We haven’t heard so much about cancel culture in MSM lately, but I assure you it is still going strong. And I think it will get much stronger if Trump is elected US president next year; they’ve backed off a bit while Biden is president. So let’s analyze the issue a bit here.
To add to the ambiguity dimension, maybe we should also have a temporal dimension. Something a person in their 60s wrote when they were 25 shouldn't really carry as much weight as something they wrote last week. Seems like elementary bayesian math.
Why the MSM cancel culture peddlers have backed off during Biden and will be reinvigorated for Trump 2.0 would make for an interesting topic of analysis.
RH: I'm guessing that for those who follow you, the "main point [you] want to make in this post" is obvious. Your Wikipedia page ("gsr") is the case-in-point for how obvious this is.
There's a dilemma here: you make a perfectly reasonable and logical point, yet the mob is incapable of hearing your point almost by definition. I say fuck em, and let's burn the mob down. Who's with me?
Cancel culture or at least rank censorship has not calmed down under Biden. Biden has admitted that the FBI and other government entities practices censorship by getting Big Tech companies to do it for government. And he has insisted that such government censorship via proxies is good for us! The moves toward forcing ID to be on the internet are moving along with several pushes and partial successes of legislation passed through the Western World. The demonization of dissenting speech as "misinformation" and even such dangerous absurdities as "information terrorism" has gotten stronger.
I have no love for Trump to say the least but an insinuation that Trump would harm the free speech gains made under Biden (there are none) is completely absurd.
Mobs canceling people is a different phenomena than govt or big tech censoring. I didn't say Trump would oppose free speech, I'm suggesting anti-Trump mobs will go more wild in canceling people.
As someone a bit more sympathetic to "cancel culture" than you, I think you are missing something about why it's desirable to those of us who see value in it, and why the idea of "cancel courts" seems deeply beside the point.
While not all "cancel culture fans" believe in upholding the US tradition of free speech, I do. I do not think it should be illegal to express an opinion.
Like almost everybody (including you, I expect) I think it is reasonable to *judge* people by the opinions they hold and express.
*Unlike* you, and like other "cancel culture fans", one of the things I judge people negatively for is something like political incorrectness or offensiveness.
I think it would be hugely disproportionate and counter to our national traditions to legally ban offensive speech, but I do view people more negatively for it, and don't in general object to firing people over it.
I also don't think it would be good to have anything resembling a "court proceeding" to see if the offensive speech really reflects a deep-seated or consistent attitude in the speaker. Fundamentally that's not the point, as I see it.
If someone speaks offensively, I don't generally feel better about it if I find out that they were joking or misspoke or had been misinterpreted. They still *didn't care enough to avoid giving offense*, either before they spoke or in an apology afterwards.
The fundamental problem is not that offensive speech reveals some objectionable *belief* (such as bigotry) but that offensive speech reveals an *objectionably low priority given to being inoffensive in speech.*
I find that I am much more forgiving of offensive speech from the past (when the speaker wasn't violating *his* culture's social norms) even when it clearly *does* indicate a bigoted attitude, than I am of offensive speech in the present that *doesn't* indicate a bigoted attitude but does indicate a cavalier attitude towards the rules of "political correctness."
And I am almost entirely OK with non-offensive speech that indicates bigoted beliefs but doesn't sound like it's violating a taboo.
It's really not the kind of thing where a court-like investigation would help achieve my goals better.
How people respond to being accused of offensiveness is much more informative. Silence, pro forma apology, or sincere apology means they care at least somewhat about avoiding offense. Insistence on their good intent ("it was a joke", "it was ironic", "I didn't mean the thing you're reading into it") , or strident insistence on their right to offend means they don't actually care to avoid upsetting people.
Tearful complaint about how hard their life has been since being "cancelled" also tends to make me more sympathetic, I think independently of whether they apologize.
Like many things, it's about showing how much you care.
