That’s why no one advocating for safe spaces for women also advocates for blanket bans on trans women being allowed to be in them!
It absolutely is not. Nor is this:
For that matter, nor is this:
If those are your genuine interpretations of what I wrote, I can’t see any possible point in continuing this conversation. We clearly have an unbridgeable communication gap.
Reputational consequences have always been bad, but in social media, everyone’s famous for 15 minutes, and many people have monetized that fame. So getting “canceled” is worse than having a bad reputation, because it can actually cost you money.
Moreover, due to the viral nature of the internet, cancellation can happen extremely quickly, long before anyone can mount a response, sometimes before they even know something’s gone wrong. You don’t even know where it’s coming from, since it’s coming from everywhere.
And because the reach is internet-wide, it’s not like you can move to a smaller town to outrun the reputation, you’re basically cooked and the only option to stay relevant is to double down and wail about your cancellation.
So in my view, that’s why people find cancellation scarier than just plain reputational consequences. It’s a permanent loss of relevance at a time in history where everyone’s a star now. It can be felt as being demoted to a permanent second-class citizen.
? Miller didn’t say that a safe space is intended to ban people because of “who they are”. It’s intended to keep out people based on what they do.
Nobody’s saying, for example, that a transphobic person can’t attend a trans-inclusive Ladies’ Night event or whatever that a local venue is offering. But if the transphobic person can’t resist her inclination to do and say transphobic things at such an event, then her ass is getting banned from it, not because of “who she is”, but because of what she does.
Keeping the event a safe space for the trans and trans-supporting people means keeping out the people who can’t manage not to behave transphobically. If the transphobic person in question complains that it’s stifling her necessary self-expression to require her not to behave transphobically, and that that behavior is a fundamental part of “who she is”, well, that’s her call. But it’s not the venue that’s making that call. The venue is simply banning her transphobic behavior.
The problem is that the first part of “how this sort of thing should be handled” is always true – social media empowers virtually anyone to make highly publicized accusations, whether well-founded or not, whether exaggerated or not, or even if an outright lie that may be a product of deep-rooted psychological issues that distort a person’s view of the world. But the second part is rarely true – it’s usually much easier for an employer or other organization to terminate their association with the accused than to endure the considerable expense and risk of defending them. This imbalance of power is precisely the problem with cancel culture. Few of us are celebrities, but all of us are vulnerable.
And even when such a defense as I described has been successfully mounted and the person reinstated, some will insist on continuing to promulgate the stigma of guilt.
Well said.
So… You think that going to prison and then having trouble finding a job because “felon” is part of your legal identity and can be found on any background check is less bad than being accused of rape or racism and then possibly having trouble finding a job because potential employers might discover that accusation on social media?
Really?
And I’m going to gently suggest that the sort of person who believes that murderers should have a path to renter society likely feels the same about those who are dangerous in other ways, too.
As an example, i used to run a small square dance event. One day, a guy who sometimes joined us showed up wearing an anklet, which several people reported to me, with varying degrees of alarm. He had pled no contest to accusations of abusing a woman he dated. (And there was a he said/she said aspect to it.) I discussed the situation with some progressive friends. We agreed that he was not accused of actions that made him a danger to our group, which met in very public places, etc. And one very progressive person pointed out that people who are totally ostracized can’t renter society. So i let it be known that he was still welcome to attend our public dances.
I did remove him from the invitation list to a private weekend event in the middle of nowhere, however.
So, i don’t know what every progressive would do in every situation. But i know that at least on the one situation where i was involved in the decision making, we tried to balance safety and compassion towards the accused.
“These people who deserve some punishment for their actions are getting no punishment, and these people who deserve a lot of punishment for their actions are getting way too much punishment,” doesn’t seem a particularly hard concept to grasp.
Please help clear this up, because I find it somewhat disturbing. You said:
Would you, or would you not, perceive all or most unmasked autistic people in a safe space as acting like jerks towards you (even if you conciously know they are likely not doing so)? If yes, is that based on experience, or just speculation?
You mentioned a hypothetical guy who’s non-verbal cues are coming across as hostile. It’s easy to understand how you would perceive him as jerkish. But you said ‘everyone’. Do you believe all or most autistic people are like this?
And then you said:
Now, saying it would be jerkish to demand autistic people mask in a safe place for autistic people does not necessarily mean you think it would not be jerkish to demand they mask outside that space. But you should not be surprised if someone interprets it that way. Why add the condition otherwise? Perhaps you just meant it would be more jerkish to make that demand in a safe space? Or maybe that it would be reasonable to make that demand in a safe space for a different group of people?
