How did this affect anyone’s life? Random people clicking “cancel” on a comedian they don’t like on some random website doesn’t harm them. Might as well complain that someone on Twitter said something mean.
Honesty and justice are two of the essential and fundamental pillars of society, without which it deteriorates into anarchy, mob rule, and sometimes mob hysteria. At the most basic level that’s all I’ve been trying to say in all my posts in your #MeToo thread.
Al Franken and Garrison Keillor are victims of themselves. There was no injustice done to them. They are also doing just fine—better than 99 percent of us—and have plenty of opportunities yo speak to any public who is willing to listen to them. Franken doesn’t have a right to be a senator. Keillor doesn’t have a right to a weekly two-hour public radio program.
I don’t know enough about the Tyson situation to comment.
And now people will start to learn that if you want to be in a career that depends on people liking you, you should be aware that any time you mistreat someone in private, your audience might decide they don’t like you any more. That’s the first step to eliminating importuning on the part of people holding over others. They will be aware that their privilege doesn’t protect them and they will learn about consent.
Regardless of whether such an investigation can be trusted, what would you suggest? Should publishers be forced to publish his book? Should workers be forced to work for a publisher if they disagree with them on something? Should readers be forced to buy his book?
This is a free society. If people think Allen is a creep, they are free to criticize him and publishers who want to work with him. Workers are free to criticize their employers. Allen is free to publish a book with his own resources, which is incredibly easy and inexpensive nowadays (I’ve done it three times so far).
Allen will be fine. If he doesn’t like how the public has responded to him, he can console himself with his millions of dollars.
I probably should be angry, but I’m mostly amused by the way my post has been turned inside out, cherrypicked, and misinterpreted to be repurposed as arguments against what I was saying. What a great example of the interact in action.
The lesson from Broussard 's prank is not that cancel culture is invalid and has no effect, but that nobody complained about it being an injustice that invited an audience to castigate their peers anonymously. Instead everyone got canceled. Every single person. That’s what mobs do. They don’t make distinctions. They don’t do nuance. They don’t have to think, or gather evidence, or check facts. Mob justice is no justice at all.
Yeah, iiandyiiii, we should take #MeToo seriously. You know who also said that? Me. But here’s something that several wise thinkers said.
They said that because they were so afraid of mob justice at work. The question of what to do about the falsely accused innocents is a crucial one. I don’t have an answer. I don’t think anybody has. I’m very much afraid that some innocent lives will be ruined in the process of righting decades of serious wrongs. That is how society works. Should no one care?
Here’s another thing I said, though. “Cancel culture is not synonymous with #MeToo.” You and most of the others keep running over those words to talk about #MeToo. Look over here! is a another internet eyesore I’m sick of. You can’t find an example of my saying anything negative about the #MeToo movement because I never have. I am, irony alert, being accused of something I never did. Will some readers of these posts believe my accusers over me? Will they make a swift judgement on the basis of an accusation? Will I have to defend myself in the future against some rot that came bubbling out of the ooze?
You see how easy cancel culture can arise out of nothingness? You’re wrong to dismiss it or claim that it has no consequences. Cancel culture is new only in the way it currently manifests. It’s the direct descendant of earlier whisper campaigns. Stay away from John, he’s a homosexual. Betty? She belonged to a Communist group. Old Abe is secretly a Mason. I am not exaggerating the seriousness of this new variation; I wish I were. Get your minds around the notion that two separate but partially overlapping cultural movements can happen simultaneously. Real Communist spies did real damage by stealing real secrets and they needed to be exposed. At the same time, thousands of innocents had their lives destroyed by suspicion and namecalling. Both happened simultaneously. The mob happily allowed it; heck, encouraged it. Today McCarthyism is one of the worst insults that can be hurled at someone. Is cancel culture the new McCarthyism? Maybe. I’m fighting it just in case.
I don’t want to rehash the arguments in the #MeToo thread all over again. I think Exapno Mapcase has eloquently summarized much of what I wanted to say in post #88 anyway.
But I do have the following specific responses to the above post. You are suggesting much more than what you claim.
Nowhere did I ever say or imply that accusations shouldn’t be taken seriously. What I object to is a social climate where an accusation is equivalent to a conviction, with no due process and no recourse, and which may be career-limiting or career-ending or, as in the story I posted, put an innocent person through years of living hell.
Even when there is an investigation which clears the individual, we live in a social climate where it doesn’t matter. In the minds of many, Woody Allen is still a pedophile, and Chris Hardwick is still being called a creep who doesn’t deserve to be on the air.