In some contexts, I want people to *care about other people's wishes*. I want people to aim to please, to fear giving displeasure, and to suffer when socially disapproved of -- and I *don't* want people to defy social norms or revel in giving offense.
I offered an alternative to making offensive speech illegal: "make separate cancel courts to help us find the truth about legal but offensive behavior".
You say you don't care why someone offended, if others claim offense. But it can be hard to anticipate what will offend who. See for example those recent college presidents, who had expensive advisors and still failed. I can tell you that in the case of my cancellations I did not intend to offend nor anticipate offending.
So you think “cancel courts” would anticipate public opinion (and its changes) better than waiting for public opinion to show up in the form of outraged people? And that this is more efficient overall because it’ll help people avoid giving offense unintentionally and the various costs of avoidable firings & general disruption to life?
In general courts don't go out into the world looking for problems, but wait for someone to complain to them. So cancel court proceedings would be initiated by complaints that someone had offended. But then mobs might wait to see what the court ruled before pushing for punishment. If the court upheld the complaint, they could move ahead with more confidence.
As far as responses go, how do you score something pleasantly phrased and polite, but utterly unapologetic? E.g. quoting Rick & Morty to say "Your boos mean nothing to me -- I've seen what makes you cheer."
I'll assume you meant to use the third person rather than the second. I only know three R&M quotes, and that's one of them.
I find it refreshing when people who have no reason to care what I think admit that they don't. This clears the way to explore what, if anything, we both do care about.
A contemporary American comedian wears blackface in a skit; vs, a Japanese cartoon includes a character with a very stereotyped/caricatured African-like appearance.
Does either artist have derogatory attitudes towards real-life black people? Does either work function to promote racism in practice?
The truth would depend a lot on context and be hard to tease out, and many works that *aren’t* obviously offensive might be equally or more “guilty” by those standards.
Which work violates the social taboos of the culture in which it’s produced? Clearly, the American comedian’s does and the Japanese animator’s doesn’t. That’s both an easier question and closer to the question I (and IMO most people) actually care about.
For me the main criterion would be how much, in expectation, the representation of a person from category X is likely to mislead people about the true distribution of people from category X. And that rule should be applied consistently for all X, even X's that belong to the outgroup (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/).
You might need a deliberative procedure to answer questions about a creator’s underlying beliefs or mental state, or the net effect of a work on society. Or it might be impossible to get answers to those questions at all.
To know if something is offensive or not, all you need to know is whether people often get offended by it, and especially whether the “offender” knew that and/or how the “offender” reacted to accusations.
Here is an experiment: I find what you just said deeply offensive. I find it offensive because the mere fact that others might socially disapprove of a behavior does not mean the behavior is wrong or that the person behaving that way should care about the others' feelings. As proof, think for a moment about the social disapproval of LGBT by right-wing communities; should the LGBT people care about the feelings of those who believe they shouldn't exist? They should not. Now, the experiment is this: will you apologize for saying what you said, given that it offended me?
I don’t believe that you’re offended. You aren’t making a personal emotional appeal. (For instance you’re not saying that you’re LGBT and from a repressive culture and that I’m essentially endorsing *your* oppression.) I’d react differently if you were actually *getting offended* (or threatening me) vs suggesting an in-principle-compelling argument.
So we can classify this under "insistence on your good intent" or "strident insistence on your right to offend" (quoting you).
You don't think I have a personal emotional investment in oppressed groups not being forced to conform to an unfair social consensus? I certainly do. Yes, it is personal, though I don't feel like telling you exactly how, because that is personal.
Leaving that aside, it is certainly possible to be offended on someone else's behalf. If it *wasn't* personal (it is) I could still be upset that you endorsed a perspective oppressive to minority groups such as LGBT that I am not a member of. Speaking up on behalf of disadvantaged groups you aren't personally a member of is a big part of the political correctness you claim to endorse.
