[kragen]

Ironic that this is being posted by the NYT (though not as an editorial, I guess), who fired Quinn Norton within 24 hours because she'd embedded herself in Anonymous and consequently used the word "fag", years earlier. The mob framed her as anti-gay despite her having had an outspokenly bisexual life partner around that time.

[cornel_io]

Right, there are only three consistent positions here: 1) this type of firing is unfair and bad, 2) this type of firing is fair and good ("consequence culture"), or 3) "I'm a partisan who just wants my enemies to burn"

Maybe 80% of the people that opine on this subject are in category 3), 19% are in 1), and only 1% actually believe this sort of thing is great even when it hits someone that's on their team. Unfortunately all of the category 3 hardcore partisans tell themselves that when they tear someone on the other side down it's different because they were really wrong.

Here's a good test: if >50% of people on each of the left and the right would agree that someone has done something so egregious that they should face consequences, you're probably dealing with a real problem person and not a case of awry cancel culture. If more than half of either party would say that what a person has said is OK, you're probably dealing with a partisan cancellation.

Edit: I should mention that I have more extreme feelings in favor of free speech than the above paragraph, in that I think even opinions that are outside the window for both parties deserve protection and shouldn't usually result in firings unless super duper out there and horrible. But my point is that at the very least, if something is a majority position in a major party, it's a mainstream position and it is extremely questionable (both morally and practically) to ever fire someone for expressing a common belief.

[pjc50]

> if >50% of people on each of the left and the right would agree that someone has done something so egregious that they should face consequences

Is that really achievable for people who are political figures? That is, for someone attributed to a "side", is it actually possible to get the two sides to agree on anything? We've seen the defense of some quite spectacular indefensible behavior lately. Attempts to investigate The Jan 6 incident have been filibustered.

There's two aspects which really ought to be separated:

1) is this behavior bad?

2) has this person done that?

Much of the partisan fighting over racism and homophobia disagrees at #1. Much of the disagreement over sexual assualt happens at #2; if an event happens and only the victim witnesses it, is that sufficient proof?

[inglor_cz]

Well that is the point. Consequences for "bad" behavior should not be equal in cases when 90 per cent of population agrees and when 40 per cent of population agrees.

Let us stop thinking about racism and homophobia for a moment and think of marijuana legalization instead. This is precisely the case when an aggresive intolerant minority used to destroy people over nothing. Most legalization projects were pushed through by ballots, where the aggressive intolerant minority could not intimidate the voters into silence.

Interestingly, the vote results usually did not align with the partisanship of the voters. There is much more ideological diversity within the parties than generally recognized.

And, as a result, many people no longer "face consequences" for smoking weed that only a vocal minority considers taboo.

[pjc50]

In the US marijuana legalization exists in a superposition: it's still illegal federally, just not enforced by the states. Sometimes it's also enforced by drug testing employers, even in places where it's legal by state law.

> There is much more ideological diversity within the parties than generally recognized.

Party discipline (yes, on both sides) aims to suppress that. e.g https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/16/republicans-who-vot...

[cornel_io]

I'm really thinking of normal folks in normal situations (Damore, Garcia-Martinez, Wilder), not people with massive political power and partisan sway like Trump or Clinton - those figures always get passes for the horrible things they do and say even when they break their own group's rules, but normal people actually do have to color inside the lines a lot more.

I agree about your distinction between "is this behavior bad?" and "has this person done that?". The important cancel culture debate to me is over the first, where it is 100% clear who said what, the only question is whether they should be fired/silenced/banned/attacked for it. The facts about what really happened matter deeply but to take an example, the Kavanaugh situation isn't really an issue of "cancel culture" being out of control because almost everyone agrees that if he did it he should not have been appointed, it's just that most Republicans really don't think he did it and most Democrats do. Something else is going on there that is very not good, but it's not the same as James Damore being fired for statements that most people in both parties find to be within the bounds of "speech you shouldn't be shitcanned for" (https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/policy/technology/3..., surprisingly the political divide on that one is only 10% but even Ds are 50/50 on it).

Edit re: Kavanaugh: I'd also put good money that even if the accusations against him were 100% proven or disproven almost no minds on either side would actually change, despite people claiming allegiance to the truth. Instead, like Trump and his misdeeds, we'd start arguing about fake facts and then further retreating to discussions about whether his sins we're actually great enough, etc. But as things currently stand the ostensible argument is at least over the real facts.

[ashtonkem]

I’m a bit baffled why were treating “cancel culture” as one, monolithic thing, when it’s pretty clear that each case is a bit different.

Someone losing their job for having a public melt down is not the same as a celebrity getting criticized, and that’s not the same as someone clearly losing some sort of nasty office politics war. Treating this as a monolithic block is silly.

[cutemonster]

Indeed. The humans, they tend to want things to be simple, grouping together things that are different, or group together people who are different just look the same on the outside

[darkerside]

That's a very relativistic definition of morals. That's not too say it isn't valid, but there are tradeoffs to adopting a framework like that. One of them is that it inevitably shifts over time, making it more prone to abuse.

On a separate note, I don't agree with your breakdown of people because I think it's possible to have principles that are not partisanship but are also orthogonal to "mob good" vs "mob bad".

[cornel_io]

A lot of people would say "consequence culture" is a valid viewpoint on this, that people just need to face the music for the things that they say, and that there's nothing nefarious about it. That's well and good to claim, but I have yet to hear one of these people be anything but angry when a lefty is torn down by a right wing mob, which has me lumping them in with the partisans.

Maybe a charitable interpretation of the motivations fo that philosophy is "my mob is correct, your mob is not", but the end result is the same.

While I guess it is possible to have another consistent view, I think they mostly boil down to the specifics of where to draw the "bad speech" line. And I think in reality the vast majority of people who don't take a hard free-speech-for-all (asterisk: except people whose words are so horrible that a huge number of people agree) stance on this set the line based on their own politics rather than any stable set of principles.

[darkerside]

> I have yet to hear one of these people be anything but angry

That's because you don't "hear" people be silent.

[goatinaboat]

Maybe 80% of the people that opine on this subject are in category 3)

Category 3 is actually “what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander”

[makomk]

It's pretty obvious that the reason the NYT is doing this is that someone was fired who they saw as being on the same side as them, for online speech they were extremely sympathetic towards, due to stuff dug up by Republican supporters. This particular issue is heavily tied to the US political divide: supporting Palestine is seen as a left-wing thing, and labelling those people as anti-Semites a right-wing tactic.

Which, I think, probably says something about how likely it is that people genuinely believe the talking point invoked in this article that the right-wing is the real cancel culture. If it was, it wouldn't be so shocking that and news-worthy that it happened, and the sole other example in the article wouldn't be someone from 2004 who built a career in media thanks to the supposed cancellation - exactly the kind of thing the press would point to as proof "cancel culture" isn't real if the left were the ones calling for her head.

[MikeUt]

> the sole other example in the article wouldn't be someone from 2004 who built a career in media thanks to the supposed cancellation - exactly the kind of thing the press would point to as proof "cancel culture" isn't real if the left were the ones calling for her head.

I think we agree, but to elaborate further, here's an informative post on the topic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-pop...

One should also look at how the average person would see this. If after expressing an opinion, the only viable career left is that of a political commentator/provocateur (the market for which is limited), most people will stay silent.