Most disturbing of all is your claim in the other thread that a “broken society” placed Ghomeshi’s accusers in an “impossible” situation, and that therefore their deliberate, proven lying and calculated withholding of material information should have been excused and Ghomeshi found guilty regardless, despite the fact that the credibility of the witnesses was absolutely central to the case. This goes directly against the principle I expressed that honesty and justice are the pillars of civilized society. Instead, your conclusion was that the judge (who was widely praised for putting justice and due process ahead of emotion) was an old fogey who erred in his decision.
BTW, I hope it was clear that in the other thread, when I said “I don’t see #MeToo helping with very much of it”, the “it” I was referring to were your alleged systemic societal dysfunctions of misogyny, patriarchy, and “rape culture”. I think we can all agree that #MeToo has done a great deal to expose and reduce sexual violence against women and that this is an unmitigated good thing. I think progress in these other areas is mostly being made through other, broad cultural changes.
I think in the final analysis all that I really disagree with you about is what I regard as your extremism, which seems willing to subvert those fundamental values I talked about – honesty and justice – to a social cause that you believe in so strongly that any societal upheaval and injustice is worth it.
But no one got canceled, AFAICT. That list did nothing and affected no one. A bunch of random people clicked “cancel” or whatever, next to some names, but why is this notable? Why does this matter? I could make a list and invite people to decide who is a poophead and who isn’t… but this wouldn’t affect the world in any way. No one would or should care about a random list on the internet with “poophead” or “cancel” next to a bunch of names.
Mobs actually hurt people. Random internet people just do silly things online that affect no one, for the most part.
I don’t have a problem with any of those quotes, and they don’t dispute anything I’ve said.
Maybe there are bad things about whatever “Cancel Culture” is, and maybe it could hurt some people. But you haven’t offered any examples of this so far – just random internet silliness, and mundane things happening to wealthy people that marginally affect their lives. Many abusers, gropers, harassers, and the like have suffered significant (but rarely criminal) consequences, and this is a good thing. But I assume this isn’t what you’re talking about.
I object to this as well, and I don’t believe anything I’ve advocated leads to this.
But false accusations will cause suffering, unfortunately. I can’t imagine how all accusations can be taken seriously without the possibility of the false ones causing suffering. Can you?
Neither Allen nor Hardwick have been cleared. Maybe investigations occurred (with some or no details released), and maybe they faced no professional or criminal consequences, but that doesn’t mean they’ve necessarily been cleared.
Here you misrepresent my posts once again. Not once have I characterized the verdict of the case in any way – I only criticized the judge’s comments. And I stand by my criticism of the judge’s comments, which I made in detail and with specific examples.
Maybe clearing up the mischaracterization above would eliminate this concern/disagreement. Honesty and justice are also two fundamental values in my view as well.
If their story is accurate, then they suffered unjustly. But I don’t understand what this story has to do with this discussion. We already know that false accusations are possible. Sucks, but sometimes people suck.
Do you notice that those citations all references criminal punishments—imprisonments, death penalty, and other punishments we only allow the government to impose after due process.
“Mob justice” is when Private citizens usurp the prerogatives of the justice system to, say, abduct, assault, or murder someone.
When people in society decide they don’t want to associate or do business with someone, that’s not mob justice. Would you really restrict the rights of individuals, entities, and societal institutions to refuse to include someone in their social groups? Would you really make being rich and famous a protected class?
What happened to some of the people in Jon Ronson’s book is unfair. What happened to Woody Allen or Al Franken is not a miscarriage of justice.
If they get a rejection letter because a bunch of people are actively trying to prevent the book from being published, you bet it’s censorship. That’s completely different from just deciding “eh, I don’t think this manuscript would garner much interest”.
Seriously? You’re going down the same road that had LAZombie say there was no AIDS crisis because he didn’t know anyone with AIDS? You’ve had your eyes and ears closed for years?
You didn’t hear about Jeremy Kappell when he made an extremely unfortunate stumble over his words?
How about when Sam Sedar got fired after a misunderstanding of a decade-old tweet?
I’m still shaking my head over your continued dismissal of my comments about Broussard. A parody only works if everybody instantly gets the joke, meaning that it is public and obvious. Just because you’re blind to the issue doesn’t prevent you from learning about it when it’s waved in front of your face.
Every movement has a segment of assholes who go too far and outrage the rest because they give the whole movement a bad name. Cancel culture is the segment with the assholes who make #MeToo look trivial and vindictive. If you didn’t know that before, you know it now.