I think the concept of offense was much less likely to be opportunistically trivialized when you were expected to challenge to a duel whomever you claimed to have offended you, risking your life in your attempt to suppress it; at least, among men of the appropriate social groups. That system seems hard to reconcile with feminism, however, let alone with modern gender ideology.
(FWIW this second response *was* more personal -- saying you don’t want to reveal details is fine -- and more accusatory, so I’m a little more scared and feel a little more like I’ve overstepped, and am more inclined to back off.)
I guess I could see this as a good steelman for the concept, but we’ve seen it weaponized at scale for political ends these past few years, so it’s obvious that we must reject it for practical reasons.
Then again, it may be more practical for some to politically arbitrage the contexts in which those want others to "care more about others people's wishes"... there's value in playing the wishes of those in places SF vs Miami vs Doha vs Beijing vs Jakarta (and etc), esp when those wishes are in great conflict with the wishes of others in different locations.
But it is such fun to judge others, for the worse. Historically this has been the function of the community court known as the gossip circle. Without pariahdom and social shunning, a lot of novels would never have been written. Even today, one gender tends to indulge in it more. The other gender tends to limit personal judgements to "The boss is a ****" or "Brad Blag the greatest ball player of all time BS."
Cancel culture is extremely unfair to those without the social skills to properly thread the needle. Folks on the autism spectrum (James Damore at Google for example) think they're having a reasonable discussion and get crucified because they violated a social taboo they can't perceive. It's like getting mad at a sight-impaired person for bumping into you.
I’m not sure I understand where you are going with this. Are you suggesting fines and/or jail for hurting peoples feelings? Ostracism for being rude? Saying something politically incorrect gets you banned? Who gets to judge?
The important thing is to have a court process. That could either be due to making it a criminal or civil offense, or because we create non-legal courts to adjudicate such claims.
To add to the ambiguity dimension, maybe we should also have a temporal dimension. Something a person in their 60s wrote when they were 25 shouldn't really carry as much weight as something they wrote last week. Seems like elementary bayesian math.
Why the MSM cancel culture peddlers have backed off during Biden and will be reinvigorated for Trump 2.0 would make for an interesting topic of analysis.
RH: I'm guessing that for those who follow you, the "main point [you] want to make in this post" is obvious. Your Wikipedia page ("gsr") is the case-in-point for how obvious this is.
There's a dilemma here: you make a perfectly reasonable and logical point, yet the mob is incapable of hearing your point almost by definition. I say fuck em, and let's burn the mob down. Who's with me?
Cancel culture or at least rank censorship has not calmed down under Biden. Biden has admitted that the FBI and other government entities practices censorship by getting Big Tech companies to do it for government. And he has insisted that such government censorship via proxies is good for us! The moves toward forcing ID to be on the internet are moving along with several pushes and partial successes of legislation passed through the Western World. The demonization of dissenting speech as "misinformation" and even such dangerous absurdities as "information terrorism" has gotten stronger.
I have no love for Trump to say the least but an insinuation that Trump would harm the free speech gains made under Biden (there are none) is completely absurd.
Mobs canceling people is a different phenomena than govt or big tech censoring. I didn't say Trump would oppose free speech, I'm suggesting anti-Trump mobs will go more wild in canceling people.
Duels, even a credible threat of one, would solve this far more effectively
As someone a bit more sympathetic to "cancel culture" than you, I think you are missing something about why it's desirable to those of us who see value in it, and why the idea of "cancel courts" seems deeply beside the point.
While not all "cancel culture fans" believe in upholding the US tradition of free speech, I do. I do not think it should be illegal to express an opinion.
Like almost everybody (including you, I expect) I think it is reasonable to *judge* people by the opinions they hold and express.
*Unlike* you, and like other "cancel culture fans", one of the things I judge people negatively for is something like political incorrectness or offensiveness.
I think it would be hugely disproportionate and counter to our national traditions to legally ban offensive speech, but I do view people more negatively for it, and don't in general object to firing people over it.
