Ordinary people, collectively, have gained the power to actually deliver real consequences against speech (and actions) they find objectionable. That’s not censorship - that’s consequences. It’s more speech. Collective speech is still speech.
It can be a good thing when used for good. Just like any tool. And sometimes people get it wrong and it’s bad. It’s good if fewer people see Mel Gibson movies, because he’s obviously a bigot, and it’s good that there are consequences for bigotry. But he still makes movies. He hasn’t been censored.
That’s pretty much what I said, but the sequence of events was that MeToo sparked either changes in law or changes in how courts and juries interpreted the law. To that extent, those were all good things. To the extent that (for instance) Chris Hardwick’s ex-wife was empowered to try to exploit the movement by libeling him on social media, that was a very bad thing.
From what little I know from popular media, P Diddy is a piece of shit and I’m disappointed that he wasn’t convicted on the major charges, but remember that he was convicted of lesser ones and the judge denied the defense request to have him immediately released.
But here’s the thing. The legal system requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt for conviction. This is a good thing. Who’s in a better position to judge the evidence, you or me reading the popular media, or a jury presented with all the available facts and instructed on how to apply the law and the rules of evidence?
The legal system is far from perfect, to be sure, especially in the US where a wealthy individual can hire high-priced lawyers and pit them against an often second-rate prosecutor, as was spectacularly demonstrated in the OJ Simpson case. But I vehemently reject the implication that the alternative is mob rule, that the alternative is libeling someone through social media and attempting to destroy their reputation and their livelihood based on rumour and innuendo. This is an environment where the accused is automatically presumed guilty until proven innocent, and being proven innocent is essentially impossible for most ordinary people who aren’t celebrities.
So let’s say that P Diddy was found not guilty on everything. In that world, P Diddy should face no professional consequences because he was not found guilty? You would encourage, say, your daughter to work for him, because to do otherwise would be to support mob rule? Or you bring up OJ: OJ faced significant consequences in his personal and professional life despite being found not guilty. Is that cancel culture? If not, why not?
It was both. Her harangue might in the past have been attributed to the venting of a bitter ex. At the time it had the substantially added impact of almost literally saying “me, too”, latching on to a powerful internet meme.
Sorry, yes, not ex-wife. There’s nothing wrong with being honest about one’s experiences in response to a question. But she wasn’t responding to a question. This was a completely spontaneous unprovoked posting in Medium. So what was the purpose of it? I don’t know and you don’t know, but for a likely explanation, I refer you to the title of this thread.
That’s actually a common tactic in the “cancel culture” community, mainly to avoid potential legal entanglements. What’s important is that the target of the attack is obvious.
You’re distorting the argument here. Every employer-employee relationship is based on subjective judgments. Always has been. This is a completely different topic from having someone’s reputation destroyed through social media innuendo.
You weren’t addressing me, so I apologise for butting in unbidden…
I would say that in the example, it’s not especially wrong to call for a boycott if:
You are not somehow innocently wrong about the coffee shop (like the information you have relates to some other, similarly-named coffee shop).
You’re not simply innocently repeating misinformation someone else fabricated about the shop.
You’re not actively lying about the coffee shop.
You’re confident that the result of you urging others not to support the business will not escalate into something more than a boycott (such as people deciding it would be appropriate to attack customers as they walk out of the shop - customers who at that point may not even know the facts you know about the shop’s owner).
Item 4 is for me, the most tricky aspect of all of this, because it’s not easy to predict those sorts of things, especially the scale of the reaction. That’s not to say that the answer is to keep quiet, but it is maybe why I would prefer these things to have solutions that don’t depend on a mob.
There’s nothing wrong with women (and people in general) coming forward to speak about their own experiences, period, for any reason at all, as long as they’re truthful.
MeToo didn’t bring all the big changes that are ultimately necessary for real progress against patriarchal and rape culture. And a big reason why is that women are still shamed and have aspersions cast on them for nothing more than telling their own stories. Your post above is a very small but real example of this - you imply malevolent motives for someone speaking about their own experiences, with no actual evidence of dishonesty or otherwise ill intent.
