[throwaway894345]

> If your entire concern is based in a slippery slope, it's more difficult to take it seriously

Of course the same argument could be applied to anything, such as covid back in March. "What's all the fuss about? Things are trending in a bad direction, but they're not that bad yet so naturally they will not get worse in the future." I hope the fallacy here is obvious.

> the concern conceals a disregard for actual harm happening now

I could hazard a guess as to what you're alluding to here, but it hardly matters--if you have some concern about some actual harm that's happening right now that you'd like to express, free-speech has your back with respect to your right to express it.

> "Cancellation" is a democratization of power. It allows the little guy to push back effectively against the bigger guy.

You have it completely backwards. You can't cancel someone without power over them, and many of the targets of cancellation have had little power and were cancelled by people with literal, explicit power over them (e.g., Lindsay Shepherd).

> Saying "look there's the possibility that it might eventually have bad consequences" rings hollow when it's also actively having good consequences right now.

"Good" is in the eye of the beholder, and you're observing the fleeting convenience of authoritarianism.

[joshuamorton]

> Of course the same argument could be applied to anything, such as covid back in March. "What's all the fuss about? Things are trending in a bad direction, but they're not that bad yet so naturally they will not get worse in the future." I hope the fallacy here is obvious.

It is not. We know how viruses work. We also know how they don't do good things. Are you willing to provide specific falsifiable predictions on the harms that Cancel Culture will cause in 6 months or a year and how it will be so great?

Trying to explain away a slippery slope fallacy by comparing it to the well documented and well understood exponential growth of a communicable disease isn't good reasoning.

> if you have some concern about some actual harm that's happening right now that you'd like to express, free-speech has your back with respect to your right to express it.

Exactly! To allude to anther example: someone tweeting "@FSF, you should fire Richard Stallman because he is a bad man" is simply exercising their right to free expression. Why are you criticizing that?

> You can't cancel someone without power over them, and many of the targets of cancellation have had little power and were cancelled by people with literal, explicit power over them (e.g., Lindsay Shepherd).

Lindsay Shephard doesn't fit the definition of cancellation. There was no social media, there was an anonymous complaint to her university, who did something, and when the public was involved the university reversed course. "Cancel Culture" is characterized by a boycott or threat of boycott, or at least distributed criticism. Imagine that instead the members of her class had taken to twitter to urge the university to remove her from her position, and encouraged others to stop donating to the school if they didn't do so. That's cancellation.

What you described is a bad thing, but it's also a non sequitur.

And note the difference: her pupils (the non-authority) pulling in popular support to provide consequences to the authority figure when normal channels of feedback failed.

> "Good" is in the eye of the beholder, and you're observing the fleeting convenience of authoritarianism.

You're going to have to elaborate on how decentralized movements are authoritarian in nature, that's a relatively unique claim.

[throwaway894345]

See my response to you here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23796317

[joshuamorton]

I certainly don't favor mob rule. And I don't agree that cancellation and mob rule are in any way comparable. If you want to make claims like that, much like your claims that "cancellation is authoritarianism", you're going to need to support them.

Large groups of people taking action you dislike isn't mob rule. Mob rule is characterized by violence. Is large groups of people expressing their disagreement with you violence now?

The danger of "mob rule" is that it endangers minority groups. It's really, really difficult for me to square movements that are often minority lead and exist to hold the relatively powerful accountable as being dangerous mobs in the classic sense.

Again, you're welcome to actually support that assertion, but drawing the metaphor without backing it up appears to be more of a veiled attack at my morals than any attempt to discuss the merits (or lack thereof) of these movements.

[DenisM]

If you had to, would you be able to enumerate similarities between the mob rule and the cancel culture rule?

[joshuamorton]

Yes, I think one primary difference is that mob rule is classically considered to be the primary form of government. It's a direct democracy with no tools to prevent immediate populist sentiment from controlling things.

Cancel culture exists as an alternative tool that, in my opinion is generally only used when normal power structures break down. It's not really comparable to mob rule because it isn't "rule".

[DenisM]

I was asking for similarities, not differences.

