Which question?
the question about whether or not you agree with the books transphobic basis.
I think ultimately everyone really is concerned about content, and their concern about process is about when certain processes (eg. “cancelling”) are being applied, not whether the process itself is inherently evil (as opposed to something like torture, where a lot of people argue is such an inherently evil process that it shouldn’t be applied even if it results in net good outcomes). I doubt DemonTree for example would be against a company firing their employee for promoting child slavery, for example (even though I am not sure if she answered iiiandyiiii’s questions along those lines). Most critics of cancel culture, from what I have seen, are more concerned that companies and society are simply pulling the trigger over increasingly benign views. This is exceptionally subjective as what seems like a completely harmless comment to one person may be offensive to another, but I think this is ultimately what people are really concerned about.
As an analogy, it’d be like everyone agreeing that getting thrown in prison is an acceptable punishment for crimes. But while historically people only got thrown into prison for things like burglary and assault, now people are getting imprisoned for, say, shoplifting. Some people are saying that getting imprisoned for shoplifting is vastly disproportionate response and arguing that people will be afraid to go shopping because they might inadvertently forget to pay for something and get imprisoned as a result; others are saying that we have for too long downplayed the damage that shoplifting does, that society is simply no longer tolerant of shoplifting and that it is a good thing that we are now imprisoning people for their crimes. Others are saying “you’re a hypocrite for saying people shouldn’t be imprisoned for shoplifting, when you say nothing when this other person was imprisoned for jaywalking. You clearly don’t actually care about people being wrongly imprisoned”.
I think it’s a reasonable stance for people to feel concerned over what they see is an escalation of consequences, and if they say they feel someone has been wrongly imprisoned or wrongly cancelled, that doesn’t mean that they think imprisonment or cancellation is wrong in ALL cases. So while I think you’re technically correct that everyone agrees that “it’s not the process that’s the problem” I’m not sure you’re really framing the issue in a useful manner.
Stories have an arc.
Consider the source. If at first blush they seem implausible, then dismiss them.
If they persist look deeper into what evidence is being offered. Can they be corroborated by independent sources. If not, dismiss.
If they seem to continue to persist and now they are being pushed by large platforms or prominent figures, responsible journalists or their publications might decide to expose the story for the bullshit that it is. To do so, they might consider publishing the developing story before they know where it leads, even if they suspect they already know.
News is a business and it thrives on creating interest in trending stories.
I don’t have an objection. I’ve been saying that some stories need telling even when we think they are going to end up being bullshit.
I told you I haven’t read it! I can’t and won’t say whether I agree with a book that I haven’t read.
Yes, you’re right. It’s exactly the escalation of consequences that has me worried, and makes me question whether it would be better to get rid of the imprisonment/cancellation altogether than have it be so overused.
That’s what happened.
Hunter Biden left a laptop with supposedly incriminating information with a blind computer repairman, who couldn’t remember if it was Hunter or someone else who dropped it off.
No corroboration, no witness, not even a chain of custody of anyone who would admit they knew where it came from.
Implausible, dismissed.
Which is what many reputable publications ended up doing. Not sure if it helped.
That to me, is just bad journalism. If they haven’t checked into it, if they haven’t verified evidence and done due diligence, then publishing it would be very irresponsible.
Should they publish everything interesting, even if untrue?
I think that stories should be vetted and made sure that they are not bullshit before they are told.
Historically, people had hands or even heads cut off for shoplifting.
Since that was meant as part of your analogy, people used to also lose their heads for saying things unkind about their leaders.
Now they get chided on twitter.
It is not an escalation, but a massive de-escalation of consequence.
'Salright, I was not intending to include you personally in my condemnation of the ass-embedded heads in question anyway. Greenwald, on the other hand, was alive in the '70s and is also a journalist by profession, so he really has no excuse for falling for this kind of ahistorical overgeneralization. He’s also a native-born US citizen who AFAIK has lived pretty much his whole life in the US, so it’s reasonable to require of him a greater familiarity with issues like ACLU history than we expect of you cousins across the pond.
I don’t think there have been any significant changes in the division of opinion among US liberals about free-speech absolutism over the past several decades, no. Two books that both happened to come out a quarter-century ago, Stanley Fish’s There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech and Henry Louis Gates et al.'s Speaking of Race, Speaking of Sex, both illustrate how actively such issues were being discussed back then in civil-liberties circles.
