaste for it, hence the jump to legislation.
      - brobdingnagians 4y ago
        I do not support legislation outlawing cancellation.
bostonsre 4y ago
Isn't cancellation just censorship by a mob? If i understand my terms correctly (I very well might not), cancellation causes people to be deplatformed which seems a lot like censorship. I guess cancellation can be considered free speech, but that doesn't mean it's not censorship.
- kenjackson 4y ago
  Cancellation and censorship mean a lot of different things in different contexts. For example, OJ Simpson has largely been cancelled. But it doesn't feel like censorship per se -- for example you can still purchase writing by him or find video of him. If he's not on Tic Tok or YouTube, I don't think they'd block him. Yet, I don't think Disney is going to make a movie starring him.
- eldaisfish 4y ago
  Cancellation is the consequences of speech. Period. It is most certainly not censorship when you consider the context - something these debates regularly leave out. Some views are widely considered to be abhorrent or dangerous. People are free to believe vaccine misinformation or glorify extremism. Society does not have an obligation to listen.
  - janalsncm 4y ago
    The question under discussion is what those consequences should be. In some countries the consequence for certain kinds of speech is capital punishment by the State. Most Americans would be horrified if the US government did this. To be clear, the fact that this happens to be constitutionally protected is irrelevant because the question is what should be illegal not what is illegal. > Some views are widely considered to be abhorrent or dangerous. I also think pointing to “society” isn’t that useful since it’s a moving target. “Society” isn’t one thing. Things that are acceptable in one place are not in another. In some places advocating for equality for LGBT people is considered an affront to society. Dangerous even. The question is, what should be the worst consequence of having unpopular viewpoints?
  - jvalencia 4y ago
rhaway84773 4y ago
The complaints about “cancellation” are complaints about others speaking up. I am not a fan of cancel culture in the way it’s practiced today (especially some of the Twitter driven campaigns), but it’s squarely free speech.
hellfish 4y ago
> Should I not have the freedom to organize a protest of my local theater for hosting a controversial figure that I think is worthy of cancellation? Isn't that a very basic and fundamental example of free speech? Perhaps it isn't about freedom of speech but centralization of power. Protest all you want, but if you advocate for the centralization of power in government or corporate hands then you shouldn't complain when you can't protest anymore without getting the same treatment Chinese protestors are receiving
spfzero 4y ago
Cancellation is using speech and other means to limit someone else's ability to speak. When you demand that your local theatre forbid someone from speaking, rather then just choosing to not attend and listen to it, that's yes, technically, using your right of free speech. It's what you're using it for that is the difference. In one case, to get your message heard, in the other, to prevent someone from doing that. In essence using free speech to stop free speech.
twobitshifter 4y ago
It’s not a contradiction, there is political cancellation which has happened to celebrities in China. Look up Zhao Wei. This is the type of thing GP refers to. https://www.newsweek.com/who-zhao-wei-mystery-surrounds-chinese-actor-deleted-internet-1624875 https://www.newsweek.com/who-zhao-wei-mystery-surrounds-chin... In China any friendliness towards Japan can lead to being “cancelled” but the way it happens isn’t through a local protest.
tablespoon 4y ago
> This specific phrasing jumped out to me because being against both censorship and cancellation should be a contradiction. Cancellation is an example of the exercising of free speech. It isn't a contradiction. Think of it this way: government censorship is just when the government cancels you. The issue with "cancellation" is that it's often a cudgel to suppress and punish expression some minority disagrees with, often to enforce some kind of orthodoxy. It might be someone expressing their narrow "free speech" rights, but in a way that's opposed to "free expression" or a "free exchange of ideas."
Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