[throwaway894345]

The problem with mobs is distinctly not that they don't attack the "right" races (or whatever else you might've meant by 'minority'). Perhaps our disagreement is representative of a broader disagreement between (philosophical) liberals and progressives, in which case this might be enlightening. In any case, the reason societies for thousands of years have evolved away from mob rule and toward rule of law isn't that mobs endanger minorities, but rather that mobs are happy to extract their vengeance on anyone who is a suitable token irrespective of whether or not that individual or group has done anything wrong. Mobs also lack any sense of proportionality in their "sentencing"--it's always as severe as the mob can get away with. Further, mob rule always results in multiple mobs exacting ever-escalating vengeance on the other group or groups.

> Again, you're welcome to actually support that assertion, but drawing the metaphor without backing it up appears to be more of a veiled attack at my morals than any attempt to discuss the merits (or lack thereof) of these movements.

I mean, it really sounded like that's where you were going. Even now it sounds like you only disagree on the issue of violence, but that harm to one's livelihood and psychological well-being are all well and good. I'm happy that you draw the line somewhere before violence, but I would take more comfort knowing that you took issue with the "mobs are terrible at justice and always end up perpetrating more injustice" aspect.

Lastly, I invite you to have some empathy for the people who are being targeted, even if only for those who aren't powerful. Imagine if you felt as though the prevailing public debate was avoiding obvious questions or being framed in a very limited scope that disenfranchised you and people like you; imagine that you wanted to raise those questions, but were told your views had been determined in advance to be racist and hateful (and then being told to go read a book which purports to "take down" your views, but really only takes down a straw man). Imagine going so far out of your way to avoid offending anyone in a social media post, but a colleague gets whiff of it and begins a campaign to ruin your reputation in the company and the broader industry--you know you'll bounce back, but the sheer trauma of being targeted by strangers and acquaintances, to have work friends avoid you for their own personal preservation. You rationalize with yourself that you'll bounce back economically, but you're just so shaken to think that there are people out there who don't know you but have such an intense hatred that they'll spend their time and resources to ruin your reputation. Now imagine the same thing except you don't make a cushy 6-figure salary at an in-demand job and you have a family to feed and clothe.

Cancel culture isn't a theoretical debate for some people; it's a reality. Consider those people when you're tempted to tell yourself that it's just the rich and powerful who are affected.

[joshuamorton]

By minorities, I mean in general minorities. The concerns about "mob rule" were that they were unfettered populism and that minority groups: racial, religious, whatever would be unable to defend themselves. That is, mob rule is majoritarianism, or a "tyranny of the majority".

As a result of that, I want to push back on your use of "mob rule" in this conversation entirely. There's nothing that related mob rule and cancel culture. You can argue that cancellations are mobs, but the existence of mobs doesn't "mob rule" make. So yes, the entire reason that we moved from mob rule was to protect minorities in a society. Otherwise the majority is able to repress the minority or minorities with no way for the minorities to defend themselves.

The liberal ideal of free speech is one such protection for the minority: the ability to speak out against injustice without fear of government silencing people. (https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1280992197404491777, https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1281002990002769920)

> Mobs also lack any sense of proportionality in their "sentencing"--it's always as severe as the mob can get away with.

I disagree with this: Look at the super smash bros and gaming community over the past week. Tons of people have been kicked out of the community, many of whom made their living by playing the game, but at the same time those who did bad, but not unforgivable, things have been offered the opportunity, or even apologized without prompt (https://twitter.com/dizzkidboogie/status/1280566816801124352) and faced no consequences. There's a sort of fatalistic argument that the outcome is always the most the mob could have gotten because it is ultimately a democratic movement, but I don't think that's the argument you're making, nor is it really useful (it's circular).

Or even the example of the truck driver, where the "mob" actually backpedaled and apologized, but the authority figure didn't. You can fault the "mob" for acting quickly, yes, but you can't fault it for aiming to sentence people unjustly. To the extent possible, the mob tried to fix the issue, it just couldn't.

> but that harm to one's livelihood and psychological well-being are all well and good.

