I think one big rule the rights is violating this time is government officials being THIS involved, and using their powers of office to effect the cancelations
Yeah there is in fact a bright line test. The issue with literally any other version of policing “cancellation” is that “cancellation” by private actors…is just speech and association!
Something about this doesn't sit right with me, and I think it's the distinction between the use of social sanction against opinions that you hate, and "cancel CULTURE".
As you say, everyone approves of using social punishment against people you think are truly awful. However, to me the term "cancel culture" describes something like an atmosphere of fear that emerged in the late 2010s, when in liberal professional circles everyone suddenly developed an acute fear of having their life ruined by a pile-on because of some minor perceived transgression against constantly shifting norms, or something in their past that had been trivial, or perfectly OK at the time.
I spent part of my childhood in the former Soviet Union, and while this is not at all equivalent (you wouldn't be sent to the gulags for running afoul of progressive shibboleths in the US), the atmosphere of fear, widespread preference falsification, and everyone just "keeping their head down" felt similar.
So yes, we all generally want to be able to direct social punishment against truly bad actors. But that's not the same as a culture of fear, which I think only the extremists on both sides approve of (when the balance of power benefits them).
I find “everyone’s in favor of it” glib. Of course everyone has circumstances in which they support someone being fired; everyone has circumstances in which they approve of violence, too, but “everyone is in favor of violence” obscures more than it reveals: where one draws the lines is important! Here’s my own piece from 2020 on how we liberals should remember post-9/11 cancellations and think twice before embracing the same tactics ourselves: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/conservative-cancel-culture-after-9-11/
Yes, it's true that there everyone has someone that they would cancel, if given the power. It is true that societies tend to use social and political pressure to punish undesirable speech, and that this is a very human instinct that all of us have.
And yet, it is also very evident that some groups, cultures, and people are significantly more censorious than others. The experience of living in North Korea and being executed for not mourning the regime's allies in a sufficiently convincing way is very different from the experience of living in 1990s America. America itself has had eras of more or less censorship, moments when "cancellations" were rampant and people were constantly afraid, and times when people felt relatively free to say what they thought.
Clearly, something is different across these cultures and time periods, even if they both contain some amount of the human urge to censor those with unpopular views. In practice, free societies deal with widely varying levels of 'cancelling.' Innovations occur where an entirely new kind of cancellation occurs. This person has their business gone after by a mob, this person is imprisoned by the government, this person lives in a social-media panopticon where AI pre-moderates any sort of wrongthink they try to write. Calling cancellations an unchangeable fact of human nature seems insufficient to describe these cultural distinctions.
I think when people argue against cancel culture, they aren't saying that no policing of speech should ever occur anywhere. Rather, the idea they're expressing is that they want to live in a society closer to America than North Korea. They're placing value on social and cultural norms that allow the powerless to speak truth to the powerful while retaining their livelihoods and personal safety. And when people censor and cancel, they weaken those norms and make the North Korea state more likely and acceptable.
And I think saying "Everyone would cancel their enemies if they could" doesn't give enough credit to the more liberal societies that put barriers in between the mob and unpopular speech. It's not the natural state for humans to refrain from throwing people into gulags for their unpopular speech - and yet, many societies manage to do this! We disrespect the work and power of that social technology when we fall back on this being a purely human problem that everyone has. It's like saying "Everyone's a sinner." It's broadly true in the strictest sense, but all too often, it serves as an easy excuse for any individual sin.
I think there was an especially large amount of handwringing about left wing cancel culture in the late 2010s bc it was novel. The cultural left probably had tried to cancel lots of people throughout history, it just didn’t work until that point and it’s probably social media that made it effective for the first time. This spawned a ton of content from all sides of the political spectrum when, as this post suggests, the actual practice is banal power politics. These think pieces don’t come out when the right does it because there’s nothing novel about the right doing it effectively. It’s the air we breathe. Plus the center and center left in the media loved to navel gaze and self flagellate in a way that the right does not because they understand their jobs to be staying on side.
As usual, the main difference is that "the Left" is often randos online while "the Right" is the literal president (or Veep, in this case). It's not "both sides" when one side's literal leader is acting like the might irrelevant fringe from the other side.