>you seem to be defining free speech GP didn't mention free speach anywhere. Yet you still take the liberty of defining words they didn't use for them. >Comments like yours seems to reveal a lack of a consistent principle underlying your argument cancellation is a societal issue, free speech is a legal issue. GP didn't say "we should make cancellation illegal" they said cancellation, which "a significant proportion of our society has become totally OK with" combined with surveilance, will cause even more cancelation. That is bad. (And I agree, btw.) You can have fair laws and still have an unfair population obsessed with censorship and cancellation. That's bad, but doesn't mean we should make it illegal. Complaining about societal failaings does not have to mean advocating for those people's views to be made illegal. That seems to be something that censorship and cancellation advocates can't seem to understand. >Should I not have the freedom to organize a protest of my local theater for hosting a controversial figure that I think is worthy of cancellation? You have complete freedom to do that, but it doesn't mean you should or shouldn't. That's what GP is saying. And cancellation can be over extremely petty or unfounded things. Obviously there is a line but people have taken a "cancel first, ask questions later" approach, and over increasingly petty reasons. One can advocate against that without being against free speech, which means that the government cannot make speech illegal.
- slg 4y ago
  You are only focusing on half of the passage I quoted. They also voiced opposition to censorship. I wasn't calling out their opposition to cancellation. I was saying those two views shouldn't coexist because being against cancellation is a form of censorship.
  - lp0_on_fire 4y ago
    Being against cancellation and specifically, cancel culture, is not a form a censorship. At no point did that person suggest that people participating in cancel culture be prevented from doing so or that their ideas be shouted down. Funny enough, that same courtesy is usually not applied by the proponents of cancel culture.
    - deleted 4y ago
adventured 4y ago
> Cancellation is an example of the exercising of free speech. If the context is a vacuum that might be fine, maybe. In reality the US is hyper fragile intellectually and it has gotten drastically worse over the past 10-15 years. The way that fragility is being managed is through silencing and cancellation instead of through intellectual strengthening. Younger people in the US are entirely incapable of discussing difficult ideas emotionally, they're weak. Today the US would try to defeat the KKK via cancellation, which doesn't actually work; yesterday the KKK - which was a huge movement at one time, and has almost no power today - was defeated in the public square head-on, not by cowering or cancelling. The people that intellectually fought the KKK at the height of its power would ridicule today's incredible mental weakness; such weakness that someone as trivial as Trump has to be cancelled in order to deal with him. If people today weren't so intellectually weak, they could counter a Trump quite easily. Trump is absolutely nothing compared to what was dealt with in prior generations. You defeat bad ideology through rigorous intellectual conflict in the public square. It's messy, difficult and it can be violent - so what. Anything else and the bad will fester under the rugs where it has been swept, and you risk it getting far worse. There are far worse things than Trump and they're barrelling toward the US right now (DeSantis), that wasn't stopped by silencing Trump; it only gets stopped through exactly what I said - you have to smash the ideas in the public square, your ideas have to win. Or else. The far right will eventually produce the next version of Nixon, and he'll wield far greater executive power compared to what Richard Nixon had. Trump isn't that, he's a carnival barker at best; a big part of the left is too irrational and obsessed to recognize the difference. The US is lucky it was Trump. He's a de facto clown show. The US is increasingly close to being primed for real authoritarianism, the levers are there.
- throwaway23597 4y ago
  Yes, you're absolutely right. Jonathan Haidt touched on this quite a bit in "The Coddling of the American Mind". Unfortunately I see no possible way to reverse the situation. People simply aren't used to hardship anymore, you can easily live a life of pure comfort. The advances in digital technology only intensify this phenomenon. Short of major economic collapse, I'd expect humanity to become increasingly soft and squishy, to the point of essentially becoming another form of cattle.
derefr 4y ago