I also don't think it would be good to have anything resembling a "court proceeding" to see if the offensive speech really reflects a deep-seated or consistent attitude in the speaker. Fundamentally that's not the point, as I see it.
If someone speaks offensively, I don't generally feel better about it if I find out that they were joking or misspoke or had been misinterpreted. They still *didn't care enough to avoid giving offense*, either before they spoke or in an apology afterwards.
The fundamental problem is not that offensive speech reveals some objectionable *belief* (such as bigotry) but that offensive speech reveals an *objectionably low priority given to being inoffensive in speech.*
I find that I am much more forgiving of offensive speech from the past (when the speaker wasn't violating *his* culture's social norms) even when it clearly *does* indicate a bigoted attitude, than I am of offensive speech in the present that *doesn't* indicate a bigoted attitude but does indicate a cavalier attitude towards the rules of "political correctness."
And I am almost entirely OK with non-offensive speech that indicates bigoted beliefs but doesn't sound like it's violating a taboo.
It's really not the kind of thing where a court-like investigation would help achieve my goals better.
How people respond to being accused of offensiveness is much more informative. Silence, pro forma apology, or sincere apology means they care at least somewhat about avoiding offense. Insistence on their good intent ("it was a joke", "it was ironic", "I didn't mean the thing you're reading into it") , or strident insistence on their right to offend means they don't actually care to avoid upsetting people.
Tearful complaint about how hard their life has been since being "cancelled" also tends to make me more sympathetic, I think independently of whether they apologize.
Like many things, it's about showing how much you care.
In some contexts, I want people to *care about other people's wishes*. I want people to aim to please, to fear giving displeasure, and to suffer when socially disapproved of -- and I *don't* want people to defy social norms or revel in giving offense.
I offered an alternative to making offensive speech illegal: "make separate cancel courts to help us find the truth about legal but offensive behavior".
You say you don't care why someone offended, if others claim offense. But it can be hard to anticipate what will offend who. See for example those recent college presidents, who had expensive advisors and still failed. I can tell you that in the case of my cancellations I did not intend to offend nor anticipate offending.
So you think “cancel courts” would anticipate public opinion (and its changes) better than waiting for public opinion to show up in the form of outraged people? And that this is more efficient overall because it’ll help people avoid giving offense unintentionally and the various costs of avoidable firings & general disruption to life?
In general courts don't go out into the world looking for problems, but wait for someone to complain to them. So cancel court proceedings would be initiated by complaints that someone had offended. But then mobs might wait to see what the court ruled before pushing for punishment. If the court upheld the complaint, they could move ahead with more confidence.
Why would the mob want this?
Mob members might actually want only the guilty to be punished.
Guilty of what though?
I think what mobs actually care about is *the accused’s response to being mobbed*. The process is the test.
As far as responses go, how do you score something pleasantly phrased and polite, but utterly unapologetic? E.g. quoting Rick & Morty to say "Your boos mean nothing to me -- I've seen what makes you cheer."
That gets the worst possible score.
It is a barefaced statement that you do not care what I think, i.e. strong evidence that you in fact do not care what I think.
The Rick & Morty quote is especially telling (that show seems to be beloved by people who don't mind being booed.)
I'll assume you meant to use the third person rather than the second. I only know three R&M quotes, and that's one of them.
I find it refreshing when people who have no reason to care what I think admit that they don't. This clears the way to explore what, if anything, we both do care about.
Example:
A contemporary American comedian wears blackface in a skit; vs, a Japanese cartoon includes a character with a very stereotyped/caricatured African-like appearance.
Does either artist have derogatory attitudes towards real-life black people? Does either work function to promote racism in practice?
The truth would depend a lot on context and be hard to tease out, and many works that *aren’t* obviously offensive might be equally or more “guilty” by those standards.
Which work violates the social taboos of the culture in which it’s produced? Clearly, the American comedian’s does and the Japanese animator’s doesn’t. That’s both an easier question and closer to the question I (and IMO most people) actually care about.