To be clear, I think there should be more restrictions on free expression than exist today (or in other words, I don't support the level of 1A protection that exists today). However, if you do, you must apply that justly. Much as a KKK demonstration can (and have) caused harm to people's psychological well being, so too can cancellation. If you want to support free expression, you have to come to terms with the fact that some of that expression will harm people. It's unavoidable (https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1280994817305018369, https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1280995368738516992).

A common thread among classical liberals is the belief that speech can't harm people, it's just speech and it isn't real, or somesuch. More progressive groups have long realized this wasn't true. The conversation about cancel culture is forcing a reckoning about that among liberals, and instead of facing it head on and accepting that yeah, this is the cost of free speech, people are doing what you yourself have done elsewhere: try to slice the aspects of cancel culture that they dislike into a box of "not just speech". This is something that progressive groups have said for a while ("hate speech isn't free speech"), but have faced criticism for.

The idea that a threat or a boycott isn't just speech is an interesting thought. I personally am fully on board with there being no difference in theory between "a speech" and "an act", and that we should protect various acts on a gradient. But the liberal idea that speech is unique doesn't have that nuance. Speech is protected, whether it be hate speech or threats. Yet you yourself elsewhere expressed that the threat to boycott isn't protected speech, it's something else. That's decidedly illiberal.

Threatening to boycott something on moral grounds is absolutely speech. And trying to frame it as a threat that isn't protected speech is horribly problematic: how do we differentiate between the unprotected threat "I will not contract with you if you hire this individual" and what is presumably a completely reasonable threat: "I will not contract with you if you don't give me your product at below this price"? Or perhaps the even more ambiguous "I will not contract with you if you employ child laborers to help build your product".

> Lastly, I invite you to have some empathy for the people who are being targeted

I'm quite aware. I've been the target of online harassment (although not "cancellation" specifically) before. It's not, at all, fun. I didn't enjoy it.

> Imagine if you felt as though the prevailing public debate was avoiding obvious questions or being framed in a very limited scope that disenfranchised you and people like you

I often do. But I enter those conversations with curiosity and the intent to learn, not to fight.

> imagine that you wanted to raise those questions, but were told your views had been determined in advance to be racist and hateful (and then being told to go read a book which purports to "take down" your views, but really only takes down a straw man)

I've had exactly this happen to me. I read the book. I still do read books when people suggest them. Not every one, but some. I've yet to find one of these recommendations that I didn't come away from having learned something, both about empathy and about history or politics or society. But perhaps this is because I engage to learn, not to fight. So I read this more as a condemnation of the reader than the book.

> Imagine going so far out of your way to avoid offending anyone in a social media post, but a colleague gets whiff of it and begins a campaign to ruin your reputation in the company and the broader industry--you know you'll bounce back, but the sheer trauma of being targeted by strangers and acquaintances, to have work friends avoid you for their own personal preservation.

I don't think this happens, or at least not as often as you seem to think. It's not endemic. And to a large extend, I think many of the people who do this are overreacting: they're reacting to the perceived danger that's larger than the actual danger, and believe that it will be impossible to stop. If you have any sense of social capital with people, this usually is possible (https://twitter.com/le_roux_nicolas/status/12754857362597928..., and again the car driver) as long as you don't respond like an asshole.

> Consider those people when you're tempted to tell yourself that it's just the rich and powerful who are affected.

I don't believe I've made that argument. I've said it was a tool that could be applied to the powerful in cases where no tool existed before. Please don't construct strawmen, yeah ;)

There are specific cases of "cancellation" that I disagree with and think were bad. There are likely some that you also disagree with. But I can say that certain cases were bad while also believing that the net impact of the culture that did bad things is good, or is moving us forward.

Much the same way that someone might, for example, believe that the justice system in America is a net positive despite clear problems.

If you want to have the conversation about how we put "guardrails" on cancellation, I think that's an interesting conversation to have, and a valuable conversation to have, and it's in fact one that I have been having with others, and one that I know other progressives are having privately.