I feel it's actually the opposite: the fact that "randos online" can potentially "cancel you", an ordinary person, for voicing your opinion, is probably perceived to be a much more pervasive "speech control" for most "normies" than Trump's threats forcing business and university leaders to toe the line, end a few late night shows or even deporting foreign students ("other" - although this does seem to get some pushback).
This hits the nail on the head imo. People who are opposed to whatever cancellation is currently happening like to appeal to abstract principles and virtues like "free speech" because this is more comfortable than just working with the reality that they don't actually really care about the principle, they care about the specific case.
Instrsd of these silly games, we'd be able to have more honest conversations if we could just say "I don't think someone should be cancelled for this thing because it isn't that bad" instead of pretending we're applying some universal standard and pretending to be a free speech "warrior" or "advocate" or "absolutist".
I don't get it. Why do you say no one cares about the principle? Maybe you don't care, but doesn't that put you in a poor position to understand why other people might care?
"No one" could just as easily be "a statistical rounding error".
For a start, I don't think *most* people are all that ideologically consistent when the rubber meets the road. It is *hard* to truly live up to one's principles.
Look at the pro-life movement- how many people simultaneously believe that a fetus is a human life but also support exceptions for cases of rape and incest? Abortion is equivalent to "killing babies" but it's okay to kill *some* babies if their conception was a crime? As monstrous as I think it is, the hardline anti-abortion position is at least consistent with its principles.
Teacher's unions are [good | bad] because they [protect members from community reprisal over controversial aspects of the job | shield bad members from punishment for malfeasance] but police unions are [bad | good] because they [shield bad members from punishment for malfeasance | protect members from reprisal over controversial aspects of the job].
Likewise, appeals to the right to bodily autonomy vs harm imposed on others flips whether you're talking about abortion or vaccine mandates.
I think a lot of people who have spent the last decade listening to the Right endlessly wail and moan about cancel culture when they didn't have political/cultural power and are now seeing many of those same people suddenly gleefully embracing their own supercharged cancel culture are right to feel pretty cynical about the whole thing.
"Look at the pro-life movement- how many people simultaneously believe that a fetus is a human life but also support exceptions for cases of rape and incest? Abortion is equivalent to "killing babies" but it's okay to kill *some* babies if their conception was a crime? As monstrous as I think it is, the hardline anti-abortion position is at least consistent with its principles."
I actually disagree here; I think "banning abortion except for rape" can be a consistent moral position, because you can apply the well-known "kidnapped violinist" parallel to committing abortion after being raped.
The moral argument for that isn't pro-life though, it's anti-sex. It's the natural inverse of believing that pregnancy is a consequence to be suffered for women choosing to have sex (especially frivolous, unprotected sex outside the bonds of marriage), so if you didn't choose to have sex- if you were raped- then you don't deserve to be subjected to the consequences of it.
It's not about saving the lives of fetuses- otherwise, again, how can you justify killing *some* babies because of the crimes of their parents- it's about controlling women's sexuality.
"It's not about saving the lives of fetuses- otherwise, again, how can you justify killing *some* babies because of the crimes of their parents- it's about controlling women's sexuality."
Sorry, I don't understand you. You can justify it the same way you justify unplugging the violinist from body in the famous thought experiment.
It's not about "killing the baby for the crime of the parent", but that "my body, my choice" only supersedes the sanctity of life if you are forced to maintain someone else's life against your will, with no choice of your own in getting into that situation.
We may be going around in circles here and I may not be understanding you, but the way I see it, that kind of soft pro-life stance sidesteps the matter of "bodily autonomy" and "fetal right to life" to focus on "choice and consequences". So pregnancy is a potential consequence of hetero sex, so making the choice to engage in sex means you deserve the consequences of pregnancy (do the crime, do the time)... unless you *didn't* make that choice, in which case it would be wrong to force you to bear those consequences.
Your right to bodily autonomy ends (abortion bans) when you make a choice that leads to pregnancy (sex), and your fetus' right to life ends if the mother didn't consent to that choice (R&I exception).
