# Cancel Culture and Canceling versus consequences for actions **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 8, 2025, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644 "2025-07-08T22:55:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 34
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [August 16, 2025, 9:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/875 "2025-08-16T09:12:38Z")
> [@iiandyiiii](#): > > It’s always been this way and always will be. It’s one of the few ways the masses have to demonstrate consequences to the rich and powerful for whom they deplore. That and the charivari. Well, it beats tarring and feathering. ---
**Author:** ![Zoobi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/13edae/32.png) [@Zoobi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoobi)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2025, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/876 "2025-08-20T22:29:24Z")
> **[Yankees drafted player after he admitted he drew swastika on Jewish student’s...](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6563252/2025/08/20/yankees-prospect-swastika-core-jackson-2025-mlb-draft/)** > > The club said it did its due diligence when deciding to select Core Jackson, and that the choice was cleared with owner Hal Steinbrenner. Man that cancel culture is brutal huh. ---
**Author:** ![Spice\_Weasel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spice_weasel/32/5435_2.png) [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2025, 2:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/877 "2025-08-24T02:06:15Z")
But.. but … > The Yankees drafted Jackson at No. 164 overall this July, signing him to a bonus of $147,500, well under the pick’s $411,1000 slot value. His life is basically over! ---
**Author:** ![Zoobi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/13edae/32.png) [@Zoobi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoobi)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2025, 2:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/878 "2025-08-27T02:04:33Z")
> **[Minnesota woman charged for using racial slur against Black child as her...](https://apnews.com/article/woman-racist-slur-video-black-child-minnesota-76d527799d0c22bd4fb0c715c69ecf39)** > > Minnesota prosecutors have filed misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges against a woman accused of using a racial slur against a Black child at a playground. > As of Tuesday, she had raised over $800,000 on the Christian fundraising platform GiveSendGo — including many donations that came in after the charges were announced — with a stated goal of $1 million. In her last update, in June, the woman claimed she was the victim of “silly misinformation.” > A different person, who recorded the confrontation on his phone, asked her why she used the slur. The complaint said she admitted to using it and said she could “if he acts like one.” When pressed, the complaint said, she turned her anger to the witness, called him the same epithet, and when confronted about her “hate speech,” she used expletives to indicate she didn’t care. $800,000+ worth of getting cancelled. You just can’t say anything these days right? ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2025, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/879 "2025-09-06T15:26:17Z")
Woman and man vie for loose baseball, man gets it, gives it to his son, woman comes over and starts screaming at man, man takes it from son and gives to woman who is now, or will be very soon, a subject for this thread: > ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2025, 5:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/880 "2025-09-06T17:35:01Z")
I mean, the ball landed by her seat. The man was a jerk for running all the way over to grab it from her. ---
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2025, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/881 "2025-09-06T17:58:43Z")
Ah…? It’s well-understood that home run balls are a foot race. A spectator is not more entitled to the ball just because it landed closer to her. As long as there was no physical assault to dislodge the ball from someone else’s possession, it is fair game. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2025, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/882 "2025-09-06T18:00:56Z")
And she convinced him to give her the ball. He was better than her at running, she was better than him at shouting. Fair game. ---
**Author:** ![Mighty\_Mouse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mighty_mouse/32/7776_2.png) [@Mighty\_Mouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mighty_Mouse)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2025, 6:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/883 "2025-09-06T18:15:37Z")
Wow! That is one amazing take on what happened in that video. ---
**Author:** ![Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/q.q.switcheroo/32/5713_2.png) [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.Q.Switcheroo)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2025, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/884 "2025-09-06T19:15:28Z")
She also touched his arm in a way that might have caused him pain, or at least apprehension of imminent harm (judging by his “fast-forward Chicken Dance” reaction). ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2025, 8:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/885 "2025-09-06T20:10:18Z")
That’s how she asserted dominance. Seriously, though: he comes across as a try-hard. Here they all are, enjoying the game, relaxing, and here he comes barreling down the aisle as if he thinks he’s a player instead of a spectator. It’s bullshit. The game’s on the field, not in the bleachers. Take it easy, OK? ---