I think this is probably a pointless argument over terminology, since you are agreeing with my understanding of what it means. Besides, @crowmanyclouds has helpfully reminded us that there do exist safe spaces where groups of people are banned based on who they are, eg men from a safe space for women.
However, I think you are quite wrong that it means behaviour at the event. If your ‘transphobic person’ has always acted unexceptionally at the ladies’ night, but is discovered to have retweeted JK Rowling, then she is getting banned, no?
I don’t see how it’s not worse for someone to be more or less unemployable because of something they may not have done, and in most cases isn’t a crime, than for someone to be more-or-less unemployable because they were actually convicted of a serious crime. How is it not hypocritical to say we should give the latter a chance, but not the former?
There are multiple posters here who have said they would not employ someone if they discovered from their social media that the person supported MAGA. Perhaps the same people would also refuse to employ someone convicted of even a minor crime? It’s hard to keep track.
@puzzlegal… you’ve been polite, helpful, and generally friendly towards me. That is decidedly contrary to my experience with most progressives, who tend to assume anyone who disagrees with them must be either ignorant or evil, and display none of their self-proclaimed empathy* when dealing with ideological opponents.
So I’m afraid even if you and your friends are reasonable and consistent about this, it doesn’t do all that much to convince me that that is generally the case.
* In either sense. No sympathy, and no understanding. It’s startling how little either side understands what motivates the other.
Again, you think that prison plus the certainty that any employer knows you are a convicted felon is somehow less bad than no formal punishment plus a risk that an employer might find unpleasant things posted about you on social media? Really? That makes the accused but not-convicted rapist more punished than the murderer?
I have volunteered in a prison. Prison is rather unpleasant. And… a murderer who shows no remorse is unlikely to even get out of prison, at least for decades and decades. You really think that’s not as bad as having some gossip about you on social media?
You didn’t say, “it’s unfair that someone who might actually be innocent is being punished”. That would be uncontroversial. You said that
Do you want to retract that? Or do you live in a world where unpleasant gossip is worse than years of prison plus unpleasant gossip that can be sourced?
Obviously I think prison is worse than social media gossip. And the certainty of an employer knowing something that would make them unwilling to employ you is worse than the chance of them knowing.
And I don’t really mean this:
But there’s a real phenomenon here. I often encounter people on the left who try to empathize with and even excuse actual criminals (blaming poverty, mostly) and say that prison should not be about punishing people, but rehabilitating them. And I often encounter people on the left who treat bigotry as a grave moral failing, and do not at all try to empathize with why the person might have those views, or try to excuse them. And they sure seem eager to punish ‘bigots’ to the extent of their ability to do so.
So what is going on?
In order for that claim to be true you would have to know the motivations of, say, American conservatives/liberals.
So, how is it that you know what motivates American conservatives/liberals?
I believe bigotry is a grave moral failing, and we should try to rehabilitate bigots.
But perhaps you conflate “punish bigots” with “protect other people from unrepentant bigots”?
Nobody can explain what’s going on with fictitious, generalized composite characters.
I’m not saying that you’ve never encountered anything like that, or that’s never happened. But context matters quite a bit, including the prescription of what the offender did, and what a person thinks should happen.
Absent that, what you’re doing here is demand that people defend the generically-described actions of “people” whose description you contrived specifically to create the appearance of hypocrisy. It’s not honest or fair, and you shouldn’t expect anyone to engage with that kind of tactic.
I know you understand the problem, because you just wrote this:
No. I’m saying we can’t trust these reports because the history of large entertainment corporations on actually dealing with abuse by their valuable male talent is abysmal. Because of the bias of capitalism to protect the money, for one thing (also - because largely run by the same sort of wealthy powerful males doing the abusing)
With a small side of “Hearst Communications owns 20% of AMC, and who is Hardwick married to?”
This is not borne out by the actual results. Kevin Spacey still gets work, Louis CK still tours, Dr. Luke is still producing records.
As was said, only if the perceived risk outweighed the benefits. And despite the visibility of #MeToo, it’s blindingly obvious that there are plenty of people who would always believe the man - and the corporation - over the woman, despite the awful track record of that approach. And AMC knows this.
Are these “people on the left” that you “often” encounter arguing for imprisoning the bigots merely for being bigots? Because otherwise it’s a false equivalency and absolutely not the hypocrisy you’re presenting it as.