> being against both censorship and cancellation should be a contradiction Not at all. By analogy, someone who is for the free market, must stand against both nationalization and monopolization. Nationalization happens through regulation; monopolization happens through a lack of regulation. So you can't say that someone who is "for the free market" is for or against "regulation" as a concept. Some regulation (anti-trust) is needed in order to make the market free. Other regulations (the kinds lobbyists push for) must be avoided in order to make the market free. As nationalization is to censorship, monopolization is to cancellation. You get one from allowing some participants in the market to capture the market's regulators (moderators) and through them, direct top-down use-of-force to suppress those they don't like. You get the other by not regulating at all, and thereby not inhibiting private actors from either direct suppression of their peers — or, more insidiously, manipulating public opinion to cause aggregate bottom-up use-of-force ("mob justice") to be used to suppress their peers. Governments have a monopoly on the use of force — i.e. a self-named vigilante is just someone committing criminal assault in the eyes of the law — because we as a society want the use of force to flow through checks and balances. Insofar as speech can be used as violence to silence or terrorize groups (see: hate-speech laws in much of the world explicitly recognizing this), the act of silencing others through speech — cancellation — should also be considered a criminal vigilante act if not performed through societally-approved channels with checks and balances. The lack of checks and balances for the "process" of cancellation, is how you get cyber-bullying witch-hunts and mis-aimed identity defacement (see: the Reddit Boston Marathon debacle.) We don't accept witch-hunts in the physical world; why should we accept them online?
threatofrain 4y ago
Cancellation is freedom of association, not free speech. As for which is more fundamental under tension…
Kon5ole 4y ago
>Should I not have the freedom to organize a protest of my local theater for hosting a controversial figure that I think is worthy of cancellation? Isn't that a very basic and fundamental example of free speech? I don't think so. What you should be allowed to do is to freely argue that the speaker you disagree with is wrong. That's free speech. If you try to influence the theatre to not have the person speak at all, you are suppressing free speech.
- cthalupa 4y ago
  >I don't think so. Thankfully, this is your opinion, and not actually how courts and the legal system view the first amendment. The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that even full on boycott campaigns, which would generally be above the level of simple protest, to be protected speech when the boycott is political in nature and not just for economic gain. https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/987/boycotts https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/987/boycotts >What you should be allowed to do is to freely argue that the speaker you disagree with is wrong. That's free speech. This is true. That is free speech. >If you try to influence the theatre to not have the person speak at all, you are suppressing free speech. No. This is also free speech. If you are simply protesting the action, you are informing the theater that as a prospective customer you are unhappy with their decision and makes you less likely to be their patron in the future. If you are going further and advocating that the theater be boycotted if they host this person, then you need to show that you are attempting social or political change - but from the premise of the discussion here, it is obvious that this is the intent. Boycotts of businesses that were pro-British or selling British imported goods were a significant part of the early stages of the American Revolution - https://www.masshist.org/revolution/non_importation.php https://www.masshist.org/revolution/non_importation.php - so they have a long history of being an important tool in shaping America into what her (future and present) citizens wanted her to be. The theater is not a public square. The controversial speaker has no first amendment right to say whatever they want in a private space. The theater has no right to force people to not have and share an opinion about who they host. I have every right to share my opinions about a person speaking somewhere, and my opinions about what I think that means about the location hosting them. The speaker (likely) has every right to say what they are saying in general, but not necessarily in any given private location. Free speech is about preventing government censorship of speech, not private censorship.
nobodyandproud 4y ago
> This specific phrasing jumped out to me because being against both censorship and cancellation should be a contradiction. Cancellation is an example of the exercising of free speech It stops being speech when action is levied against someone. The problem with cancellation isn’t the debate, but losing your livelihood or worse.
raxxorraxor 4y ago
> Cancellation is an example of the exercising of free speech. Absolutely not. This inverts the meaning of freedom of speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech First sentence. Your definition jumped out to me because that is a position of pretty one-sided ideologues. You are free to protest, but not free to "cancel" people. Precision here is very important.

