Conservatives didn’t invent social media.
Look, saying that “cancel culture” is bad because conservatives also do it means nothing to me, because I believe every tool I use to fight for my political beliefs should also be available to the opposition. The first amendment itself is a “weapon of my enemy.” The ballot box is a “weapon of my enemy.” I’m not abandoning either of those just because they’re sometimes used in ways I don’t like.
If the government is doing it it’s tyranny, if the civil society establishment is encouraging it it’s persecution. The point with the phrase “cancel culture” is that it’s a culture, a way of behaving of different cohorts of the civil population.
And one of the key things about “cancel culture” is that it is ostensibly propelled by those who do not have the formal institutional power and authority to themselves “punish” those they feel did wrong. The online blogger who starts a #cancelJoeBlow is typically someone who has no power to himself arrest or fire Joe Blow. He’s seeking to shame Joe Blow’s employers to fire him, or to whip up public support to pressure the employer to fire him and/or the authorities to investigate him.
Cancel culture of a particular cohort can be a tool of the tyranny (basically by propagandizing the need for cancel action against the opposition and looking the other way as the persecution happens at public mob level) or it can have contributed to the rise of the tyranny by creating a favorable environment.
The semantics of “suspension” vs “termination” often depends on the exact contractual arrangements. Being “placed on leave” is another semantic equivalent. One could substitute the word “suspension” in my statement and the meaning is the same, because as you just said, it’s standard practice for serious accusations and is the typical precursor to a firing or permanent termination. How about we just say “he was immediately no longer allowed to work, and no one knew if he would still have a career after it was all over?”
That’s… sort of the point of the investigations? Nobody knew what would happen to his career until the investigations were completed. Wouldn’t it be a problem if every knew what the outcome would be before there was an investigation?
Because he wasn’t terminated, he was suspended, pending the investigations. Those are very different.
You keep getting the facts wrong about this story.
I was saying that this “cancel culture” is a thing that exists sometimes, but rarely, and Sandmann is a good example of its rare occurrence. However, it’s often used as a snarl word by the right, when in reality the right practices it far more horribly than the left does.
It’s like how the right is convinced that the left’s mob violence and terrorism is a huge issue, when in reality it’s very rare on the left but much more common on the right. Any conservative who’s genuinely concerned about cancel culture, rather than just looking for an easy way to attack the left, ought to be much more concerned with the right’s own practice of cancel culture, as it’s much more common and horrible on the right.
Completely understandable, and I’m very sorry to hear about your experiences. And I know that such experiences are unfortunately all too common. We live in a complicated and often unfair, exploitative, and sometimes even violent society. And we are all shaped by our lived experiences. There are no easy answers.
I don’t think the criminal justice system is broken in any fundamental way; it’s just that by its very nature, it requires accusations to be supported by strong evidence. Where abuse allegations are made in the context of intimate relationships, such proof may be difficult or impossible to obtain, and it becomes a question of who to believe. I’m sure you can see that a policy of “always believe the accuser” is a path fraught with peril and runs counter to one of the most fundamental pillars of the justice system.
No, it’s not surprising, but the problem is that methods of seeking justice “outside the system” can be exploited by unethical and vindictive individuals precisely because they lack the safeguards of the justice system, giving accusers power – without accountability or any need for evidence – to inflict lifelong consequences on their targets, consequences potentially out of proportion to the alleged transgressions, and potentially worse than the measured judgments of an actual court.
We all want to live in a peaceful society where sexual assault doesn’t occur, or the perpetrator faces justice when it does. But I don’t think we want to live in a society that condones extrajudicial retribution, either.
I do. Powerful men who abuse others in the context of an intimate relationship are almost never punished by the criminal justice system. I agree that it’s unclear how it can be fixed, because it’s hard to obtain clear evidence in these cases. But “abusers continually get away with it” is a symptom of “broken”.
I mean, the obvious reason to do it is that she was telling the truth, and wanted her truth to be heard. Sure, there are other possible reasons. But that’s the first one that comes to mind.