What is going on? People on the left want people to stop doing bad things.
A criminal who has already gone to jail, already been convicted, already had their life turned upside down, needs to re-enter society as a person who won’t commit more crimes. People on the right want to punish and punish and punish until the criminal is weeping in a corner, then punish them some more for good measure, as if a human being who leaves that system is ready to be a functional law-abiding citizen.
They are not.
From a strictly non-emotional place, ex-cons need support and tools to help them avoid reoffending. Not only for their sake, but for the rest of us, their future victims, and taxpayers who would have to pay through the nose AGAIN to incarcerate them. A stitch in time, right?
Bigots, out in the wild, have not been convicted and jailed. In fact, nothing happens to them at all. Without cancel culture, they just keep spewing their bigotry, mainstreaming it, popularizing it, continuing to do it over and over because they don’t even accept that it’s wrong. How do you stop bigots from bigotting, when there are no consequences, and their actions help make more bigots?
It also bears mentioning that if I look at someone in prison, and believe that they did the crime due to disadvantage or desperation, I can feel empathy for them and their situation, while agreeing that their sentence is justified and they have to pay their debt. Even more so if they’ve shown remorse, even more so if they’re showing signs of good behavior, improvement, and rehabilitation. Many convicts don’t deserve that, but many do.
I’d feel the exactly same way toward a “canceled bigot” who displayed a similar remorse, apology, and efforts to change. I would be 100% willing to forgive such a person, if I ever saw a situation like that.
But that’s generally not what bigots do. They don’t let go of the bigotry. They don’t show remorse, they double down, insisting that they’re being unfairly treated. They deflect toward the flaws and hypocrisiesof those accusing them.
Usually if a bigot says they’re sorry at all, it’s not an apology, it’s a transparently self-serving excuse in the form of “I’m sorry, now can we be done with this silly inconvenient misunderstanding.” There’s no sense of remorse or sense of restitutive obligation. In fact they often profit off of their “canceling”, re-orienting their online persona to a posture of martyrdom, sometimes gaining greater notoriety than before. Why would anybody feel empathy for that?
If you’re making the comparison of criminal vs. bigot, context is absolutely everything.
I feel we need to circle back to this, and other consistent complaints that “people on the left” are doing this/that/other when it comes to ‘cancelling’ people or ideas. While there has been some acknowledgement that it’s NOT one sided, your emphasis on it being something “the left” does has been overwhelming. Meanwhile, ‘the Right’ has cancelled books, the ability to serve in the armed forces, maintain a distinct identity, as well a host of lesser issues (like the whole Bud Light beer thing).
This isn’t about bothsiderism, because I see a distinct difference. Most of the examples @DemonTree is bringing up seems to focus on cancelling specific individuals, some of whom may indeed be subject of a smear campaign, others which have a decent amount of examples (I won’t say evidence, because this ISN’T about courts) confirming their actions.
The Right, on the other hand, has a much broader scope, attempting to cancel ideas, and entire groups of people. So, no - not equivalent.
Speaking in terms of “Great Debates” - no, there’s no easy fix in a nation where there’s mass communication, reasonably strong defenses on Free Speech (if you’re the ‘right’ sort of people that is), and libel laws that normally only protect the richest and most connected sorts of people. You can choose to put a moral judgement on that or not, I’m not stopping you. I generally avoid looking at it from that POV - shunning, voting with your dollars, or other iterations of what we now call Cancel Culture has been with us probably since before Homo Sapiens Sapiens became the last standing hominid. It reflects how we structure our groups from the largest to the smallest.
But saying that one group is consistently applying it unfairly to individuals while carefully not mentioning that another is applying it systematically… it may reflect your personal experiences, but obviously it doesn’t reflect that of many/most of the others in the thread.
I also feel it’s worth mentioning that even if boycotting and doxxing have harmful side effects (which they sometimes do), suppressing them (at least in current American society) would have far worse side effects. That’s how you get Luigis.
This, 100%.
I grew up in the 80/90s. I was steeped in a lot of shitty attitudes, and being a high schooler when the Internet went fully mainstream, I’m sure that whatever “edgy” blatherings I may have posted online at the time would probably make me cringe and apologize for them if I saw them today. What I would NOT do is defend my shitty past-self’s behavior or start screaming about free speech. I would apologize for the hypothetical-but-probably-real incredibly stupid remarks, explain that past me was a fucking idiot, and move on.