In the violinist thought experiment, it would be like you went out for a drive and got into a crash with the violinist, and you woke up in the hospital connected to them, and they will die without you surrendering the use of your body. The pro-choice position is that you can't be compelled to save the life of the violinist through the use of your body against your will and that going for a drive was not consenting to becoming human life-support, the pro-life position is you have an obligation to save the violinist's life and that disconnecting from them is an active choice to commit murder, and the soft pro-life position asks "who was driving the car?"
I’m a moderate conservative … I do tend to err on the side of free speech. I always think ‘who is deciding what speech is harmful’ and that’s a slippery slope
Unfortunately that means putting up with ‘cancel culture’ from both sides. You cannot really police this.
With social media , it has become much easier to cancel someone
Employers do look at social media also so it’s highly likely they saw these ‘celebrations’ and decided they didn’t want such people representing their company and quite frankly I wouldn’t want people doing this teaching my children. I think that would be the one instance I would intervene.
I’m quite amazed at what people will put on social media… like do they think at all before they start furiously typing. It’s a written record … I’m so glad we did not have this when I was young
This is a distinction I spent a lot of time thinking about long before the most recent unpleasantness. Freedom of association is a pretty core right. You can't be forced to associate with people you don't like. This can include not letting people whose speech offends you join your club, or workplace, or whatever.
Where I finally came down on the important line is not when you make a personal choice not to associate with someone, but when you go and try to influence the choice of someone else. If you find out somehow that your employee said some reprehensible things and you choose to fire them...that's fine. If you find out someone said something reprehensible and you go tell their boss, to fire them, that's not. That's the line (for me). It is more than fine to make personal choices about associate in reponse to speech. But if you value a broader culture of free speech, then trying to influence the choices of others for nothing but speech is corrosive to that culture.
The problem has never been that somone lost a job, or friend, or opportunity in response to speech. The problem was that we became a culture of scolds baying for _other people_ to enforce our own views about speech.
When it comes to speech, feel free to chose to not associate with people who say terrible things (however you personally define that). But let it stop there.
Youre missing that context matters. Famously, yelling Fire is speech, but doing so in a crowded theatre is not speech, its an intentional crime. In the case of the minority of radical leftists celebrating Kirk, they are equivalent of yelling fire in a theatre. Because of the context, their clear intent is to provoke intentional violence. This is different than Kirk talking about Bidens execution, where he was referring to a legal process that would require broad based support, legal arguments in court, and a grand jury. Even if someone does celebrate violence a post, under normal circumstances thats not violence if that person doesnt reasonably expect others to act on it.
Second, I don't see what leftists celebrating Kirk's death has to do with yelling fire in a crowded theatre... it's obviously abominable, but it doesn't very directly and immediately cause violence.
I appreciate this. I was a free speech absolutist briefly in college before I realized that actually yes some ideas are so harmful that it's best to just purge them from the public discourse. I am conservative, but I've noticed that often when people on "my side" say "we shouldn't cancel this person bc first amendment" they mean "we shouldn't cancel this person bc I think their opinion should be included in our society's Overton window." There's nothing wrong with the latter, but I think we should make that more explicit.
“[RACE] people are disgusting, they’re subhuman monsters. They do nothing but leech on society. Their men are brutish apes and their women are worthless sluts. We should send all the {RACE} back where they came from”
The name cancel culture itself needs to be canceled 😞 it’s a vague term that covers a stupidly wide range of behaviors and unfortunately is worse when race or political affiliation is involved. The worst thing is that it can be a punishment with no due process and be applied when the political victors are able to fire people. Finally I think the Charlie Kirk data project is ridiculous and probably would not have his support ironically 🤨
Part of the problem, as he defined it, was distinguishing between holding an opinion, signaling a propensity towards some behavior, and committing "speech acts".
I think one big rule the rights is violating this time is government officials being THIS involved, and using their powers of office to effect the cancelations
Agreed 100%. The formal powers of the state being involved is a qualitatively different situation than randos online trying to get you fired.
Yeah there is in fact a bright line test. The issue with literally any other version of policing “cancellation” is that “cancellation” by private actors…is just speech and association!
