Why are Christian Bookstores Allowed to Ban Books?

[WalterBishop]

@Kimstu

That seems like a rather Schroedingerian interpretation of “coordination”: it’s based not on what people are doing, but whether people are aware of what other people are doing. If several hundred people all spontaneously complain about an offensive public remark, they’re not “coordinating” and therefore not participating in a “cancel” effort? But if one person happens to know about the other several hundred complaints and adds their own complaint anyway, then that person is the one doing the “cancelling”? I don’t think this definition is going to hold up well in practical use.

It’s definitely messy, and one could argue from my definition that the first tranche of complainants aren’t participating in a cancel effort. However, cancellations happen in real time and if thousands of people are all piling on one person (say, on Twitter), then the vast majority of them would see the prior messages and know that the point they’re about to make has already been repeatedly made. At that point, it’s up to them whether or not they proceed. If they do then I think it’s fair to say they’re coordinating. They’re aware of the existence of the mob (which the first few posters may not be) and they’re willingly adding their voices to the cacophony.

@Kimstu

Again, that’s placing an awful lot of weight on subjective qualities of “charity and empathy”. I’m not sure that’s going to stand up well either as a working criterion.

True, and I think that’s another reason why coming up with a concrete definition of cancel culture is so difficult. Quite a lot of it is subjective. What I consider to be an almighty fuss over nothing, you might consider a genuine scandal in need of social correction, or vice-versa. The definition I’ve ventured isn’t all-encompassing, it’s just my best effort given my current level of knowledge of the phenomenon.

@Kimstu

For example, do you think it was a “bad cancellation” when two W. Virgina officials were forced out of their posts in the widespread condemnation of the infamous Facebook post where one of them called Michelle Obama “a Ape in heels”? Was that post something it was okay for “the mob” to be mad about?

ISTM that none of the people complaining about that post (which I think was pretty inexcusable, btw) were feeling noticeably “charitable” or “empathetic” towards the woman who wrote it. Does that mean that they were wrong to complain about her publicly? Should her “cancellation” have been “opposed”?

For me, this is a textbook example of a good cancellation. Calling Michelle Obama an “Ape in heels” is appallingly racist and if the mayor of my town vocally approved of that kind of bigotry I’d want them out. The most charitable and empathetic reading of that incident is pretty much identical to the least charitable and empathic reading, as far as I can tell.

Contrast that with the incident I mentioned to iiandyiiii about a hundred posts ago. About a week after Megyn Kelly asked why blackface was offensive on national TV, a woman attended a Halloween party in blackface with a name tag reading “Hi! I’m Megyn Kelly”. Here, the charitable and uncharitable readings differ wildly. The uncharitable reading is that the woman is a shameless bigot who doesn’t care about black people’s feelings. The charitable reading is that she does care about black people’s feelings and was actually criticizing Megyn Kelly’s racial obliviousness, but didn’t know that wearing blackface is inexcusable, even if one is doing it satirically.

My guiding principle here is “Never attribute to malice what can be equally explained by stupidity”. Therefore, if someone is accused of racism (or any other kind of bigotry or foolishness), and there’s clear daylight between a charitable interpretation of their actions and an uncharitable interpretation, then, all else being equal, we should favor the charitable one. However, all too often I see people doing the reverse.

[Kimstu]

@WalterBishop

I found this article in the Atlantic interesting. According to the author, cancellation is a very persistent fear among academics, and they routinely self-censor as a result.

Academic concern about ideological conformity and self-censorship is a perennial issue, as you can see illustrated in, e.g., this similar essay from 1997.

[Kimstu]

@WalterBishop

For me, this is a textbook example of a good cancellation. Calling Michelle Obama an “Ape in heels” is appallingly racist and if the mayor of my town vocally approved of that kind of bigotry I’d want them out. The most charitable and empathetic reading of that incident is pretty much identical to the least charitable and empathic reading, as far as I can tell.

To me, that makes no sense. Obviously there’s nothing at all “charitable” or “empathetic” about calling that remark “appallingly racist” and saying “if the mayor of my town vocally approved of that kind of bigotry I’d want them out”.

Personally, I think such a reaction to that remark is eminently reasonable, but there’s no way it could be described as “charitable” or “empathetic”. The most “charitable” way to read the situation, for example, would be along the lines that the “cancelled” women themselves suggested. Namely: they didn’t mean it the way it sounded, they’re truly sorry to have offended anybody, they don’t have a racist bone in their body, they don’t think of black people as “apes” and did not intend to suggest that association as a racist slur in general, and so forth.