What I think is variable—not necessarily with any regular “cyclical” pattern, but subject to change—is the extent to which liberal division of opinion about free-speech absolutism is foregrounded in popular perception of civil-liberties issues. Here are a few factors that IMO have contributed to raising public awareness about that division of opinion in recent years:
1) The comparative decline of anti-free-speech activism by religious fundamentalists. The rise of the “Moral Majority” conservative Christian movement in the 1980s led to a wave of repressive unconstitutional legislation that tended to concentrate ACLU activity on topics that liberals were pretty much unanimous about.
High-profile ACLU court cases about, say, school libraries banning books by the likes of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Wright, or fundamentalist colleges enforcing racial segregation losing their tax-exempt status, or requirements for public schools to mandate student prayer or the teaching of creationism, had very little constitutional gray area in them no matter where you stood on the issue of free-speech absolutism.
2) The increase in the perceived, and actual, physical threat associated with right-wingers’ assertion of their constitutional right to promulgate hate speech. Back in 1978, for example, the US Nazis seeking authorization for their proposed Skokie march testified that the demonstrators would not have any weapons. How quaint, huh? American fascists pledging to remain unarmed at their “free speech” demonstration!
Growing aggressiveness among right-wingers about exercising their Second Amendment rights, in any and all circumstances, has led to a lot of cooling of already lukewarm enthusiasm among civil-liberties supporters for right-wingers’ getting together to exercise their First Amendment rights. That shit has been getting people injured and killed.
3) The recent rise in deliberate right-wing trolling of liberals with hate speech in constitutionally unprotected ways, followed by well-publicized whining about “censorship” when their lack of constitutional protection results in their de-platforming. Pretty self-explanatory, I think.
There’s an overlap between so-called “cancel culture” and criticism, but they’re not exactly the same either. When we complain about any of them, we need to make sure exactly what we’re objecting to and exactly what legal or moral norms we think it’s violating.
That’s where Greenwald falls down so badly in the OP’s linked article. There is nothing wrong with an ACLU representative stating his personal opinion that a particular bad and maliciously inaccurate book should be ignored and ostracized in public discourse, as long as he’s not advocating any unconstitutional means for ensuring its ostracism.
I think you’re really fighting the hypothetical here…
Welcome to the Dope!
Thanks for the explanation. Your (1) especially is something I hadn’t really appreciated. Those are issues that would put eg iiandyiiii and Glenn Greenwald on the same side, obscuring the fact they are acting from different principles. And, perhaps, leading each side to think the other has abandoned their principles when less clear-cut issues reveal the divergence.
Greenwald is a free speech absolutist and believes that should be the mission of the ACLU. Strangio is not and that’s Greenwald’s main beef with him. But Strangio himself denied advocating for any entity to ban the book, which suggests he thinks that would be inappropriate.
Anybody who wants to learn more about how the ACLU itself perceives and supports its mission, as opposed to Greenwald’s polemically charged view of it, should take a look at the ACLU Case Selection Guidelines leaked shortly after the Charlottesville demonstration/riots. A lot of intelligent and nuanced discussion in there, including the following:
That’s not quite what I asked you.
Ok, let me try again- do you support trans rights 100%, or do you think that perhaps there is something wrong going on there?
Did you read the article about the ACLU getting involved in elections and reinventing itself that GG linked to? Is it accurate?
Strangio, the person and Strangio, the Deputy Director for Transgender Justice are two distinct entities, are they not? His twitter bio says specifically: “He/him or they/them. All views my own.” If the government tries to ban that book and Strangio doesn’t support the ACLU in fighting that, I’ll join your protest.
It’s no different than the mods here. They have jobs to do (and so highly paid to boot) and they have personal opinions. While they personally all love me and can’t stand people on the other side of a debate with me, if I break a rule, they’ll slap my hands so fast that I’ll look like the last place contestant at a city wide Red Hands tournament.
In the meantime, fuck that transphobic book and fuck any publisher (Regnery) who enriches the witch that wrote it.
I don’t see anything in that article that I find incorrect. The ACLU has openly admitted to getting involved in elections when civil liberties are at stake. The initial driver appears to be as a counter to all of the voter disenfranchisement actions that have been growing in recent years.
As a donor, I have no problem with this either.
What should happen is that we should go back to the days of evening news with Walter Cronkite. But I’m pretty sure the horse is out of the barn and the barn is now a cookie cutter town center with a Williams Sonoma and a yoga studio.
I know this probably won’t surprise you but in his time Cronkite was accused by conservatives as being overly liberal. He was accused of using negative facial expressions and tones with conservative stories, and positive tones with liberal ones. Additionally, he was accused of predominantly choosing pro-liberal stories, and not covering enough conservative stories (censorship!!!). This idea from the right that they aren’t treated fairly in the media, and censored by virtue of not being covered, is hardly anything new. It is almost like… they’ve been consistently on the wrong side of history. Go figure.