Something about this doesn't sit right with me, and I think it's the distinction between the use of social sanction against opinions that you hate, and "cancel CULTURE".
As you say, everyone approves of using social punishment against people you think are truly awful. However, to me the term "cancel culture" describes something like an atmosphere of fear that emerged in the late 2010s, when in liberal professional circles everyone suddenly developed an acute fear of having their life ruined by a pile-on because of some minor perceived transgression against constantly shifting norms, or something in their past that had been trivial, or perfectly OK at the time.
I spent part of my childhood in the former Soviet Union, and while this is not at all equivalent (you wouldn't be sent to the gulags for running afoul of progressive shibboleths in the US), the atmosphere of fear, widespread preference falsification, and everyone just "keeping their head down" felt similar.
So yes, we all generally want to be able to direct social punishment against truly bad actors. But that's not the same as a culture of fear, which I think only the extremists on both sides approve of (when the balance of power benefits them).
I find “everyone’s in favor of it” glib. Of course everyone has circumstances in which they support someone being fired; everyone has circumstances in which they approve of violence, too, but “everyone is in favor of violence” obscures more than it reveals: where one draws the lines is important! Here’s my own piece from 2020 on how we liberals should remember post-9/11 cancellations and think twice before embracing the same tactics ourselves: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/conservative-cancel-culture-after-9-11/
I think this oversimplifies.
Yes, it's true that there everyone has someone that they would cancel, if given the power. It is true that societies tend to use social and political pressure to punish undesirable speech, and that this is a very human instinct that all of us have.
And yet, it is also very evident that some groups, cultures, and people are significantly more censorious than others. The experience of living in North Korea and being executed for not mourning the regime's allies in a sufficiently convincing way is very different from the experience of living in 1990s America. America itself has had eras of more or less censorship, moments when "cancellations" were rampant and people were constantly afraid, and times when people felt relatively free to say what they thought.
Clearly, something is different across these cultures and time periods, even if they both contain some amount of the human urge to censor those with unpopular views. In practice, free societies deal with widely varying levels of 'cancelling.' Innovations occur where an entirely new kind of cancellation occurs. This person has their business gone after by a mob, this person is imprisoned by the government, this person lives in a social-media panopticon where AI pre-moderates any sort of wrongthink they try to write. Calling cancellations an unchangeable fact of human nature seems insufficient to describe these cultural distinctions.
I think when people argue against cancel culture, they aren't saying that no policing of speech should ever occur anywhere. Rather, the idea they're expressing is that they want to live in a society closer to America than North Korea. They're placing value on social and cultural norms that allow the powerless to speak truth to the powerful while retaining their livelihoods and personal safety. And when people censor and cancel, they weaken those norms and make the North Korea state more likely and acceptable.
And I think saying "Everyone would cancel their enemies if they could" doesn't give enough credit to the more liberal societies that put barriers in between the mob and unpopular speech. It's not the natural state for humans to refrain from throwing people into gulags for their unpopular speech - and yet, many societies manage to do this! We disrespect the work and power of that social technology when we fall back on this being a purely human problem that everyone has. It's like saying "Everyone's a sinner." It's broadly true in the strictest sense, but all too often, it serves as an easy excuse for any individual sin.
I think there was an especially large amount of handwringing about left wing cancel culture in the late 2010s bc it was novel. The cultural left probably had tried to cancel lots of people throughout history, it just didn’t work until that point and it’s probably social media that made it effective for the first time. This spawned a ton of content from all sides of the political spectrum when, as this post suggests, the actual practice is banal power politics. These think pieces don’t come out when the right does it because there’s nothing novel about the right doing it effectively. It’s the air we breathe. Plus the center and center left in the media loved to navel gaze and self flagellate in a way that the right does not because they understand their jobs to be staying on side.
As usual, the main difference is that "the Left" is often randos online while "the Right" is the literal president (or Veep, in this case). It's not "both sides" when one side's literal leader is acting like the might irrelevant fringe from the other side.