by slg 4y ago

throwaway23597 4y ago

You're reading too much into my comment. I specifically tried to stay neutral because this sort of tactical escalation could come from either side. In no way am I attempting to "define free speech as some narrow window of speech that I agree with". I'm specifically talking about people using seemingly private data to comb over people's private statements, which is a bad thing regardless of the content of those private statements.

slg 4y ago
>You're reading too much into my comment. I specifically tried to stay neutral because this sort of tactical escalation could come from either side. Fair enough, but you should know that calling out cancelation as a growing flaw of society will often not be received as a neutral position. The people who complain the loudest about cancelation generally do not come from "either side". It ends up making your comment appear to have a specific political slant even if that wasn't intentional.
- chitowneats 4y ago
  "One side often uses a particular tactic against their enemies (cancellation). You criticizing it makes you sound biased". No. The only one here who comes off as biased is you.
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  >Fair enough, but you should know that calling out cancelation as a growing flaw of society will often not be received as a neutral position Unfortunately, to those who view the world through the warped prism of partisanship, there are no neutral positions. Everything is tribal - Red or Blue. Statements aren't ever read with an open mind about what is actually being discussed, but rather scrutinized for indications about whether the author is on one team or the other, so they can be either supported or attacked. >It ends up making your comment appear to have a specific political slant even if that wasn't intentional. To tribalists, everything has a political slant.
- mecha_ghidorah 4y ago
  >> The people who complain the loudest about cancelation generally do not come from "either side". Look you aren't wrong exactly but for those of us who grew up being incredibly left aligned and still are on a majority of things like myself expressing concerns about cancellation will make others put us in the out group. Genuinely though I am concerned about it because I think it has a tendency to encourage people to think about others one dimensionally. One of my friends has told another one of my friends that they are a bad person for not cutting someone out of their life because that person voted for the LNP (the major Australian conservative party). This is trying to guilt and shame someone into "cancelling" someone else on a micro scale and it freaks me the fuck out. I genuinely don't think this would have happened if cancel culture wasn't such a thing. >> It ends up making your comment appear to have a specific political slant even if that wasn't intentional. This kind of thing also worries me, the idea that viewing a single thing as a flaw culturally speaking is enough to put someone on a specific political slant. To me it feels somewhat prejudicial. I am not going to pretend I've not been guilty of it, because I absolutely have... just it feels to me like everyone is very quick to take positions on a particular thing as evidence as a side in an all encompassing culture war and I hate it

tomrod 4y ago

Not to jump into US political discussion, but the phrase you call out is what was typically called a dog whistle a few years ago.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hombre_fatal 4y ago

I can support the concept of free speech without cheering on everything someone might utter with their speech. I support free speech but I’m against dishonesty and calling someone’s employer to fire them because you disagree with them. I just don’t necessarily think those cases should let the state prosecute you. You might want to be sure you’re interpreting someone’s position in a way they would agree with before leveling something as grave as to assert their principals are inconsistent. Free speech is generally a legal thing while one may expect social mores to correct for the things they find distasteful and be disappointed when they don’t. That is not a contradiction.

slg 4y ago
> I support free speech but I’m against dishonesty and calling someone’s employer to fire them because you disagree with them. Do you not see any contradiction in this sentence? Dishonest speech is still speech. If you support free speech, you support the ability for people to lie because often whether a person is lying or not is not black and white. If a company employs someone who makes objectionable statements, how is it not free speech to call up that company and threaten a boycott unless they are fired? Boycotts are one of the more fundamental examples of free speech. How can you be against them but for free speech unless you have a very narrow definition of what speech qualifies as being worthy of protection?
- bostonsre 4y ago
  Don't your statements also have contradictions? I am not condoning one viewpoint or another, but this is not black and white. The definition of freedom of speech: the right to express any opinions without censorship or restraint. Is it right that your free speech supersedes the free speech of others to the point where you actively fight against their free speech and which means the speech of others isn't really free then, is it?
  - jonnybgood 4y ago
    It seems you’re suggesting that by exercising disagreement we would be limiting the free speech of those we disagree with. Freedom of speech is not freedom of consequences. Others have the freedom of speech to speak against your freedom of speech. Only the government is disallowed in interfering.

brobdingnagians 4y ago

I agree with free speech and oppose censorship, but I also promote tolerance of those we disagree with and a certain degree of latitude in putting up with things others say without jumping on them immediately for things I disagree with or endless protests for what many believe to be innocuous or good faith beliefs. Cancellation is usually not just protest, it is warfare by any means to smear and destroy someones life and silence dissent from your position. It is dirty tricks instead of intellectual dialogue.

