Realty always wins in the end. A post-truth world can thrive in the short term but it can never persist.
Yeah.
My instinct was to support free speech. The best reason is that a potentially worthwhile argument may not be made because the person is afraid to make the argument. Also to avoid toxicity in society.
I have come to believe that whether an argument is correct has nothing to do with whether it will gain traction. It’s 90% whether the argument makes the listener feel good. The only way to stop garbage from infecting society is to deplatform.
Sometimes emotion is more real than facts.
Some of the stuff you mentioned are also great tools for reform. South Africa was “cancelled”. Alabama transit system was “cancelled”.
Boycotting is important. “Winning the argument” is a privilege of someone who don’t stand to lose that much if he loses the argument.
Lack of accountability is a far worse problem at the moment than censorship. You can see that in the purest form with the whole “cancel culture” myth, which is entirely designed to remove that accountability
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Dude you literally said you were cancelled because someone doesnt like you and your feelings are hurt.
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Yep. Nothing is perfect. There were advantages to my original free speech position. It’s just that those are outweighed.
The fight against “cancel culture” isnt a fight against censorship or for free speech. It’s the fight against those things and for the preservation of power.
Too bad that movement is able to use good people to fight for the wrong causes.
I’m not against boycotting and neither is Chomsky. Boycotts in general can be great. Boycott South Africa? Sure. Transit boycott in civil rights movement? Of course. Boycotting Israel? Sure. Organizing a boycott of factory farmed meat? Great idea.
I’m talking about limiting acceptable topics of debate by trying to get people fired for expressing them. So threatening a boycott because the New York times runs an op-ed you don’t like and demanding the person who wrote the op-ed be fired. That’s how you ramp up self-censorship.
What about limiting debate to good faith arguments and threatening a boycott of the NYT if it gives a platform to those who argue in bad faith?
People got fired because of the SA boycott.
People get fired for every boycott.
You are actively trying to remove one of the few course of action a civilian has in a capitalist society (example - cancel his NYT subscription because they are crap).
Sure, not every case is apartheid, but also not every racist moron is Salman Rushdie. Instead of creating boogie men and talk vaguely about free speech in a way that will only benefit people who are against it, judge things by their actual context.
As far as I can tell from the way people talk around here, “good faith arguments” have a remarkable correlation with “arguments I agree with” and “bad faith arguments” have an equally remarkable correlation with “arguments I disagree with”. So, no.
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How is that different from you can boycott things i agree with (south africa) but not things i disagree with (nyt)? You are not against cancel culture, you just want to be the judge of it
Cancel culture is a dumb phrase that I don’t think I’ve ever used.
I’m saying that organizing boycotts and sanctions against a country or city for systematic and grave human rights abuses is very different from a bunch of people on twitter trying to drum up enough outrage to fire someone who expresses a view you disagree with. I disagree with the latter because it is capricious, disproportionate, simplistic, and most importantly creates an atmosphere where people self-censor any viewpoint that might be controversial or taken the wrong way.
Boycotting chick-fil-a is acceptable or no?
How is this not just purely “what did you expect going out in that outfit, you’re asking for it”?
Like it’s striking the difference between your attitudes to even the mildest of bigotry on the internet (it has to be called out, attacked, we must rip it out of our society root and stem) and your attitude to mob harassment of people for some small offence against orthodoxy (oh well, it’s like the weather basically, nothing we can do, internet gonna internet, what did they expect). You seem inconsistent on the question of whether we should give a fuck about people’s feelings, basically. If a trans person looks at the Rowling tweets and is like “this makes me feel unsafe and unwelcome” you’re like “this is a problem of the utmost seriousness” but when it’s the ContraPoints chick saying it suddenly you retreat into “actually Twitter isn’t even real”.
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It’s more like laughing at someone for quitting UFC because they unexpectedly got hit in the face.
“Cancel culture” riles up people I dislike, so the temptation is to wrap myself up in it, even if I don’t necessarily agree, just to annoy them.
I still eat at Chik-Fil-A occasionally.
This is not a good analogy. Getting hit in the face is fundamental to MMA. Being vicariously attacked is not fundamental to being online. We’ve just given up and accepted it. There is absolutely no reason an online world can’t exist that operates by the same social norms as we all use live.
being attacked for things you said and done is neither good nor bad. It all depends on what you said and what you’ve done. All of the arguments against “cancel culture” seem to miss this very basic idea while they are literally arguing for eliminating free speech (i am no longer allowed to not buy the New York Times!)
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