I feel it's actually the opposite: the fact that "randos online" can potentially "cancel you", an ordinary person, for voicing your opinion, is probably perceived to be a much more pervasive "speech control" for most "normies" than Trump's threats forcing business and university leaders to toe the line, end a few late night shows or even deporting foreign students ("other" - although this does seem to get some pushback).
wat
This hits the nail on the head imo. People who are opposed to whatever cancellation is currently happening like to appeal to abstract principles and virtues like "free speech" because this is more comfortable than just working with the reality that they don't actually really care about the principle, they care about the specific case.
Instrsd of these silly games, we'd be able to have more honest conversations if we could just say "I don't think someone should be cancelled for this thing because it isn't that bad" instead of pretending we're applying some universal standard and pretending to be a free speech "warrior" or "advocate" or "absolutist".
I don't get it. Why do you say no one cares about the principle? Maybe you don't care, but doesn't that put you in a poor position to understand why other people might care?
"No one" could just as easily be "a statistical rounding error".
For a start, I don't think *most* people are all that ideologically consistent when the rubber meets the road. It is *hard* to truly live up to one's principles.
Look at the pro-life movement- how many people simultaneously believe that a fetus is a human life but also support exceptions for cases of rape and incest? Abortion is equivalent to "killing babies" but it's okay to kill *some* babies if their conception was a crime? As monstrous as I think it is, the hardline anti-abortion position is at least consistent with its principles.
Teacher's unions are [good | bad] because they [protect members from community reprisal over controversial aspects of the job | shield bad members from punishment for malfeasance] but police unions are [bad | good] because they [shield bad members from punishment for malfeasance | protect members from reprisal over controversial aspects of the job].
Likewise, appeals to the right to bodily autonomy vs harm imposed on others flips whether you're talking about abortion or vaccine mandates.
I think a lot of people who have spent the last decade listening to the Right endlessly wail and moan about cancel culture when they didn't have political/cultural power and are now seeing many of those same people suddenly gleefully embracing their own supercharged cancel culture are right to feel pretty cynical about the whole thing.
"Look at the pro-life movement- how many people simultaneously believe that a fetus is a human life but also support exceptions for cases of rape and incest? Abortion is equivalent to "killing babies" but it's okay to kill *some* babies if their conception was a crime? As monstrous as I think it is, the hardline anti-abortion position is at least consistent with its principles."
I actually disagree here; I think "banning abortion except for rape" can be a consistent moral position, because you can apply the well-known "kidnapped violinist" parallel to committing abortion after being raped.
The moral argument for that isn't pro-life though, it's anti-sex. It's the natural inverse of believing that pregnancy is a consequence to be suffered for women choosing to have sex (especially frivolous, unprotected sex outside the bonds of marriage), so if you didn't choose to have sex- if you were raped- then you don't deserve to be subjected to the consequences of it.
It's not about saving the lives of fetuses- otherwise, again, how can you justify killing *some* babies because of the crimes of their parents- it's about controlling women's sexuality.
"It's not about saving the lives of fetuses- otherwise, again, how can you justify killing *some* babies because of the crimes of their parents- it's about controlling women's sexuality."
Sorry, I don't understand you. You can justify it the same way you justify unplugging the violinist from body in the famous thought experiment.
It's not about "killing the baby for the crime of the parent", but that "my body, my choice" only supersedes the sanctity of life if you are forced to maintain someone else's life against your will, with no choice of your own in getting into that situation.
We may be going around in circles here and I may not be understanding you, but the way I see it, that kind of soft pro-life stance sidesteps the matter of "bodily autonomy" and "fetal right to life" to focus on "choice and consequences". So pregnancy is a potential consequence of hetero sex, so making the choice to engage in sex means you deserve the consequences of pregnancy (do the crime, do the time)... unless you *didn't* make that choice, in which case it would be wrong to force you to bear those consequences.
Your right to bodily autonomy ends (abortion bans) when you make a choice that leads to pregnancy (sex), and your fetus' right to life ends if the mother didn't consent to that choice (R&I exception).