slg 4y ago
>I agree with free speech and oppose censorship, but I also promote tolerance of those we disagree with Does this mean you would support legislation to outlaw hate speech? After all that works against tolerance of others and is often used "to smear and destroy someones life and silence dissent from your position" "for what many believe to be innocuous or good faith beliefs."
- dirheist 4y ago
  How do you get him supporting legislating to outlaw hate speech from him saying he wants to promote tolerance? Tolerance is something every human possesses and should exercise, it's not something that can be legislated. An intolerant person will use their free speech to attack, malign and try to get you fired (which is fair). A tolerant person will let you speak your mind even if they disagree. In no point is there the need for hate speech legislation if you have true free speech.
  - slg 4y ago
    Because both hate speech and cancellation are forms of speech that can be used to suppress the speech of others. I assumed their opposition to cancellation was more than just a distaste for it, hence the jump to legislation.
    - brobdingnagians 4y ago
      I do not support legislation outlawing cancellation.

bostonsre 4y ago

Isn't cancellation just censorship by a mob? If i understand my terms correctly (I very well might not), cancellation causes people to be deplatformed which seems a lot like censorship. I guess cancellation can be considered free speech, but that doesn't mean it's not censorship.

kenjackson 4y ago
Cancellation and censorship mean a lot of different things in different contexts. For example, OJ Simpson has largely been cancelled. But it doesn't feel like censorship per se -- for example you can still purchase writing by him or find video of him. If he's not on Tic Tok or YouTube, I don't think they'd block him. Yet, I don't think Disney is going to make a movie starring him.
eldaisfish 4y ago
Cancellation is the consequences of speech. Period. It is most certainly not censorship when you consider the context - something these debates regularly leave out. Some views are widely considered to be abhorrent or dangerous. People are free to believe vaccine misinformation or glorify extremism. Society does not have an obligation to listen.
- janalsncm 4y ago
  The question under discussion is what those consequences should be. In some countries the consequence for certain kinds of speech is capital punishment by the State. Most Americans would be horrified if the US government did this. To be clear, the fact that this happens to be constitutionally protected is irrelevant because the question is what should be illegal not what is illegal. > Some views are widely considered to be abhorrent or dangerous. I also think pointing to “society” isn’t that useful since it’s a moving target. “Society” isn’t one thing. Things that are acceptable in one place are not in another. In some places advocating for equality for LGBT people is considered an affront to society. Dangerous even. The question is, what should be the worst consequence of having unpopular viewpoints?
- jvalencia 4y ago

rhaway84773 4y ago

The complaints about “cancellation” are complaints about others speaking up. I am not a fan of cancel culture in the way it’s practiced today (especially some of the Twitter driven campaigns), but it’s squarely free speech.

hellfish 4y ago

> Should I not have the freedom to organize a protest of my local theater for hosting a controversial figure that I think is worthy of cancellation? Isn't that a very basic and fundamental example of free speech? Perhaps it isn't about freedom of speech but centralization of power. Protest all you want, but if you advocate for the centralization of power in government or corporate hands then you shouldn't complain when you can't protest anymore without getting the same treatment Chinese protestors are receiving

spfzero 4y ago

Cancellation is using speech and other means to limit someone else's ability to speak. When you demand that your local theatre forbid someone from speaking, rather then just choosing to not attend and listen to it, that's yes, technically, using your right of free speech. It's what you're using it for that is the difference. In one case, to get your message heard, in the other, to prevent someone from doing that. In essence using free speech to stop free speech.

twobitshifter 4y ago

It’s not a contradiction, there is political cancellation which has happened to celebrities in China. Look up Zhao Wei. This is the type of thing GP refers to. https://www.newsweek.com/who-zhao-wei-mystery-surrounds-chinese-actor-deleted-internet-1624875 https://www.newsweek.com/who-zhao-wei-mystery-surrounds-chin... In China any friendliness towards Japan can lead to being “cancelled” but the way it happens isn’t through a local protest.

tablespoon 4y ago

> This specific phrasing jumped out to me because being against both censorship and cancellation should be a contradiction. Cancellation is an example of the exercising of free speech. It isn't a contradiction. Think of it this way: government censorship is just when the government cancels you. The issue with "cancellation" is that it's often a cudgel to suppress and punish expression some minority disagrees with, often to enforce some kind of orthodoxy. It might be someone expressing their narrow "free speech" rights, but in a way that's opposed to "free expression" or a "free exchange of ideas."

Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago

>you seem to be defining free speech GP didn't mention free speach anywhere. Yet you still take the liberty of defining words they didn't use for them. >Comments like yours seems to reveal a lack of a consistent principle underlying your argument cancellation is a societal issue, free speech is a legal issue. GP didn't say "we should make cancellation illegal" they said cancellation, which "a significant proportion of our society has become totally OK with" combined with surveilance, will cause even more cancelation. That is bad. (And I agree, btw.) You can have fair laws and still have an unfair population obsessed with censorship and cancellation. That's bad, but doesn't mean we should make it illegal. Complaining about societal failaings does not have to mean advocating for those people's views to be made illegal. That seems to be something that censorship and cancellation advocates can't seem to understand. >Should I not have the freedom to organize a protest of my local theater for hosting a controversial figure that I think is worthy of cancellation? You have complete freedom to do that, but it doesn't mean you should or shouldn't. That's what GP is saying. And cancellation can be over extremely petty or unfounded things. Obviously there is a line but people have taken a "cancel first, ask questions later" approach, and over increasingly petty reasons. One can advocate against that without being against free speech, which means that the government cannot make speech illegal.

slg 4y ago
You are only focusing on half of the passage I quoted. They also voiced opposition to censorship. I wasn't calling out their opposition to cancellation. I was saying those two views shouldn't coexist because being against cancellation is a form of censorship.
- lp0_on_fire 4y ago
  Being against cancellation and specifically, cancel culture, is not a form a censorship. At no point did that person suggest that people participating in cancel culture be prevented from doing so or that their ideas be shouted down. Funny enough, that same courtesy is usually not applied by the proponents of cancel culture.
  - deleted 4y ago

adventured 4y ago

> Cancellation is an example of the exercising of free speech. If the context is a vacuum that might be fine, maybe. In reality the US is hyper fragile intellectually and it has gotten drastically worse over the past 10-15 years. The way that fragility is being managed is through silencing and cancellation instead of through intellectual strengthening. Younger people in the US are entirely incapable of discussing difficult ideas emotionally, they're weak. Today the US would try to defeat the KKK via cancellation, which doesn't actually work; yesterday the KKK - which was a huge movement at one time, and has almost no power today - was defeated in the public square head-on, not by cowering or cancelling. The people that intellectually fought the KKK at the height of its power would ridicule today's incredible mental weakness; such weakness that someone as trivial as Trump has to be cancelled in order to deal with him. If people today weren't so intellectually weak, they could counter a Trump quite easily. Trump is absolutely nothing compared to what was dealt with in prior generations. You defeat bad ideology through rigorous intellectual conflict in the public square. It's messy, difficult and it can be violent - so what. Anything else and the bad will fester under the rugs where it has been swept, and you risk it getting far worse. There are far worse things than Trump and they're barrelling toward the US right now (DeSantis), that wasn't stopped by silencing Trump; it only gets stopped through exactly what I said - you have to smash the ideas in the public square, your ideas have to win. Or else. The far right will eventually produce the next version of Nixon, and he'll wield far greater executive power compared to what Richard Nixon had. Trump isn't that, he's a carnival barker at best; a big part of the left is too irrational and obsessed to recognize the difference. The US is lucky it was Trump. He's a de facto clown show. The US is increasingly close to being primed for real authoritarianism, the levers are there.

throwaway23597 4y ago
Yes, you're absolutely right. Jonathan Haidt touched on this quite a bit in "The Coddling of the American Mind". Unfortunately I see no possible way to reverse the situation. People simply aren't used to hardship anymore, you can easily live a life of pure comfort. The advances in digital technology only intensify this phenomenon. Short of major economic collapse, I'd expect humanity to become increasingly soft and squishy, to the point of essentially becoming another form of cattle.