I don’t think their arguments are persuasive, but somebody more charitably inclined than I am might well be willing to say “okay, they’ve apologized and they didn’t intend any general insult to all black people, so let’s not ruin their lives over this.”

You see what I mean about the difference between a “good cancellation” and a “bad cancellation” having the potential to be unworkably subjective.

@WalterBishop

My guiding principle here is “Never attribute to malice what can be equally explained by stupidity” . Therefore, if someone is accused of racism (or any other kind of bigotry or foolishness), and there’s clear daylight between a charitable interpretation of their actions and an uncharitable interpretation, then, all else being equal, we should favor the charitable one.

I think it’s perfectly possible that a couple of random white people on Facebook might well be stupid enough never to have consciously thought about why it’s racist to compare any particular black person to an ape, and therefore to have made such comments about one particular black person they disliked without intending any racism.

Again, your “guiding principle” here is one that there’s no objective way to apply consistently.

[Slash1972]

@WalterBishop

The charitable reading is that she does care about black people’s feelings and was actually criticizing Megyn Kelly’s racial obliviousness, but didn’t know that wearing blackface is inexcusable, even if one is doing it satirically.

I’m curious - if that woman, instead of criticizing Megyn Kelly by wearing blackface to a party, she instead went on Twitter and criticized Megyn Kelly and that led to Megyn Kelly getting fired, would you consider that a “good” or a “bad” cancellation?

[Ann_Hedonia]

Seriously, there’s something I don’t think you guys get.

Have you ever read Teen Vogue??

It’s WOKE TEEN magazine, geared to teenagers that are woke, many of them obnoxiously and sanctimoniously woke in a way that only an overprivileged teenager whose never lived in the real world or changed their mind on a position can be. Teens that have yet to recognize that sometime in the long and complicated life that’s ahead of them they might make a mistake or need forgiveness.

I don’t particularly like teenagers, especially sanctimoniously woke ones. But I do think they generally grow up, on their own schedule, to be reasonable adults.

I also really like it that teens have a media outlet that addresses serious subjects from a liberal point of view. So, I like Teen Vogue even if I’m not crazy about teens.

So the publishers of Teen Vogue tried to hire an editor that wasn’t considered woke enough to edit WOKE TEEN magazine. The woman that wasn’t hired made a graceful exit, but the right wing trolls that are trying to destroy liberal media decided to have a big troll party, in the hopes that it would damage Teen Vogue in general and, more broadly, liberal media.

I’m sure they’d love to thank you for help.

[Kimstu]

Thinking about this in the context of a remark I made in a concurrent thread:

@Kimstu

The basic anti-cancel-culture argument seems to be:

We mustn’t discourage speech that could have the “consequences” of insulting and offending a lot of people. And therefore we must discourage speech that could have the “consequences” of widespread disparagement or unpopularity for the authors of the insulting and offensive speech.

I really do get the “anti-cancel-culture” viewpoint that not much useful purpose is served by an unending vicious cycle of people being mean to each other. Where you say something that I find insulting and then I boycott you for insulting me and then you denounce me for “canceling” you and so on all day long on the merry-go-round. At some point somebody’s got to be willing to break the cycle by just letting it go.

But my point is that you can’t just arbitrarily pick a point in the cycle and say “This is where the meanness has to stop.” Trying to make such rules is just too vulnerable to subjective bias and the influence of existing power structures.

We can certainly make rules about what specific acts of meanness we will or won’t tolerate: e.g., no violence, no threats or intimidation, no doxxing, etc. (and we have to be willing to back that up with official enforcement). But trying to find a place on the cycle that reliably separates permissible “speech” from impermissible “bad cancellation” just doesn’t seem workable to me.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Ann_Hedonia

the right wing trolls that are trying to destroy liberal media decided to have a big troll party, in the hopes that it would damage Teen Vogue in general and, more broadly, liberal media.

Another example of why so many of us are arguing that The Republican Party is the Party of Evil.

[Ann_Hedonia]

@WalterBishop

My guiding principle here is “Never attribute to malice what can be equally explained by stupidity” . Therefore, if someone is accused of racism (or any other kind of bigotry or foolishness), and there’s clear daylight between a charitable interpretation of their actions and an uncharitable interpretation, then, all else being equal, we should favor the charitable one.