Well, if he runs for office it may very well come up. This seems to me to be similar to the buzz over Mamdani’s selecting “African American” and “Asian American” and “other - Uganda” on his application to Columbia.
Note that when she says “normie conservative and even centrist opinions,” she means publicly promoting discrimination against trans people, which is “normie centrist” in her book. Not mine.
The cynical response would be “well, that’s the chance he took when he staked his life savings on a business as high-risk as food and beverage service.”
How about Nick Sandmann? He didn’t go to jail (indeed, he successfully sued several news organisations for undisclosed sums), but he did spend weeks being pilloried from here to the moon by half the internet over - and really, I can’t stress this enough - absolutely nothing. For smirking at an old man. For, essentially, not being photogenic. It would be stupid to pretend his experience wasn’t traumatising, and it would be stupid to pretend it was anything other than a cyberbullying campaign led by an unhinged mob (a mob which, incidentally, included a surprising number of celebrities).
Yes, it’s oppression. Ask someone who grew up in a Soviet country, or lived through the Cultural Revolution in China. That’s why people with those experiences are often at the forefront of free speech movements. Having to watch every word you say out of fear it will be blown up into some life-wrecking controversy is an oppressive way to live.
We can choose, as a society, to be more or less judgemental, more or less forgiving. I think we should strive to be more forgiving. We should remind ourselves and each other that everyone makes mistakes, and that a 3 minute social media video doesn’t give the whole story, or encapsulate the entirety of a person’s being.
And as @JRDelirious points out, it is not always voluntary. We can’t get away from cameras and surveillance in the modern world; for most people the only protection is the anonymity of being one among millions.
This is the kind of thing I wanted to see. Define what you find objectionable, to avoid the slippery slope of the meme:
What I see happening, and object to, is that sometimes “have that conversation respectfully” is nothing more than an excuse not to have that conversation at all, or to predetermine the outcome, because any disagreement with the social justice activist position is defined as disrespectful, or bigoted in some way. That’s not the result of social media or corporate culture, it is a group of people using their social and institutional power to advance their agenda in an illegitimate way.
As long as ‘respectful’ is about how ideas are discussed, rather than the ideas themselves, it’s fine.
Wearing a MAGA hat does not make you photogenic, and really, I did notice that the issue was that a very conservative black religious group (Protesting against abortion, that is why they and the MAGA people were in the plaza) took the MAGA people to task for supporting a rapist, then the old man (that it was conveniently not mentioned to be a Native American), actually intervened to defuse the situation.
Sure, there was a lot that the media missed and I think the case against the press had some merit, but, one result was:
Now then, as a MAGA it is clear that he is nowadays supporting moves like this one:
Moves that are more harmful than a snowflake having his feelings hurt.
This is definitely one of the other issues. Whatever you think of Sandmann and the others being there, a single picture has zero wider context. Sometimes that’s okay, even in photojournalism. But in a situation like that one, the full context is everything. And people are lazy and dumb and don’t bother to inform themselves of what comes out later. That’s an example, the people who get all the details of the Rittenhouse case wrong is another one. There’s probably people still out there that think Richard Jewell set the bombs in Atlanta in 1996. And related to that you’ve got people who believe in false etymologies and similar misinformation. No, “rule of thumb” has nothing to do with beating your wife. “History” is not a sexist word because it contains the string “his”. “Call a spade a spade” and “tar baby” are not racist, among many proclaimed “racist” idioms.
It’s very easy to gin up outrage on the Internet. As we all know, the initial false reporting gets thrown up in big letters and the corrections are buried. Even being completely wrong isn’t enough for some people to admit that maybe they jumped to conclusions.
By that logic - If we don’t want the public to be able to accuse coffee shop owners of being Nazis, we need to pass a law that says people can’t accuse coffee shop owners of being Nazis.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Friday largely blocked sweeping executive orders from President Donald Trump that seek to end government support for programs promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.
U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson in Baltimore granted a preliminary injunction blocking the administration from terminating or changing federal contracts they consider equity-related.
Abelson found that the orders likely carry constitutional violations, including against free-speech rights.