But that conversation can't be had publicly, and it cannot be had constructively with people who want to destroy cancel culture entirely. Interesting corollary, and I'll leave it to you to figure out why?

But those conversations have to come from one of two places: either you start from the liberal position that cancellation is just speech, and deserves exactly as much protection as any other speech. Then the question is how do we control and interact with these groups? How do we minimize the harms? If everyone has a stronger social safety net, does cancellation matter as much? What about the ideal of restorative, instead of punitive justice? Can we improve the existing power structures and justice systems so that we don't need to resort to cancellation?

Or you come from the progressive mindset: speech isn't holy, and stronger regulations on speech in general should be acceptable. But then if cancellation is unprotected, you should probably be willing to give on hate symbols or slurs and similar forms of harassment that are so often directed at the people who are forced to resort to cancelling to achieve justice today.

I don't see how any other starting point can be productive. It's ultimately a free speech for me but not for thee discussion at that point, and that's not interesting or helpful (https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1281004327327240192).

[cxr]

In the most polite way possible: these comments are not well-considered.

There are such things as mobs that arise during or after sporting events, you know. (What's the majority/minority balance there?) So Twitter mobs, too, are very much a thing—no need for a stretch of the imagination. The threats both of these pose are squarely in the category of things to be concerned about wrt the dangers of mobs. And to argue about things like the "classical liberal [...] belief that speech can't harm people" (i.e. that the belief is wrong) while asserting that there is no threat of harm posed by clear-cut examples of mobs on Twitter is to talk out of both sides of the mouth.

> You can argue that cancellations are mobs, but the existence of mobs doesn't "mob rule" make.

With the ability to rationalize thoughts like this, is there even any point of trying to approach this with reason?

> Or even the example of the truck driver, where the "mob" actually backpedaled and apologized, but the authority figure didn't. You can fault the "mob" for acting quickly, yes, but you can't fault it for aiming to sentence people unjustly.

Sorry, the obvious attempt to sidestep here is too obvious. Reddit may have the best of intentions in trying to find the Boston bombers, but that doesn't make it any less exemplary of a mob in action.

The whole attempt to narrowly recognize mobs only when a minority is threatened is stultifying, and your entire line of reasoning is just begging the question. Tyranny of the majority is a thing, but they're definitions that overlap in their examples; they're not synonymous, even if the overlap is significant.

In a prison, the inmates outnumber the guards, but that doesn't preclude a mob mentality taking hold if the guards' behavior turned mob-like (or, say, police behavior e.g. during in a protest where outnumbered by prostestors). At the same time, mob rule remains a possibility in the scenario involving the reverse. The numbers stay the same, but in each there's a plausible picture of mobs and mob rule. Majority/minority is not only not the defining factor, it's a footnote.

The actual key to understanding mobs, mob rule, and the dangers they pose comes from recognizing the parallels between the bystander effect (where the undesirable outcome is most commonly inaction) to mob mentality (where the undesirable outcome is most commonly action)—it's diffusion of responsibility/accountability, mixed with other things, case-specific.

> But I can say that certain cases were bad while also believing that the net impact of the culture that did bad things is good, or is moving us forward.

This is just another attempt to make an illegal move, like the sidestepping above. This time, it's implicit false dichotomy. Keep the good while eliminating the bad—that's what's in the argument to handle this without the chilling effect that cancel culture has.

> either you start from the liberal position that cancellation is just speech, and deserves exactly as much protection as any other speech

All right, so you don't accurately characterize the totality of diversity on your opponents' side and now it's come to strawmanning, then (or at least a failure to steelman—opting to attack the weakest of ones' opponents positions instead). There's a (possibily majority [hah!]) position among those speaking against cancellation culture that doesn't involve removing these protections of the speech. Yascha Mounk can float the idea of various things that involve the law being used to enforce drastic changes to the permissibility of cancellation efforts, but it doesn't mean everyone with a like mind about the dangers of cancellation culture agrees with it. Present an argument against those who acknowledge that the speech/actions are protected but should voluntarily be avoided rather than wielded.

Popehat may be widely cited, but the arguments on this topic never fail to not be facile.