derefr 4y ago

> being against both censorship and cancellation should be a contradiction Not at all. By analogy, someone who is for the free market, must stand against both nationalization and monopolization. Nationalization happens through regulation; monopolization happens through a lack of regulation. So you can't say that someone who is "for the free market" is for or against "regulation" as a concept. Some regulation (anti-trust) is needed in order to make the market free. Other regulations (the kinds lobbyists push for) must be avoided in order to make the market free. As nationalization is to censorship, monopolization is to cancellation. You get one from allowing some participants in the market to capture the market's regulators (moderators) and through them, direct top-down use-of-force to suppress those they don't like. You get the other by not regulating at all, and thereby not inhibiting private actors from either direct suppression of their peers — or, more insidiously, manipulating public opinion to cause aggregate bottom-up use-of-force ("mob justice") to be used to suppress their peers. Governments have a monopoly on the use of force — i.e. a self-named vigilante is just someone committing criminal assault in the eyes of the law — because we as a society want the use of force to flow through checks and balances. Insofar as speech can be used as violence to silence or terrorize groups (see: hate-speech laws in much of the world explicitly recognizing this), the act of silencing others through speech — cancellation — should also be considered a criminal vigilante act if not performed through societally-approved channels with checks and balances. The lack of checks and balances for the "process" of cancellation, is how you get cyber-bullying witch-hunts and mis-aimed identity defacement (see: the Reddit Boston Marathon debacle.) We don't accept witch-hunts in the physical world; why should we accept them online?

threatofrain 4y ago

Cancellation is freedom of association, not free speech. As for which is more fundamental under tension…

Kon5ole 4y ago

>Should I not have the freedom to organize a protest of my local theater for hosting a controversial figure that I think is worthy of cancellation? Isn't that a very basic and fundamental example of free speech? I don't think so. What you should be allowed to do is to freely argue that the speaker you disagree with is wrong. That's free speech. If you try to influence the theatre to not have the person speak at all, you are suppressing free speech.

cthalupa 4y ago
>I don't think so. Thankfully, this is your opinion, and not actually how courts and the legal system view the first amendment. The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that even full on boycott campaigns, which would generally be above the level of simple protest, to be protected speech when the boycott is political in nature and not just for economic gain. https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/987/boycotts https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/987/boycotts >What you should be allowed to do is to freely argue that the speaker you disagree with is wrong. That's free speech. This is true. That is free speech. >If you try to influence the theatre to not have the person speak at all, you are suppressing free speech. No. This is also free speech. If you are simply protesting the action, you are informing the theater that as a prospective customer you are unhappy with their decision and makes you less likely to be their patron in the future. If you are going further and advocating that the theater be boycotted if they host this person, then you need to show that you are attempting social or political change - but from the premise of the discussion here, it is obvious that this is the intent. Boycotts of businesses that were pro-British or selling British imported goods were a significant part of the early stages of the American Revolution - https://www.masshist.org/revolution/non_importation.php https://www.masshist.org/revolution/non_importation.php - so they have a long history of being an important tool in shaping America into what her (future and present) citizens wanted her to be. The theater is not a public square. The controversial speaker has no first amendment right to say whatever they want in a private space. The theater has no right to force people to not have and share an opinion about who they host. I have every right to share my opinions about a person speaking somewhere, and my opinions about what I think that means about the location hosting them. The speaker (likely) has every right to say what they are saying in general, but not necessarily in any given private location. Free speech is about preventing government censorship of speech, not private censorship.

nobodyandproud 4y ago

> This specific phrasing jumped out to me because being against both censorship and cancellation should be a contradiction. Cancellation is an example of the exercising of free speech It stops being speech when action is levied against someone. The problem with cancellation isn’t the debate, but losing your livelihood or worse.

raxxorraxor 4y ago

> Cancellation is an example of the exercising of free speech. Absolutely not. This inverts the meaning of freedom of speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech First sentence. Your definition jumped out to me because that is a position of pretty one-sided ideologues. You are free to protest, but not free to "cancel" people. Precision here is very important.