In the violinist thought experiment, it would be like you went out for a drive and got into a crash with the violinist, and you woke up in the hospital connected to them, and they will die without you surrendering the use of your body. The pro-choice position is that you can't be compelled to save the life of the violinist through the use of your body against your will and that going for a drive was not consenting to becoming human life-support, the pro-life position is you have an obligation to save the violinist's life and that disconnecting from them is an active choice to commit murder, and the soft pro-life position asks "who was driving the car?"
If I'm misunderstanding you, I apologize.
I’m a moderate conservative … I do tend to err on the side of free speech. I always think ‘who is deciding what speech is harmful’ and that’s a slippery slope
Unfortunately that means putting up with ‘cancel culture’ from both sides. You cannot really police this.
With social media , it has become much easier to cancel someone
Employers do look at social media also so it’s highly likely they saw these ‘celebrations’ and decided they didn’t want such people representing their company and quite frankly I wouldn’t want people doing this teaching my children. I think that would be the one instance I would intervene.
I’m quite amazed at what people will put on social media… like do they think at all before they start furiously typing. It’s a written record … I’m so glad we did not have this when I was young
This is a distinction I spent a lot of time thinking about long before the most recent unpleasantness. Freedom of association is a pretty core right. You can't be forced to associate with people you don't like. This can include not letting people whose speech offends you join your club, or workplace, or whatever.
Where I finally came down on the important line is not when you make a personal choice not to associate with someone, but when you go and try to influence the choice of someone else. If you find out somehow that your employee said some reprehensible things and you choose to fire them...that's fine. If you find out someone said something reprehensible and you go tell their boss, to fire them, that's not. That's the line (for me). It is more than fine to make personal choices about associate in reponse to speech. But if you value a broader culture of free speech, then trying to influence the choices of others for nothing but speech is corrosive to that culture.
The problem has never been that somone lost a job, or friend, or opportunity in response to speech. The problem was that we became a culture of scolds baying for _other people_ to enforce our own views about speech.
When it comes to speech, feel free to chose to not associate with people who say terrible things (however you personally define that). But let it stop there.
Youre missing that context matters. Famously, yelling Fire is speech, but doing so in a crowded theatre is not speech, its an intentional crime. In the case of the minority of radical leftists celebrating Kirk, they are equivalent of yelling fire in a theatre. Because of the context, their clear intent is to provoke intentional violence. This is different than Kirk talking about Bidens execution, where he was referring to a legal process that would require broad based support, legal arguments in court, and a grand jury. Even if someone does celebrate violence a post, under normal circumstances thats not violence if that person doesnt reasonably expect others to act on it.
First, yelling fire in a crowded theatre is not a crime: https://www.thefire.org/news/walzvance-vp-debate-another-reminder-its-time-extinguish-fire-crowded-theater-trope
Second, I don't see what leftists celebrating Kirk's death has to do with yelling fire in a crowded theatre... it's obviously abominable, but it doesn't very directly and immediately cause violence.
I appreciate this. I was a free speech absolutist briefly in college before I realized that actually yes some ideas are so harmful that it's best to just purge them from the public discourse. I am conservative, but I've noticed that often when people on "my side" say "we shouldn't cancel this person bc first amendment" they mean "we shouldn't cancel this person bc I think their opinion should be included in our society's Overton window." There's nothing wrong with the latter, but I think we should make that more explicit.
Bravo on a refreshingly clear-eyed and systematic analysis. Which is a necessary first step to sorting out societal messes like this one.
“[RACE] people are disgusting, they’re subhuman monsters. They do nothing but leech on society. Their men are brutish apes and their women are worthless sluts. We should send all the {RACE} back where they came from”
Least racist college admissions officer.
The name cancel culture itself needs to be canceled 😞 it’s a vague term that covers a stupidly wide range of behaviors and unfortunately is worse when race or political affiliation is involved. The worst thing is that it can be a punishment with no due process and be applied when the political victors are able to fire people. Finally I think the Charlie Kirk data project is ridiculous and probably would not have his support ironically 🤨
Scott Alexander wrote a good piece about free speech principles long ago that lives here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/is-it-possible-to-have-coherent-principles-around-free-speech-norms/
Part of the problem, as he defined it, was distinguishing between holding an opinion, signaling a propensity towards some behavior, and committing "speech acts".
Worth a read