I was actually going to modify my statement, but too late to edit. I have said numerous times that one of the big problems with the justice system, particularly in the US, is that money is a huge factor in how justice is administered. I’ve often brought up the OJ Simpson acquittal as a prime example – no ordinary mortal could afford the team of super-high-priced lawyers that he assembled.
But that’s rather orthogonal to the issue. A major way that the justice system is broken is that it always favours the wealthy. That’s a given. I don’t know what the fix for that is, either, except that it’s especially prevalent in cultures that seem to value money above all else.
So yes, rich powerful men who abuse others often get away with it. But that’s because of the wealth disparity in how justice is administered, not because sexual abusers have some intrinsic protection in the justice system beyond the elementary and essential rules of evidence.
Earlier in the thread, it was argued (persuasively, IMO) that what happened to Nick Sandmann counts as being cancelled, even though, as a 14 year old, he didn’t really have anything to be cancelled from; the social shaming aspect of what he experienced is itself sufficient to be considered part of “cancel culture.”
Under that framework: is wolfpup currently canceling Chloe Dykstra in this thread? He’s made several attacks against her character, based on entirely unproven accusations of malicious slander against Chris Hardwick. True, he is not calling for her to suffer any sort of professional consequence, but as we established with Sandmann, that’s not a necessary component - being shamed and insulted by large numbers of strangers online is sufficient. And wolfpup is certainly not the only person to weigh in online with an opinion about Chloe Dykstra’s character based on her accusation against Hardwick.
So, what’s the distinction between what he’s doing here, and what people who believed Dykstra’s account did to Hardwick? Is there one?
The distinctions are:
I am not publishing a manifesto detailing her alleged transgressions on a popular social media site, and
The worst I’ve said is that her claims against Hardwick may likely be, in my humble estimation, exaggerated and lacking mitigating context (and that I doubt her sincerity in saying she didn’t want to harm Hardwick’s career). None of those things are firing offenses anywhere.
That’s the distinction. Has Dykstra been suspended from whatever she’s currently doing due to anything I’ve said here? 
What “manifesto”?
Already dispensed with in my post:
Is your remaining counter, “I’m not shaming her that much?” I don’t find that super-persuasive, but then, I’m not one of the people arguing that “cancel culture” is wrong in the first place.
Only because your social media site of choice happens to be relatively unpopular. 
It becomes clear that “cancelling” is often in the eye of the beholder. There are many different types of internet-mediated harassment behaviors, not all are necessary new.
To me the most remarkable is how:
The internet has brought new intensity and dynamics to reputational mechanics that have existed for centuries, but to me the distinguishing factor is entities who have a large degree of unaccountable power our lives - employers, schools, insurers, social media platforms - are simultaneously more likely to find themselves extorted by internet tattletales, and more also more likely to unceremoniously boot someone to the curb. And there’s seldom any recourse for it, not least because in the court of public opinion, there are no appeals.
To me that’s the real story here, the way that “canceling” has revealed how much our lives are controlled by the whims of various unaccountable institutions who are more than happy to ruin your life in order to prevent any inconvenience to themselves. And there’s really no due process defined for this, or any recourse for it.
The internet didn’t invent any of this, but it has created a rapidity where everything can change like a lightning bolt from the blue, where it’s already over before you even know it happened.
Good points. In older days the Town Gossip dishing on you to your boss would just as likely as not be told “go mind your own business, you got some nerve coming to me to talk dirt about someone”. You’d be less safe if it were some “respectable influential pillars of the community” who together invited him to lunch and said to him, “we have heard some worrying things about this person”, but it would still stay mostly between those immediately interested. Now there’s ten thousand town gossips and one thousand “pillars of the community” and everyone wants to be first to post “it’s FO time for JoeBlow”.
Wow, I can get fired for something unrelated to job performance?
Now if you or I were out in public and encountered a TV news crew doing a remote report, we’d give them a wide berth to do their job. (Okay I’ll admit that if I was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and baggy pants I’d dance in the background like Michael Stipe in Losing My Religion, but nothing more malicious than that)
But a few years ago it was a thing in Canada for male creepsters to interrupt women reporters by yelling “fuck her right in the pussy!”