**Author:** ![Mighty\_Mouse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mighty_mouse/32/7776_2.png) [@Mighty\_Mouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mighty_Mouse)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2025, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/886 "2025-09-06T20:27:43Z")
I’m wondering if you’ve actually seen a ball fly into the stands before. ---
**Author:** ![Irishman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/b487fb/32.png) [@Irishman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Irishman)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2025, 1:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/887 "2025-09-07T01:44:46Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > Seriously, though: he comes across as a try-hard. Here they all are, enjoying the game, relaxing, and here he comes barreling down the aisle as if he thinks he’s a player instead of a spectator. He’s not the only one. The guy from the left comes rushing up from two rows below, and the woman and her guy are practically jumping over the seats to get the ball. He grabbed it off the floor. He didn’t run over anyone to get it. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2025, 2:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/888 "2025-09-07T02:37:45Z")
Speaking of cancelling, when the pettiest man alive has control of the government: > **[Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen.bsky.social)](https://bsky.app/profile/briantylercohen.bsky.social/post/3ly7blg7toc2o)** > > Pettiest man alive. > The West Point alumni association just cancelled their award ceremony for longtime veterans advocate Tom Hanks after the academy faced pressure from Trump. > > Hanks endorsed the Democrats last year. ---
**Author:** ![DemonTree](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/demontree/32/8646_2.png) [@DemonTree](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DemonTree)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2025, 10:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/889 "2025-09-07T22:36:12Z")
> [@JohnT](#): > > Woman and man vie for loose baseball, man gets it, gives it to his son, woman comes over and starts screaming at man, man takes it from son and gives to woman who is now, or will be very soon, a subject for this thread: > > [https://x.com/JomboyMedia/status/1964136365253083609?t=7E5LgEcoLgTHAvcvuKOoLA&s=19](https://x.com/JomboyMedia/status/1964136365253083609?t=7E5LgEcoLgTHAvcvuKOoLA&s=19) I saw this; my Twitter feed had multiple people decrying others trying to whip up a cancellation campaign against her. But I came here to post this story, which is from 2018, but came up again because some Trump appointee was talking about the greater male variability theory: > **[Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole](https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published-paper-down-the-memory-hole/)** > > If a formally refereed and published paper can later be erased from the scientific record and replaced by a completely different article, without any discussion with the author or any announcement in the journal, what will this mean for the future of... ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2025, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/890 "2025-09-07T22:52:00Z")
> [@Irishman](#): > > He’s not the only one. The guy from the left comes rushing up from two rows below, and the woman and her guy are practically jumping over the seats to get the ball. > > He grabbed it off the floor. He didn’t run over anyone to get it. It’s so bizarre that a spectator sport consisting of running like crazy to get a baseball would inspire a side-competition involving running like crazy to get a baseball. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2025, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/891 "2025-09-07T23:12:46Z")
> [@DemonTree](#): > > But I came here to post this story, which is from 2018, but came up again because some Trump appointee was talking about the greater male variability theory: There could be that there was not enough of a reason given for the pull (a failure of the editors in this case), but others commented that besides that issue, the paper was not really up to what it claimed. > **[Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2018/09/09/has-an-uncomfortable-truth-been-suppressed/)** > > Update to post, added 11th September. As expected, there is another side to the story discussed below. See this statement about the decision by the Mathematical Intelligencer and this one about the… > So as I understood the situation, the paper made no claims whatsoever about the real world, but simply defined a mathematical model and proved that _in this model_ there would be a tendency for greater variability to evolve in one sex. Suppressing such a paper appeared to make no sense at all, since one could always question whether the model was realistic. Furthermore, suppressing papers on this kind of topic simply plays into the hands of those who claim that liberals are against free speech, that science is not after all objective, and so on, claims that are widely believed and do a lot of damage. > > I was therefore prompted to look at [the paper itself](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.04184.pdf), which is on the arXiv, and there I was met by a surprise. I was worried that I would find it convincing, but in fact I found it so unconvincing that I think it was a bad mistake by Mathematical Intelligencer and the New York Journal of Mathematics to accept it, but for reasons of mathematical quality rather than for any controversy that might arise from it. To put that point more directly, if somebody came up with a plausible model (I don’t insist that it should be clearly correct) and showed that subject to certain