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Thank you for your thought-provoking article on the importance of telling the truth when making a claim.

https://www.youtube.com/

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Depends on the context.By public disagreement, you strengthen the public impression that a new law may be up for debate. By making it up for debate, you might be forced to accept a compromise.By speaking up in defense of your friend publically, you implicitly deny that the accused's reputation is beyond reproach.https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

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It also makes sense to speak up to resist a law change you think is wrong. And there are often disagreements about speaker intent.

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I feel the piece you are quoting misses the fact that social 'cancellation' is also a kind of public moral discussion in which we decide what we think is the right kind of behavior. So it's not really purely judicial. It's also legislative and I think it would make much less sense for friends to stay quite while a law was passed that punished you for behavior they didn't see as warranting it.

Also, I don't think the testimony angle is that relevant for most of this. Generally, only very few ppl have direct knowledge of the facts and often disagreement over cancelation seems to be disagreement over the moral status/effects of the acts not what they were.

But, I admit this is a hard issue. There is no doubt that once people start standing up to publicly take your side it forces people to pick sides often to really awful effect (this seems like primary mechanism stopping fair sexual harassment prevention...all the accused colleagues pick sides early and can't later accept they are on the wrong side).

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What’s the reference for no justice among non-human primates?

I think Agnes is right here. There are no cancel courts, no shared venue in which to testify in search of a shared truth. Defensive testimony would only validate whatever local bubble is trying to declare itself important. And if we were in a context where there were such shared venues, the truths that need to be presented in them are much bigger, more general and less personal than questions about whether given person is supposedly creepy or whatever.

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I'm not sure I've seen a screaming accusation of "dog whistling" ever be anything but an invention or projection.

("If you hear dog whistles, you're the dog".

Not always true, but ... these past 30 or 40 years? Much more often than not.)

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This (her piece) completely misses the point. And I suspect it comes from a place of wanting to be contrarian, and a sort of victim-blaming mentality too.

No one with any conscience would expect, let alone demand, their friends publicly defend them. What they do expect is their friends not to abandon them privately, not to attack them privately, not to gossip about them, not to publicly disavow them etc.

She's created a straw man. And anyway, it's not a problem to call for public allieship. In fact presumably one wants most of one's allies to be loose ties, because said people have less to lose due to their being more objective about the matter

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