Back when I was working, I was meeting with a young mother in her gorgeous newly renovated New York City townhouse. It had one of open 5 story circular staircases running up the center. The top floor landing was her children’s playroom. We were in a little sitting area on the second floor landing, and I could hear the children ( a boy and a girl, about 4 and 6 ) whispering and giggling above.

Then there was a whoosh and some laughter, and a stuffed monkey with a bungee cord wrapped around its neck dropped into our meeting from above.

The look on Mom’s face was priceless…I’m pretty sure she was thinking “Why did they have to pick the monkey?” I said something like…”so innocent, and yet so wrong”, and she laughed a little, but it was strained. It was one of those awkward parenting moments and I felt a little bad for her,

But they were children. Adults don’t get to be that stupid. With some medical exceptions, stupid is not an immutable condition. If you are a healthy adult and you don’t know that it’s racist to compare a black person to a monkey, you are being willfully ignorant, not stupid.

By your “charitable” standards, it would be OK to wrap yourself in an American flag and storm the Capitol and execute Mike Pence as long as you really believed that the Constitution said Trump won and Pence was a traitor. Because a lot of stupid people REALLY believed that.

I do agree with the statement “Never attribute to malice what can be equally explained by stupidity”, it’s the core principle that underlies the phrase “the banality of evil”. It means that stupid is evil, and most evil is rooted in thoughtlessness, not malice.

I don’t agree that people living in the modern world, with access to information, should get any sort of a pass for making the decision not to think. That kind of “charitably” enables evil, and it’s disingenuous for you to act like you’re somehow being respectful by excusing stupid people for hurting others with their racism.

[Atamasama]

Some people are into banal intercourse.

[BigT]

@WalterBishop

For me, this is a textbook example of a good cancellation. Calling Michelle Obama an “Ape in heels” is appallingly racist and if the mayor of my town vocally approved of that kind of bigotry I’d want them out. The most charitable and empathetic reading of that incident is pretty much identical to the least charitable and empathic reading, as far as I can tell.

This is something I wanted to comment on before. You have said you think cancel culture is a net negative, that you can’t support it. So then, if you get your way, this sort of “good cancellation” can’t happen either. The exact same processes are involved in this cancelling as any other. It’s still people saying this is offensive, saying the person should face consequences, and those in charge of the consequences agreeing.

As for your policy of always choosing the most favorable interpretation—I used to think like that. But I realized two things: (1) that bad people would exploit this assumption, and (2) I was doing it in a vacuum, looking at things in isolation.

Megyn Kelly is a new reporter. Blackface has been known to be a problem for decades now. For someone of her intelligence not to realize it was a problem and not to understand why it is a problem is not credible. And her past work with other racially-tinged situations suggests she was not asking rhetorically for the purposes of understanding. That’s not how Fox News would have done it.

In order to make an accurate assessment of intent, we have to look at the situation as a whole, and not just look at one aspect in isolation. It may be plausible that some unknown person could not know about blackface or have meant it as an object lesson. But Megyn Kelly? After her long history of racially insensitive stuff? And with the actual way she said it?

No, this is another phenomenon, where people want to believe that others can’t be racist, and so subconsciously give more weight to that interpretation than the other. And people of color are tired of letting that get by.

The thing is, people were able to make a compelling argument that what Megyn Kelly did was racist. The people in charge were convinced by this argument. That’s the limit on cancel culture, the same limit that was in your “good” example of cancel culture.

Megyn Kelly’s racial issues in toto were not properly explained by stupidity, as far as the general public was concerned. The public perception of what is actually plausibly not racist has shifted. People of color have more of a voice in it.

It’s 2021. Not only has everyone been told that things are racist and why, but it’s easy to look it up if you missed it. It’s much harder to get away with saying you didn’t know.

[BigT]

BTW, @WalterBishop’s lack of response to me has led me to think he may have me on ignore or is otherwise skipping my posts. I understand that I’ve probably been an asshole to him in the past or something, so I don’t think he’s wrong to deo that.

However, I think this is important enough that I would respectfully ask anyone who thinks I’m making a good argument to let him know about it. Granted, if you think I’m screwing it up, then you don’t have to. But, as someone who used to think like him, I think my approach of how I changed my mind might help him do so as well.

If you do read what I write, @WalterBishop, I would also invite you to at least acknowledge it, even if you don’t want to argue with me.