On one such occasion, she’d been interviewing a group of coworkers at a sports event outing. They laughed. Charitably, we might say they reacted to the absurdity, not in approval of it. No stretch of the imagination they’d jump the creep if he’d committed physical assault. But they were fired nonetheless.
The moral of the story: either be a perfect human being, or don’t wear the company swag in public
The vast majority of individuals who make determinations that impact domestic and sexual violence survivors have no training or experience with this population. This includes prosecutors, attorneys, judges, police officers, staff members in family court and virtually every other profession that touches this issue. They are neither trained to identify characteristics of trauma nor experienced enough to conduct suspect examinations - in the case of domestic violence they are unaware of the severity of, risks for, or signs of domestic violence strangulation (which is a felony in my state), and unable to determine if someone’s wounds are defensive in nature because they do not have that training. They do not understand how traumatic memory works, and often characteristics that are bog standard in assault cases (tonic immobility, lack of affect, difficulty recalling important details) are used to determine whether or not the victim is credible.
Victims do not have ready access to information about their rights, what they do and don’t have to do, what evidence collection or a court case might look like, or even what are natural responses to trauma, such as freezing up and being unable to move or resist during an assault.
In the case of sexual assault, trained Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners are rare - in my case we are the only agency in the county that offers this service. Medical professionals often don’t know how to provide trauma informed care or what evidence to even look for in the collection of forensic evidence, they don’t have colposcopes on hand (fancy forensic cameras,) and I am certain you must be aware of the immense backlog of so-called rape kits that in multiple municipalities including the city of Detroit, enabled multiple women to be victimized by serial rapists before the DNA evidence was finally processed.
That’s not even getting into police precincts that refer to their special victims division as the “lying bitch unit.” (Baltimore, IIRC.)
The system is broken, and it is so broken that people still believe being accused of rape is more likely to ruin your life, rather than ruin the life of the accuser. Because the truth about our “system” is that it is the accuser who overwhelmingly, in the vast majority of cases, takes the brunt of the damage. Women know this, that’s why we don’t often don’t report it when it happens.
In my fiction, I write about trauma all day long. Sexual assault even. I dunno that it was about showing strength. What I wanted to show was healing, and the strength that comes from that.
I’m only saying I look askance at a creator who uses this theme multiple times in their work and then turns out to have very credible allegations of abuse against them. Then you realize they were probably getting off on it. Especially in Whedon’s case where he cared more about getting that fix than his actors’ own psychological safety. Marsters recently commented on that attempted rape scene as one of the worst experiences of his life.
We’ve become a society of moral busybodies, tattletales and self appointed hall monitors. It’s like living in a panopticon where some of the prisoners think they’re guards too.
Very informative, thank you, and indeed disturbing. I have no argument with anything you wrote, and again, my sincere condolences for the things you’ve been through. I was actually thinking of the procedures governing how trials are conducted, but you’re right, there are flaws in the system around the preliminary collection of evidence, too.
I still strongly hold the belief, however, that despite this kind of deplorable situation, nothing justifies extrajudicial retribution, either via social media or any other way. There are obvious reasons that that’s not the way a civilized society should ever work.
I can also appreciate the therapeutic value of a survivor of sexual assault writing about their experiences. But ethically, morally, and perhaps legally, they have to tread carefully and not cross a line that either explicitly identifies the alleged perpetrator or strongly implies who they are.
Returning to the topic of the thread, my fervent wish on this whole business of cancel culture is that maybe people shouldn’t so willingly accept everything they read on social media. Maybe they should at least consider the possibility that what someone has posted is not entirely true, or maybe not true at all, instead of getting sucked into mob hysteria. Maybe they should consider how ulterior motives might play into what someone has posted. Maybe they should withhold judgment until actual facts are known.
Maybe social media posters should act more like adults and less like schoolyard bullies, and when they do act like bullies, readers should be appropriately skeptical. At least the worst that schoolyard bullies can do is punch someone in the nose. Social media bullies can destroy innocent lives. They can literally drive people to suicide.