assumptions about males and females one would expect greater variability to evolve amongst males, then that might well be interesting enough to publish, and certainly shouldn’t be suppressed just because it might be uncomfortable, though for all sorts of reasons that I’ll discuss briefly later, I don’t think it would be as uncomfortable as all that. But this paper appears to me to fall well short of that standard. > > To justify this view, let me try to describe what the paper does. Its argument can be summarized as follows. > > 1. Because in many species females have to spend a lot more time nurturing their offspring than males, they have more reason to be very careful when choosing a mate, since a bad choice will have more significant consequences. > > 2. If one sex is more selective than the other, then the less selective sex will tend to become more variable. > When applied to humans, this model is ludicrously implausible. While it is true that some males have trouble finding a mate, the idea that some huge percentage of males are simply not desirable enough (as we shall see, the paper requires this percentage to be over 50) to have a chance of reproducing bears no relation to the world as we know it. And then we have **Darij Grinberg** who was then an Assistant Professor at Drexel University for research and math commenting there too: > The fact that males inherit traits from both their fathers and their mothers doesn’t mean that each and every trait is equally realized in both sexes. > > The paper doesn’t look very deep to me, but then again it was written for the Mathematical Intelligencer, **which is — sorry — not a very deep journal.** It’s more about mathematicians than about mathematics; it has an explicit “Viewpoint column” that says “Disagreement and controversy are welcome”; it publishes poems, philosophy and politics. **What it doesn’t seem to publish (or at least not in the few issues I’ve checked) are proofs. I’m a bit surprised that NYJM took the paper, seeing that it is indeed not a strong research paper — maybe someone was trying to make a point here.** ---
**Author:** ![Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/q.q.switcheroo/32/5713_2.png) [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.Q.Switcheroo)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2025, 11:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/892 "2025-09-07T23:26:25Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > It’s so bizarre that a spectator sport consisting of running like crazy to get a baseball would inspire a side-competition involving running like crazy to get a baseball. And give rise to a court case that’s still routinely taught in first-year Property Law courses: > **[Popov v. Hayashi](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popov_v._Hayashi)** > > Popov v. Hayashi (WL 31833731 Ca. Sup. Ct. 2002) was a California Superior Court case involving scope of ownership between parties and conversion regarding a valuable baseball acquired at a Major League Baseball game. The question present in this case is who has ownership of an item when one acquired it legally, but lost it due to the criminal act of another third party, allowing the other person to, by all standards, acquire the item legally. > On October 7, 2001, the last game of the 2001 Maj... ---
**Author:** ![DemonTree](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/demontree/32/8646_2.png) [@DemonTree](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DemonTree)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2025, 11:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/893 "2025-09-07T23:27:10Z")
> [@GIGObuster](#): > > There could be that there was not enough of a reason given for the pull (a failure of the editors in this case), but others commented that besides that issue, the paper was not really up to what it claimed. None of these quotes at all justify the decision to publish the paper and then silently delete it due to threats and activist pressure. All the criticisms would have been evident when it was submitted and reviewed, and if the Mathematical Intelligencer and the New York Journal of Mathematics had rejected it for those reasons, it would be a very different story. What is supposed to happen if a bad paper is published is that other researchers criticise it, not that someone uses their family connections to threaten the editor it to get it removed. That’s malfeasance. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2025, 11:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644/894 "2025-09-07T23:29:07Z")
> [@DemonTree](#): > > None of these quotes at all justify the decision to publish the paper and then silently delete it due to threats and activist pressure. All the criticisms would have been evident when it was submitted and reviewed, and if the Mathematical Intelligencer and the New York Journal of Mathematics had rejected it for those reasons, it would be a very different story. Not by much, it points to some editors that had very thin skins, but the context shows that the ones that managed to publish it, did choose **— sorry — not a very deep journal**. The implication here is that if by chance, a more robust journal managed to publish it, **they would not had cowered in fear.** Far more plausible is that the paper would not had been published at all. A lot of pseudoscience tales like this come from conspiracy theorists that when they find a weak journal where they managed to publish an iffy paper, then with the media that they have, cite the iffy paper ad nauseam. Not letting their readers find about that other context. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644.md?page=33) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancel-culture-and-canceling-versus-consequences-for-actions/1020644.md?page=35)