[WalterBishop]

@BigT - Please accept my apologies for my lack of response. It’s nothing personal, and you’ve certainly never been an asshole to me. It’s 100% due to the fact that I’ve received responses from quite a few different people and I’ve been struggling to keep up. This is compounded by the fact that (for health reasons I’d rather not bore you with) I have to limit my screen time so I often go quite a few days without checking threads. Nonetheless, it was wrong of me to not to at least acknowledge the arguments you put forward and the obvious effort you put into making them.

[Kimstu]

Good luck and hang in there Walter, it’s nice to talk with you and we don’t mind waiting.

[Ann_Hedonia]

Hey Walter - I was just rereading the thread, and I missed a few things and I think I was unduly harsh towards you.

The point of my last post still stands, but don’t think of it as being aimed directly at you.

[Irishman]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

, but the larger problem is that nobody should have that much control over the marketplace of ideas.

Treating Amazon as a utility accessible by many different companies would solve this problem; and the utility should no more be able to say “We won’t carry books by the Chinese Communist Party” than Verizon can say, “You’re not allowed to talk about Commies on our phone lines.” Utilities facilitate speech, they don’t regulate it.

So DemonTree, the “conservative”, is arguing for the government takeover of a profitable corporation? Does Jeff Bezos still get to make a profit, or are the company earnings now government revenue? Making a utility out of a private corporation is very anti-capitalist.

And Texas shows how effective using corporations to administrate government policy without actual legal requirements to enforce is.

If the problem is that Amazon has too much market control and thereby an outsized influence on what is published, then there are mechanisms including monopoly busting. And no, I don’t just mean splitting books from package delivery from streaming services, I mean like busting Standard Oil and Ma Bell.

But don’t think that requiring Amazon to sell any book whatsoever or provide a platform for any book publisher at all is freedom of the press. That’s actual government oppression just as much as the government preventing Amazon from selling something.

[Irishman]

@octopus

Yes, we now live in a world where a Dr. Seuss book is contraband.

Lie. No Dr. Seuss book is contraband. Nobody is being arrested for owning a copy, none are being rounded up and destroyed. The copyright holder has just decided not to print any more copies of a few select titles.

Do you get this bent out of shape when Disney puts its films in a vault for 10 years and won’t sell particular titles so they achieve scarcity again?

Did you object when Christians were freaking the fuck out over Harry Potter?

[Irishman]

@octopus

That’s why, normal people, actually work towards promoting individual liberty instead of working towards totalitarianism cloaked in wokeness.

Funny, the “normal people” you seem to extol tried to overthrow an election and are actively trying to limit citizens from voting. That’s not liberty. But at least they aren’t woke.

[Euphonious_Polemic]

@Irishman

Lie. No Dr. Seuss book is contraband.

The right wingers enjoy lying about this. Complete, brazen outright lies. They KNOW it’s false, and lie about it anyway. Even when the entire audience can see their lies.

It’s pathological.

[JRDelirious]

Going back a bit…

@octopus

If the timing was such that it was done after it was declared problematic by the woke crowd I’d be bothered. If it were a decision she came to for her own personal reasons than no.

Wait, so if anyone in the “woke crowd” is complaining, I have a moral obligation to stubbornly NOT make a decision that benefits/pleases me? I dunno, that scenario (my decision benefits/pleases me, AND it benefits/pleases them) sounds like a win-win. What you seem to be saying is you won’t believe anyone acted freely and fairly if somebody else was complaining.

[octopus]

Not at all. It could be a coincidence. That’s doubtful however as the number of these so-called coincidences are quite high. Basically it boils down to a situation like what we see with so-called speech codes at public universities. Everyone with a brain knows they are illegal. However, universities have made the cynical calculation that the virtue points they get for enacting such codes and acting upon such codes will be greater than the costs of defending such codes in court. Especially since those who are governed by those codes have not even a fraction of the power and resources of a public university.

It’s similar with corporations and other institutions. It’s cheaper to appease the online mob then it is to have a backbone. The problem with appeasement is that the mob is never satiated and only becomes more empowered and more unhinged with its demands. Look, the solution to dealing with the deranged woke mob is to ignore it. Notice, governors Blackface and Gropealot are still in power. Why? They just ignored the complaints.

TLDR. No I don’t have a problem with content creators controlling their works that they still own. I do have a problem with decisions that are nothing more than cynical virtue signaling and the market power of the big tech companies.