[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.

[joshuamorton]

> There are such things as sports mobs, you know.

I agree. I never said mobs don't exist. I said mobs and mob rule are different things. That's true. You don't think that sports mobs are "mob rule" do you?

> but that doesn't make it any less exemplary of a mob in action.

I agree.

> 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.

I want to reiterate: I've never claimed twitter "mobs" aren't a thing. Nor have I claimed that mobs exist only when I minority is threatened.

I have claimed that twitter "mobs" aren't evidence of "mob rule". Mob rule is characterized by the failure of the government in the face of the mob. And mob rule is a concern because of it's inability to protect minorities. Please do not construct strawmen.

If you want to talk about the danger of a mob, let's talk about mobs, but don't talk about "mob rule" unless you really mean "mob rule", which you probably don't unless you're claiming that cancel culture represents an imminent threat to democracy in the united states.

> 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

Indeed, this would be due to power imbalances. But it doesn't mean that the guards running would constitute "mob rule". In fact, just the opposite. The guards in a prison are the people conventionally considered to have power in the situation. Them being in charge is expected. Them acting unjustly isn't mob rule, it's authoritarianism.

Please stop conflating the existence of a mob with the existence of "mob rule". They are not the same thing. Cancellation is not anything akin to mob rule. Once more: unless you believe that cancel culture is a literal threat to democracy, it is not comparable to mob rule.

> 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.

I'm not clear on what you're saying. I'm saying that the value of cancel culture is greater than the flaws. So regressing is overall worse than reforming. There's no flaw or false dichotomy.

> Present an argument against those who acknowledge that the speech/actions are protected but should voluntarily be avoided rather than wielded.

Present an argument that acknowledges that they are protected but that they they should still be voluntarily avoided.

[cxr]

> Present an argument that acknowledges that they are protected but that they they should still be voluntarily avoided.

Sure, here: They are protected, but they should still be voluntarily avoided. I'm not sure what you're looking for here. (To walk into a grocery store and say something rude to the first person you see is protected. It's also to be avoided.)

> You don't think that sports mobs are "mob rule" do you?

Well, yeah. If this is something that we can't agree on, then that seems like a strong signal that we are going to be unable to agree on much of anything. (Maybe there's some confusion. I'm not talking about the mere existence of crowds at a sporting event. I'm referring to the instances of mob rule, resulting in violence, theft, sexual assault, etc.)

> Mob rule is characterized by the failure of the government in the face of the mob. And mob rule is a concern because of it's inability to protect minorities.

Sorry, this is just not an honest approach. I realize there's a little bit of "A implies B does not mean that A can't also imply C", but there's a rhetorical trick you're using to your benefit here whether you mean to or not. Mob rule is a concern for the reasons people find it concerning—e.g. instances of violence, theft, sexual assault, etc. Whether it's perpetrated on a minority or not isn't useful or interesting—it's the injustice that's of interest. To repeat: there's of course plenty of overlap between mob rule and the tyranny of the majority, but mob rule does not necessarily imply such a majority acting on a minority, and whether it does or not is the least remarkable thing about them, generally, because the observation about what it allows the majorities to do is trivial; it's well known.

And it looks like you're discounting instances of "mob rule" by simply defining "mob rule" to exclude the things you want excluded. That's where the begging the question comes in. Even if we grant that "mob rule" means what you want it to mean, and it excludes certain things, it's just not a very useful distinction to make wrt the context where the conversation began. (In any case, we're only talking about "mob rule" at this point because those are words you used in the comment I replied to.) Clearly the excluded referents are worth talking about, even if your definition of "mob rule" doesn't include them and they have no name. We can call them "glarck" for all it matters—and let's do if this conversation is going to continue, in order to avoid the pointless wordplay.

[joshuamorton]

> Sure, here: They are protected, but they should still be voluntarily avoided. I'm not sure what you're looking for here

This is not a moral argument, it is a personal preference. We have moral arguments as for why you shouldn't insult people randomly (rule utilitarianism provides some good ones), but "hold people accountable when they do bad things" is usually considered to be laudable, so you're arguing from the other side: what is so unique about this form of speech that using it to hold people accountable when they do bad things should be voluntarily avoided?

> Well, yeah. If this is something that we can't agree on, then that seems like a strong signal that we are going to be unable to agree on much of anything. (Maybe there's some confusion. I'm not talking about the mere existence of crowds at a sporting event. I'm referring to the instances of mob rule, resulting in violence, theft, sexual assault, etc.)

No, you're talking about mobs, not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochlocracy, which is a form of government. For the 17th time, a mob is not the same as mob rule, they are distinct concepts. If you don't want to discuss mob rule, then you are free to just not mention it and talk about mobs but please stop trying to conflate a mob and mob rule, unless you actually mean mob rule. This is the point I was trying to get across to the prior person, and they didn't seem to understand. And the semantic distinction matters, because like I said, they aren't the same concept.

[cxr]

> what is so unique about this form of speech that using it to hold people accountable when they do bad things should be voluntarily avoided?

1. You're trying to bake bad things into the premise, without accounting for not-bad things that the mob considers (even temporarily) nonetheless to be something to speak up about

2. Even for bad things, proportionality matters. (I really, really think this is the disconnect, and is linked to your views on mob rule only being able to exist in certain configurations of majority/minority [i.e. set size], rather than it varying along imbalances of power, i.e. dealing with group strength.)

> No, you're talking about mobs, not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochlocracy

I don't consider this to be canonical, and even if we did consider it to be, my comments addressed this in depth. We're so far off into the weeds on a distraction in terminology at this point that I'm not going to say more about it. The subject here is supposed to be cancel culture and speech.