For me the main criterion would be how much, in expectation, the representation of a person from category X is likely to mislead people about the true distribution of people from category X. And that rule should be applied consistently for all X, even X's that belong to the outgroup (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/).
You might need a deliberative procedure to answer questions about a creator’s underlying beliefs or mental state, or the net effect of a work on society. Or it might be impossible to get answers to those questions at all.
To know if something is offensive or not, all you need to know is whether people often get offended by it, and especially whether the “offender” knew that and/or how the “offender” reacted to accusations.
Here is an experiment: I find what you just said deeply offensive. I find it offensive because the mere fact that others might socially disapprove of a behavior does not mean the behavior is wrong or that the person behaving that way should care about the others' feelings. As proof, think for a moment about the social disapproval of LGBT by right-wing communities; should the LGBT people care about the feelings of those who believe they shouldn't exist? They should not. Now, the experiment is this: will you apologize for saying what you said, given that it offended me?
I don’t believe that you’re offended. You aren’t making a personal emotional appeal. (For instance you’re not saying that you’re LGBT and from a repressive culture and that I’m essentially endorsing *your* oppression.) I’d react differently if you were actually *getting offended* (or threatening me) vs suggesting an in-principle-compelling argument.
So we can classify this under "insistence on your good intent" or "strident insistence on your right to offend" (quoting you).
You don't think I have a personal emotional investment in oppressed groups not being forced to conform to an unfair social consensus? I certainly do. Yes, it is personal, though I don't feel like telling you exactly how, because that is personal.
Leaving that aside, it is certainly possible to be offended on someone else's behalf. If it *wasn't* personal (it is) I could still be upset that you endorsed a perspective oppressive to minority groups such as LGBT that I am not a member of. Speaking up on behalf of disadvantaged groups you aren't personally a member of is a big part of the political correctness you claim to endorse.
I think the concept of offense was much less likely to be opportunistically trivialized when you were expected to challenge to a duel whomever you claimed to have offended you, risking your life in your attempt to suppress it; at least, among men of the appropriate social groups. That system seems hard to reconcile with feminism, however, let alone with modern gender ideology.
Well, *now* I’m sorry.
(FWIW this second response *was* more personal -- saying you don’t want to reveal details is fine -- and more accusatory, so I’m a little more scared and feel a little more like I’ve overstepped, and am more inclined to back off.)
I guess I could see this as a good steelman for the concept, but we’ve seen it weaponized at scale for political ends these past few years, so it’s obvious that we must reject it for practical reasons.
Then again, it may be more practical for some to politically arbitrage the contexts in which those want others to "care more about others people's wishes"... there's value in playing the wishes of those in places SF vs Miami vs Doha vs Beijing vs Jakarta (and etc), esp when those wishes are in great conflict with the wishes of others in different locations.
Finally someone gets it.
But it is such fun to judge others, for the worse. Historically this has been the function of the community court known as the gossip circle. Without pariahdom and social shunning, a lot of novels would never have been written. Even today, one gender tends to indulge in it more. The other gender tends to limit personal judgements to "The boss is a ****" or "Brad Blag the greatest ball player of all time BS."
Cancel culture is extremely unfair to those without the social skills to properly thread the needle. Folks on the autism spectrum (James Damore at Google for example) think they're having a reasonable discussion and get crucified because they violated a social taboo they can't perceive. It's like getting mad at a sight-impaired person for bumping into you.
>we should have court proceedings regarding such accusations. Either because we’ve made saying bad things illegal
oh god
Do you think cancel culture is less bad in europe *because* they have criminalized the worst excesses of speech?
I don't know.
I’m not sure I understand where you are going with this. Are you suggesting fines and/or jail for hurting peoples feelings? Ostracism for being rude? Saying something politically incorrect gets you banned? Who gets to judge?
The important thing is to have a court process. That could either be due to making it a criminal or civil offense, or because we create non-legal courts to adjudicate such claims.